Long update from Team Shift on Great Barrier Island We’ve been here more than three weeks now, gathering info and learning our way around, getting the lay of the land, searching for our winter nest, trying to get a sense of island life and people, and most importantly, swimming twice a day on some days and adapting to a new “beach bum” sort of life! I strongly felt when Ro and I left Golden Bay that really, the best use of our remaining time together is to just be together. Despite our decades-long history of doing, doing, doing, it actually didn’t take long to adjust to the idea that hanging out on the beach is an OK use of time, in fact a wonderful use of time, and I may as well relax into it! The tide’s been in in the morning this week, so we’ve gone to Blind Bay just down the road in the mid-morning, then over to the east side to Medlands Beach for a picnic and to hang out and read, have another swim later in the afternoon, and then home to make dinner! Some days this week, now that our “nest quest” is over, that hasn’t been much of an exaggeration! The ocean beaches on the east side can be calm, or huge waves, or anything in between. People advised us right away, and we can see, that it’s best to swim at the ends, where it’s calmer, and that’s what we’ve done, but sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re at the ends or right in the middle! Some of these beaches, the ones a bit further north, are famous for surfing. The water on both sides of the island is warmer than we expected and almost uncannily clear! And the settings of all the beaches on both sides, bay or open ocean, are all magnificent. Their beauty is on a much larger scale than the beauty of Golden Bay. Also the beaches aren’t as tidal, and we can swim in the bay side beaches quite a long time before and after high tide, and on the ocean side any time. The waves on the ocean side are different to Golden Bay waves! They take their time coming in and you don’t know quite where they’re going to break! They take some getting used to. The bays aren’t always calm either, and they say when it’s windy on one side of the island, just go to the other! We’ve already experienced that for ourselves. The weather has been warm! Even after the second swim we’re usually fine in T-shirts! Our search for the best place to stay from the many options we found out about was a great opportunity to meet a lot of people and poke into just about every nook and cranny of the parts of the island that we’d want to be, as well as some we wouldn’t choose. The parts that don’t seem as good for us are along and at the ends of long, narrow, unsealed, winding, hilly roads, of which there are quite a few!, mostly ending at bays, and the northern part of the island, which to us seems very remote and a long way from things we need – but it’s not really all that far, just by our standards. Tryphena in the south is lovely. It goes on for several kilometres along the shore towards the ferry wharf at the end of the road, with a couple of grocery/general store shops and cafes and four or five (depending on how you count them) bay beaches, but it’s a distance from the magnificent ocean beaches on the east side. Claris is the “main centre” – but we now know that the term can mean something quite different from what we might have thought. It’s just a stretch of road a few kilometres long along which are strung here and there on both sides the Auckland council office and a small and an uninspiring library (heavy on crime, romance, action etc – though we have access to the entire Auckland collection!), the entrance to the airport, the local board office (which we vowed to never get involved with, but then we met the board chairperson at the Easter market when we were talking to someone who’s part of a papercrete initiative (!) here, and I couldn’t resist asking to have our address added to her local board info email list!), a police station, a car rental place, a techie guy’s shop (thank goodness he’s here to help with phone and internet, and anything else that might crop up!), a couple of small takeaway places, a post office and gift shop, a medical centre, a chemist, a charter fishing guy, a laundromat and a small grocery store, a “bottle shop”, a place to refill LPG tanks, an art gallery, a tiny museum – Milk, Honey and Grain, and the Claris Texas Cafe. They’re mostly all quite separate, with trees and maybe a house or two in between. Okupu, where we are now, is the second largest settlement after Tryphena, and it’s just residential. Only about 800 people in all live on GBI. It was very strange to go to that Easter market and know next to no one among the large crowd. What a contrast with going to HANDS markets in Golden Bay, where we knew just about everyone and just about everyone knew us, and if there was someone I didn’t know, I’d go up to them and say, Hi, I don’t think I know you, who are you?! Okupu would have been a great place to stay. It’s hilly and lovely, has nice views of Blind Bay and it's just three minutes from the beautiful bay beach there, less than ten minutes to Claris, and another five or ten minutes to those gorgeous ocean beaches, then another 15 or 20 minutes to Tryphena. We