First WWOOF stay in Anaura Bay

Feb 3, 2010
We arrived at our first WWOOF stay in the rain. And it continued to rain for three days straight. The road was washed out after the first day of rain and the rivers rose beyond their limits. If the rain had continued another day, there would have been full-on floods. Our first morning brought some work though. The rains uprooted a tree (very strange to see, it was a live tree on flat ground) on the property which blocked the path to the orchard. The moisture also weighed down a trellis into the flower garden. So we had a lot of trimming and hauling to do the past few days.
The property we stay on is called Waipare Homestead in Anaura Bay. It was built in the 1880s by Colonel Porter who married a Maori princess. It is now owned by Scrubbs and Louia Blakeney with their two teenage daughters, Juliet and Honey Lee, a handful of cats, two dogs named Lady and Bum Bum, and a rabbit that died while we were there. The homestead feels like it has really grown into the land. The roof needs to be replaced, but the structure of the main house is solid. It is made of kaui wood which is a soft wood, but the house feels surprisingly solid. There are modern out houses and showers for us to use and surf breaks in the bay out in front of the house, that is, when there is surf. Because of the heavy rains, the shorelines are lined with drift wood and sea-plants and the waters are muddy. It looks like they’re made of chocolate…if only! But Anaura Bay looks cleaner than the other beaches we’ve seen along the coast. The weather is clearing up today and we’ll have more hauling and clearing to do over the next couple days.
This WWOOF stay is more like visiting a friend and helping out around the house. The garden is barely producing right now, but I imagine at one time it was quite productive and tended to. The orchard has a variety of apples, peaches and avocados and some mornings we drink tea from kawa kawa leaves which are abundant here. Every inch of his property has history, including the hosts. Scrubbs is a kiwi. He used to be an accountant in London, but retired at 30 and soon after became a New Zealand film producer, most notably for the film Utu. Now he is on the school board and loves to surf. Louia is a Maori mamma who loves surfers and rock’n roll. She is very involved with motivating local youth. Their two teenage daughters are obsessed with make-up and clothes, and are hilarious. They have been hosting WWOOFers for 15 years, and prefer to call them ‘visitors’. Everyday brings something new here, and the only schedule is that there is no schedule. Generally, guests and residents sleep when they want, eat when they want and play when they want. Unless Louia needs something done around that house, and even that is flexible. But there are always hands to help out. Currently, we are two of three visitors. We plan to leave by the end of the week because, really, we’d like to move on to more commercial farming. But it’s been nice to wait out the rains here and have had some great conversation with some of New Zealand’s knowledgeable locals.

PICS: Waipare Homestead from two angles, Kris and I working on the fallen tree, Anaura Bay