One morning I woke up and found a text message from the owner of a kiwiberry orchard on my phone. We were supposed to attend an introductory meeting at 3pm that same day. "Well, that's pretty last minute," I thought. I surprised Bibi with the news at breakfast and we had exactly 15 minutes to decide whether we would attend the meeting or prefer to stay on the safe side, the vineyard. "No risk, no fun," Bibi said. Of course, I was in. We called our boss and told him that we now had another job, prepared our van for a new adventure and headed towards Motueka near Abel Tasman. We treated ourselves to sushi and looked forward to our new adventure. The introduction sounded promising and the kiwiberries tasted fantastic. Just to explain: kiwiberries are small kiwi snack berries that taste wonderfully sweet and you could eat tons of them because they taste so good. The owner said that he would have to do a stripe check the next day and he would expect to start harvesting no earlier than after the weekend. Now the question arose as to where we would stay. We discovered a dreamlike $5 campground in Tasman right by the sea. The next day we set off to Nelson, where we checked into Couchsurfing. Our couch host maintained an extremely noble lifestyle. House by the sea with a fantastic sunset. He cooked lamb with couscous vegetables for us and we even had a beer with him. He was a bit strange, but that thought disappeared as soon as we cuddled up in our feather-soft bed with a view of the sea. When we woke up, I had a text message from the owner of the kiwiberry orchard. We were supposed to start at eight today. Very funny. It was a quarter past eight... Apparently he forgot to write to us... Within 10 minutes we were up and gone and headed for Motueka, which was now an hour away again. As we drove, we made ourselves peanut butter toast sandwiches. We made it to the orchard and started right away. We were given a huge apron with a crate attached to it. We were supposed to pick the berries into it. The beginning was difficult. We had to come up with a quick picking technique. After all, we were paid one dollar per kilo. At first, everything was hunky-dory and we calculated our chances of making a big profit. Well, soon we realized that it was just incredibly hard. We got blisters on our hands that soon opened and were excruciatingly painful. Since we always had to look up which berries we were picking, and our arms were constantly in the air, we got neck pain and our arms started to hurt terribly. It felt like having rheumatism or something. After two and a half days, we gave up. We decided not to come back and now had no idea what to do. We needed another job as soon as possible. We decided to head back to Blenheim and try our luck at the grape harvest. In vain. All jobs were already taken. We arrived in Blenheim at six o'clock in the evening and first enjoyed a delicious $5 pizza. There we stood - without accommodation and without a job... you can find out what happened next in my next blog.