had some good options for an off-season rental in Okupu, but our big disappointment was that the centrepiece of Okupu is two cell towers – “The Two Towers", just one and two years old, and as soon as we saw them we knew we couldn’t stay here. Right now we’re about 500 m from the towers — how awful! It seems that people everywhere are losing the option of not living near a cell tower. Vodafone alone has 98% of the entire country covered. The best people can do who want to avoid EMR is try to find a place as far away from one as possible, but that would probably bring you closer to the next one, and also somehow avoid smart meters and their relay transmitters, fortunately not an issue here! Also even if you find what seems like a safer place, a new tower or repeater will likely be built before too long. That’s one reason we’d hesitate to buy another place anywhere. We’re trying to avoid potential hassles — we had far too many in Pohara Valley. We checked out some books from the library here. Ro’s reading one all about manuka honey and learning all sorts of fascinating information about the surprising benefits of all honey! Like – rinse your mouth with it; it’s great to prevent tooth decay! It’s one example of many things in all areas we thought were true that have turned out to be so wrong — a least they seem that way now, until new information comes to light! GBI is still a producer of top-grade manuka. That’s because there are zillions of manuka trees, which are a pioneer species after the clearing of forests, in fact in some eroded places the only tree that will grow. And following on from that, I got “Tales of Great Barrier Island”, which isn’t quite “tales” in the sense I thought it would be, but fascinating history of the island and many aspects of island life in the past. And lo and behold, as remote as it is, the exploitation of its resources is no different to anywhere else on our beleaguered planet. Magnificent kauri forests all ripped out for timber, and some just for the gum underneath and the trees burned. Huge dams (the same principle as the debris dams that caused all the devastation in eastern Golden Bay in December 2011, only deliberate) and all sorts of other stream- and forest-destroying infrastructure were built. There was also whaling, sorry to say, and mining for silver, gold and copper with its associated damage and toxins. The lengths they went to and hardships they endured, and much of the destruction wasn’t very profitable! Much of the rest of the forests was burned for farmland, which became unproductive with all the misuse of the land. Bird life declined to very little, and the seas were overfished and over-shellfished. Now much of the land is regenerating. How we can weep over it all! Some places have been spared, mainly in the most mountainous parts where the tramping tracks are. If you like to walk, Great Barrier is the place to be! There are walks everywhere of every length in all sorts of environments and to all sorts of beautiful and interesting destinations. As you know the only access to Great Barrier Island is boat or small plane. The ferry from Auckland (90 km) comes to Tryphena three or four times a week (also to Port Fitzroy in the north once a week), and two airlines fly small planes from Auckland and a few other places in the northern part of North Island. Usually there are just a few flights a day, but on holidays, like Easter weekend, there are a lot! Like Golden Bay, there are many holiday homes. Some people rent them to visitors in the off-season and other times when they’re not here, and it seems the daily price during the summer is the same as the weekly price during the winter! $200 a night in summer and $200 a week in winter seems about average. The place we’ll be renting is a stone’s throw from Kaitoke Beach. The only access along its entire long length is at the end of the road we’re going to be on, on a sand path over big dunes. None of the places we looked at ticked every box, but this one came the closest, even though from what we’ve seen, it’s the closest of any house on the entire island to the houses on each side, though is unoccupied during the winter. The one we’re renting has plenty of solar power and an electric, not gas, fridge. Those are things to look for here! Also, it has good all day sun. A lot of places don’t, like the one we’re in now, because they’re not intended for winter use, and it has close, flat, level access, which many places don’t! Also we’ll be able to have a small garden there. Here’s the GoogleEarth link, though Oceanview Road must have been in its early days when it was photographed. Now it’s all green with lots of trees and other plantings. https://www.google.co.nz/maps/place/24+Oceanview+Rd,+Great+Barrier+Island+0991/@-36.2478127,175.4752565,600m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x6d730dcb8c1f917d:0x39d9ad1be6383246?hl=en And here’s the link to where we are now, until 23 April: https://www.google.co.nz/maps/place/236+Blind+Bay+Rd,+Great+Barrier+Island+0991/@-36.210837,175.4267495,2403m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x6d730df7964def65:0xd513ac50d1748c7b?hl=en These links are great because you can zoom out and