The Fruitvans House

Disclaimer: this post is really really long! Sorry, but there was a lot to write about.

It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to leave the comfort of Soggy Bottom for something that in all likelihood would probably turn out to be less rewarding. Everyone told me that all the wwoofing hosts usually didn’t have any vacancies for wwoofers around the holidays either because all the wwoofers made sure to get a spot early to have a comfortable holiday, or hosts weren’t taking wwoofers so they can have a relaxed holiday without any outsiders living with them. So a few weeks ahead of time I told the folks at Fruitvans that I’d like to come and spend the holidays with them and they said that would be great. If you read the post on what wwoofing is then you know that even though wwoofing was organized to give volunteers the opportunity to work on organic farms and learn about the natural world through acriculture, horticulture, viticulture, etc, many wwoof hosts are more unconventional.

The place I was going to wwoof at is called Fruitvans. Essentially it’s a business that buys fruit In bulk from farms mostly in the Hawkes by region and sells them at roadside stands out of the back of vans all over the region. I was a little weary of going to a place that runs such a big operation, feeling that as a wwoofer, I would essentially just be there to do free work for a 3 meals a day and a bed to sleep in. After reading a lot of what other people had written about staying there and talking to Taryn, one of the owners, on the phone, I thought it sounded like a fun place to spend Christmas and New Years.

After getting to Waihi, I waited around for a few hours until one of the fruitvans came by to give me a ride to the house after they had finished selling for the day. We drove out of town and down into the Karangahake Gorge where the fruitvans house is. on the way, we drove down winding roads following a river fit for the Rocky Mountains on one side and sheer cliffs on our other. We took a turn and crossed a bridge, drove up a small valley leaving the gorge and then turned into a long narrow driveway to the house. During the drive I had found out that there was about 27 other people living here and I was wondering to myself if I knew what I was getting into. The rest of the night was a whirlwind of shaking hands and meeting countless people, trying to remember all the exotic foreign names.

My time spent at fruitvans would eventually prove to be far more interesting and unique than I could have predicted. Living at the fruitvans house means living in an eco-minded community made up of dozens of people from all over the world coming together to work, eat, and live together. The whole thing  was started by Taryn and Marcelo, an Austrailian/Brazilian couple in their low 30’s who live in New Zealand during the summer operating the fruitvans   business. As Taryn explained to me, the two had done a lot of travelling in South America and it is their dream one day to open an eco-hostel in Patagonia to cater to travellers with an ecological theme. Besides the two of them, there is a full time Brazilian mechanic to service the two decade old fleet of vans and another Brazilian friend there for the summer. The entire rest of the staff are made up of travellers, some staying for months, some for weeks. 

28 people digging into the dinner that I cooked. 

 With two small houses and a newly built shed that comfortably sleeps about 20 people on bunk beds with sheets and carpets partitioning off bedrooms, the house can easily accomadate about 30 people at a time. What struck me as impressive during the first 24 hours of being there is just how differently a house has to operate when it has 30+ people living in it. Impressive because with that many people you might think it would feel more like a hotel with people always coming and going not having the same feeling of ownership and respect that comes with a traditional household. It was just the opposite though. In order for such a home to work, there needs to be a lot of organization when it comes to chores like cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, and gardening in addition to work that goes towards the business. Yes, it took a while to get comfortable with all the systems the house used, like religiously sorting out trash and recycling into 5 distinct categories, or figuring out what needs to be done in the kitchen, which was a lot. At any given point during the day there were always 2 or 3 girls in the kitchen constantly baking bread or turning unsold fruit into more pies and deserts than anybody could eat.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I never lived somewhere with so much international culture all mixed together for the rest of my life. When I arrived, there were 2 other native English speakers, Taryn and a Canadian girl. The rest were made up of Dutch, French, German, Mexican, Argentinean, Brazilian, Patagonian, Spanish, Belgian, Japanese, and probably a few others. All this was pretty intimidating at first, being the only American and only person who wasn’t bilingual wasn’t always easy. Group conversations were always in English of various levels but it could be a lonely feeling when everyone around you is speaking a different language with eachother.

