New Zealand 6 – The Wild West

We arrive in Pukekara, and stop when we see a cabin and rooms to rent sign. We stay the next 2 days in this unusual place. The cabin is huge, in fact it’s  a house, larger than any cabin we’ve stayed in and dates back to the 1800s (that’s old here). There’s more room here than we have had anywhere on our entire trip. There are 4 bedrooms and we have the whole house to ourselves, sharing the big garden with Katie and Roydon who live next door and their little daughter Amelia, who her father describes as feral! She’s 2! Though the dad looks pretty feral too.

It turns out this couple own the whole village, they are quite alternative, and we enjoy spending time with them over the next two days. They own the roadside pub, which was recently forced to close down, for not confirming to health regulations. Possom was was one of the main dishes they served up, along with other road kill they found.

Katie and her partner only eat what they hunt and kill, or catch. If they don’t catch, they go without. They manage without having to use supermarkets and do swaps with their neighbours. Vegetables are growing out of unusual containers everywhere and the green house is full of basil and little tomatoes and other aromatic herbs, which she uses as medicine. Goat skins are stretched out and pinned taut on wooden palettes, soaked in kerosene and baby oil. They will be sold in the roadside shop, as rugs, along with all the other  products made out of Possom that they also make.

Roydon and Katie  are possom haters and despise the moves the government is making to rid the country of this pest, brought in by the Europeans in the nineteenth century. The possums, which eat the birds eggs, have decimated almost the entire bird population in New Zealand. When Captain Cook landed his ship off the Marlborough Sounds, the noise was so deafening from all the birds that they had to moor their ship further out to sea, so they could sleep at night. With the exception of the Tui Bird and a few others, we see no other birds during the course of our stay here. The poison which is dropped by helicopter over vast extents of land, is getting into the food chain, and poisoning the fish and tainting the water. This is a big problem here and it’s interesting to see the perspective from their side.

There are hundreds of sand flies here, when I ask Katie what the locals use as  a deterrent, she hands me a bottle of detol mixed with baby oil. ” this will do you” and it acts as an antiseptic too when you do get bitten! I might end up smelling like a toilet, but at least it works!