see the rest of GBI! It’s very, very quiet on Great Barrier Island, except for the flights and the usual mowers etc in residential areas, and of course the pounding waves near the ocean beaches and the wind — it can be very windy here; after all, it’s a “barrier" protecting the mainland from storms. I’ve never slept in such a quiet place, and I’ve had some amazing sleeps. Ro has always been the poorer sleeper but even he has had some good ones! It’s been warm, and almost no rain the whole time we’ve been here. That sounds great, but almost everyone on the entire island depends on rainwater! If their tanks run out, what do they do, we asked? They have a long-drop out back somewhere, jump in a creek to clean off, and buy bottled water to drink! There’s a tanker than can deliver water, but it’s from a creek somewhere and probably not very wholesome, and the tanker itself isn’t known to be particularly clean! So you can’t, or shouldn’t, use the water for drinking. The other limiting factor is food. Water and food are pretty basic but they’re not really assured here. It’s not a community of gardeners, though there are some. You won’t believe where a lot of people get their food! They order groceries from Countdown in Auckland and the boxes are flown over biweekly or sent on the ferry! That is not sustainable, and it can’t be very healthy either! It’s challenging to be 100 percent organic here, but we’re rising to the challenge. The cornerstone of our food at present is our weekly produce box from the lovely Caity and Gerald at Okiwi Passion. Oh, it’s wonderful!!! Very generous and diverse. We don’t even usually finish it all before the next one comes, and that’s saying a lot for us produce eaters! They told us about a bulk food buying coop that orders monthly from Ceres. We joined immediately! And by helping on packing days we’ll get to meet some of the other members. We also found out about the community gardens in Medlands, which was created by a group taking a four-year growing course with Caity, and some of them still tend it on Saturday mornings. Anyone can go and harvest a reasonable amount and leave a koha, but it seems very few do. That’s been the source of our salad greens and herbs. The Stonewall Store in Tryphena has a surprisingly large number of organic items though mostly in packaging. Today someone invited us to harvest red guavas, which was great. We can get fresh eggs pretty easily, and I have kefir and yogurt making back on track, but no kombucha yet for lack of jars. We’ll be able to have a small garden at our new place. Caity and Gerald told us before we left Golden Bay that they grow three varieties of bananas. We really looked forward to that! And now we’re eating them! This week’s box had a bunch each of all three kinds – very small, small, and not quite so small! We’ve hardly had a banana in decades, so these are a valued treat! So with all that we’ve been eating wonderfully well, though being away from our abundant year-‘round food source just outside the door has taken some adjusting to. Given our deep feelings about our 16 years there and the necessity of leaving, it’s been a wonderful antidote to get happy messages from Shanti telling us how much she loves living there! We’re still trying to get a grip on just what sort of people live here. Although everyone has been friendly and helpful, surprisingly at first it seemed there were very few we could relate to as our true selves with our true values. And we found it’s true — some people who we felt more of an initial connection with (which happened all the time in Golden Bay!) confirmed that many people bring their suburban lifestyle to this remote and off-grid environment and carry on as before. We have been meeting others here and there who have that casual yet conscious sort of look and quality to them that we feel most comfortable with. Sorry, it’s very hard to explain! Here are some photos we took of some of the places I mentioned. As for our future, it’s still wide open. We do love it here and it’s WONDERFUL to be here, and very special to be in such a sparsely inhabited, faraway, undeveloped, beautiful place, but as long-term avid lovers of and believers in self-reliance, ideally community self-reliance, we feel a bit uneasy about the fragile links that keep us taken care of here. After we’ve been here a lot longer, and if we can find a situation with secure food and water, and if we feel comfortable and happy with the people we know, we’d certainly consider staying on. Many people here say they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Pah Beach at Tryphena Blind Bay from the balcony of the place we’re in now. You can see the Coromandel, 19 km away, a bit under clouds, and you can just barely see Channel Rock on the horizon far to the right, a prominent landmark (seamark?) between Great Barrier Island and Auckland. They’re both more distinct on clearer days. Sand dunes at the far end of Kaitoke Beach, where the wetland-meandering Kaitoke Stream enters the sea. Taken on my birthday! Above, Ro at Medlands Beach, and below, Joanna swimming at the south end of the beach – I'm in there somewhere!
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