Although vegetarian, meals at the house were a pretty big deal for everyone there. Every night, two people were assigned to cook dinner. Everyone would crowd into the eating room with a large table made from old fruit crates painted and decorated and most people would grab a cushion and sit on the floor. Whoever cooked dinner would start making plates for everyone and at some point one person would start clapping and then the whole room would burst into applause and cheers. The first time it happened to me, we were all sitting around the table and I was wondering where the food was. Through the door walked a girl with a tray of vegie pizza and everybody went wild with applause.  Though it was almost always some variation of stir fried vegetables, pasta, rice, with plenty of soy sauce or hot sauce, it was always delicious. The best part was that because we bought avocados in bulk, it was someone’s job every day to sort the ones that were close to going bad and make two enormous bowls of guacamole for dinner. I put Avo on everything I could. After everyone finished eating, a bag was passed around that contained a piece of paper for every person in the room. When it got passed to you, you drew a paper that might read: ‘do the dishes’, ‘clear the table’, ‘kick everyone out at 11:00 and hit the lights’, or ‘go to bed, you look tired’,’turn to the person to your right and give them a 5 five minute massage’ and in this way, a meal for 30 people was easily made, eaten, and cleaned up after. Everyone loved the tradition of it all. At the house were two Tengo instructors from Argentina and every other night, about 15 of us would get a tengo lesson and cut loose after a long day. Since being in New Zealand I’ve experienced a lot of new things but never thought I’d be so into getting tango lessons, it’s just not something I would normally do. Surprisingly, the guys seemed more interested than some of the girls, who wouldn’t stop laughing when they made a mistake while the guys worked to get it perfect. Just another thing I’ll take away from living in such an outgoing house.  

Playing frisbee at Waihi Beach afte work. 

 The first week wore on and I mostly did odd jobs around the house. I mentioned that I had done some building at Soggy Bottom and this pretty much just gave me authority to spend a few days making and fixing things. I was shown a small pile of scrap wood to use and the shed that housed a bucket of used bent nails, a hammer, and a saw and was let loose. Over the first week I built an outdoor shower on the side of the house, a shelter for storage, a new set of clotheslines, a huge shoe rack (30 people + no shoes in the house), set up water drainages pipes under some big tents, two great benches for the eating room and fixed a broken Adirondack chair, a broken step, a bunk bed, and an awning. Sometimes it was hard not having any tools or materials to work with but I was told to just see what I could do and was happy when Taryn was practically ecstatic when I finished another small job. With so many people in the house with different skills, we all had our niches. Those who could cook and bake did that all day, those who could garden would manage the garden, chickens, and huge compost system, some ran the fruit selling business while others actually sold the fruit and those who couldn’t do any of that would clean or sort out rotten fruit from good fruit. Apparently my handiness came in good use again because I just became the handyman of the house and helped out here and there after I ran out of things to build/fix for the day.

As Christmas got closer the numbers in the house grew to about 35 people and was getting pretty crowded. This all worked out well for the house though because with the added business of the holidays, there was plenty of work to go around and I got to get out of the house and go help sell fruit. Most of the time this was boring but every day I got to get to know somebody new pretty well after selling fruit with them for 9 hours and getting out of the house and into town for the day was always nice, not to mention earning a little money. So things got pretty busy by the end my first week there. The fruitvans house is actually one of two houses that run the same business in different parts of the country. Because all the organizers are close friends, they decided to combine the houses and have a Christmas party at our house, bringing our number up to 60 on Christmas Eve with a huge party that night.

Most people agreed that Christmas felt pretty strange when it was a perfect 75 degrees and sunny outside every day with dark not coming until after 9:00. A few days before Christmas, we decorated a tree, set up a secret santa, everyone made Christmas posters in their native languages, and of course listened to Christmas music. It was about this time that the amount of wine and beer that was being consumed in the evening went way up, at least among the Europeans and myself.

One table of about 6 packed with foood.

 On Christmas Eve, with the promise of making a good buck,  I got up at 4:00 AM to help load the vans and make bags of cherries for them to sell. Sitting on a fruit crate counting out 18 cherries to put in a mesh bag and watching the sunrise and drinking coffee with a bunch of friendly Brazilians and Argentineans was actually one of the nicest mornings of the whole trip and made me want to see more sun rises before I go home. later I would drive one of the rickety trucks through the countryside to deliver more fruit to the sellers. Driving in New Zealand is always interesting for me. Driving on the left side of the road wasn’t so bad the first time and I learned to appreciate all the turnabouts pretty quickly. The first time I drove for fruitvans, they asked me to go to the recycling center and the grocery store in town. No problem I thought to myself, I had already gotten kind of used to driving on the other side of the road. Now I had to drive a huge 20 year old manual transmission truck out of a mountain range and all over town. That was an interesting learning experience but I did well.

Anyway, the women spent the afternoon decorating the shed that we slept in, turning it into a something fit for a Christmas party. Presents were stuffed under the tree and tables and tables of food were set up. Cakes, cookies, pizzas, sushi, things from around the world that I don’t have any name for, there was just so much food and it was all delicious. That night things got kicked off with a short speech and a performance of some sort by each house. The visiting house had a girl playing a beautiful song on violin but our house was way more fun as a dozen of us, including myself did a short tengo for everyone. After all that properness and organization, we just ate until we couldn’t eat any more. We then opened our presents, turned up the music and 60 people partied late into the night. Of course the party was great. Face painting, all sorts of games from around the world, dancing, anything was fair game. I finally went to the other side of the sheet that separated my bedroom from the party room and went to bed around 4:00, very happy that I had survived my first Christmas away from home and it was one that I’ll never forget. Many people stayed up to watch the sun rise and then headed off the bed early on Christmas morning. The previous nights dinner turned into breakfast and lunch because there was so much left over. After everyone got a few hours of sleep and had lunch, dozens of us migrated to the waterfall down the road for a Christmas day swim and then in the afternoon we all went to the beach to beat our hangovers.

The tree was packed 

Christmas morning

100 year old train tunnel. Probably the most unique part of any daily run that I'll ever have. took 5 minutes to run through and headlamp was a necessity. 

The waterfall a few minutes walk down the road

Things returned to normal pretty quickly and lots of people left over the next few days bringing our number back down to about 20. This felt small but it was great having the extra space and everyone there had been around for a while so we were all very comfortable with each other. The business stayed busy as the holidays weren’t over yet and we went back to work, contemplating New Years resolutions out loud and looking forward to another party. Without most people having New Years day off work, the NYE party was looking much smaller than the Christmas party but I was looking forward to it just as much as I had come to really get to know and like everyone at the house by now.

The plan for NYE was much less intricate than Christmas but probably more up my alley. A man named Mauro from a village at the base of Mt Fitz Roy in Patagonia wanted to make us a traditional Patagonian dinner for our party and we let him. After making sure everyone was okay with eating meat (and we were definitely more than okay with eating meat) he went out and bought a whole lamb to slow cook over an open fire. I was blown away when I heard his plans. First of all, Mt. Fitz Roy is among the worlds most famous mountains deep in the heart of one of the worlds last wild places. People, and especially climbers, talk about Patagonia and Mt. Fitz Roy with so much reverence, it seemed crazy to me that this man was born and raised at the base of it and now he was here cooking dinner for us in his custom. 

He started by building a fire and staking the lamb over it in the early evening. By the time enough embers had built up in the fire, he moved them over to a makeshift grill made of a grate propped up on bricks. Here he grilled potatoes, onions, mushrooms, vegetables, pizzas, and chicken. The look on his face was sheer joy all night as he ran around shoveling hot embers around and cooking  dinner for everyone. It was a chilly night (maybe 60 degrees) and we all gathered around the huge fire listening to music, munching on delicious meat and pizza, and waiting around for midnight. The conversation among the young people that night was heavy on looking back at what we had learned during our travels and what we all wanted to do with our futures. Some people had already been in New Zealand for almost a year and looking to 2011 for what they would do when they went home and others were wondering where the next year would take them because some weren’t planning on going home for a long time to come.  It turned out to be a great night and one of those times when you can look around at your friends around you and think with surprise that you have only known these people for less than two weeks.

The next day, those that had the day off sat around the gazebo in the yard and drank coffee for hours and hours all morning. At noon, most of the Europeans cheered Happy New Years because it was now the new year in their own countries. I realized that at 7:00 that night, I would have to do the same, though I would be the only person with that time slot. Many of us were getting ready to leave because the holidays were over and most of us had to move on so we enjoyed the time we had off to sit around with eachother before people started leaving. I would be leaving the next morning on January 2^nd so I was just enjoying my last day at the house.

Happy New Year Chicago

At some point, someone had the idea to go to go on a hike to a river where we could swim. By now I was shaking with too much caffine so a hike to a remote swimming spot sounded great to me. Seven of us piled into a car and headed deeper into the Coromandel Range for an unforgettable afternoon. We got to the parking lot of Dickie Flatts to find it pretty full and right away I was bummed about all the people. After 45 minutes of walking, the crowed had thinned out and the trail turned into a narrow tunnel about 200 meters long with water running at our feet in places. I was the only one who brought a headlamp so I walked in back and showed the way. It was here that I saw my first glow worms hanging from the ceiling. Not really a big deal but I was wondering when I would spot them. When we got to the other end of the tunnel, the trail opened up to a grassy area on the side of a river that ran down the canyon we now found ourselves in. At that spot the river took a bend and widened to make a swimming hole with little current but before and after moved swiftly with steep stone walls on either side.

I went to find a spot to change into my running shorts to swim in and came back to see everyone already in the water. The swimming hole that we found was walled in on both sides of the river and upstream were rapids and a small waterfall that looked dangerous to climb up to access what was upriver which is where we heard was good to explore and swim. The neat thing was that there was a hole in one of the vertical stone walls to the side of the waterfall that blocked our way that had about two feet of water pouring out of in and into the swimming hole. Four of us, one French guy and two German girls, swam across the pool to where the hole in the wall was and climbed into it. it was another old mining tunnel about 100 meters long that sloped upwards and rejoined the river above the rapids. Obviously the tunnel had been there to divert the river 100 years ago when there had been a hydro-plant at that spot or something. We laughed and scampered our way through the tunnel with water rushing past our legs and both hands gripping the walls to the side. When we got to the other side, we found ourselves in a narrow canyon with steep stone walls going right down into the slow moving river. We  jumped in and started swimming upstream. In a few places the gap between the walls would narrow and the current would be swifter , or we would have to maneuver up small waterfalls in our making it hard but fun to make our way up the river, further and further from the crowds. Finally after a while of this, we rounded a corner and the canyon opened up wider with a huge log spread across the water sticking out just enough to sit in the sun with our feet in the water. At times the swim had been dangerous and sketchy but we pulled and scraped our way to this beautiful spot and sat here looking down the deserted canyon, feeling miles away from anything. It brought me back to a hike I had taken with two close friends 8 months earlier in which we set out to climb a series of steep waterfalls in search of a mountain lion in southern Utah. That day had been filled with adventure, danger, laughter, even some minor hypothermia and thinking of this made me laugh, remembering how I have so many great memories from the last year of travel and adventure and can still find so much joy up to the present when I find myself in situations like this and was xcited for many more. 

Tunnel leading to the swimming hole

Laying in the sun with the waterfall climbing crew. 

Fruitvans Driveway

We swam and climbed back to the swimming hole to lie in the sun before heading home for dinner but I had been keeping a close eye on my watch. In the car on our way back, 7:00 rolled around and we all counted down to New Years in Chicago. It was a great end to the day and to my two weeks at the Fruitvans house. The next morning I got up early, ate a big breakfast and caught a ride with a seller into town with my pack. I had another host further up the Cormandel and grabbed a dozen Avocados from the back of the van for them and said goodbye.