Post 10: Cider

March 12th - March 26th

After 3 weeks, however, it was time to move on, and so we did. About 5km down the road. When talking about where to go next, Wayne had said we should think about a friend, Gregg, who lived just down the road (in retrospect, we had contacted Gregg, but received no reply). Gregg was happy to have us (he only realised later that we had contacted him), and so we landed at the orchard.

Words fail at this point.

The orchard has some 900+ apple trees – braeburn and pacific rose. Every year, family and friends descend on the place to pick the fruit, and then, a couple of months later, to juice it. This juice is then stored and kept as is (it’s incredible – concentrated as hell, and beautiful as heaven) or, and this is where it got fun, it’s converted into cider, using Gregg’s apples as well as other cider apple varieties from other farmers in the area, who appear to simply swap. Nothing is bought or sold – the juice and cider are for family and friends’ consumption.

The cider’s done a la Normandie, as it were, and is simply delicious – we have sampled several varieties (hell, we drank a few litres of the stuff every day!), and all are mmmmmmmm.
But what a beautiful place in general – we really enjoyed Gregg’s company, the orchard, the piggies (more on that shortly) and meeting his partner, Carla, who travels extensively for work.
We slept in the house, and what a cool house – made of two converted schoolhouses, we had one half of it to ourselves, with our bed next to a garage door which, when pulled up, revealed the setting sun and Kapiti Island. Gobsmacking. In addition, it had the coolest idea: Gregg, a gifted carpenter, had made wonderful rolling walls, meaning that a wholly open-plan space could be split up easily, and at will. And what wonderful things in the house – prolific travelers, and great followers of culture, the house has been filled with a wonderfully eclectic collection of seventies furniture, books, and, well, interesting ‘things’ – not bric-a-brac, certainly, but more ‘objets’, as it were.

Pipis picked at Otaki beach - awesome!

These were also the people responsible for a wonderful weekend in Wellington (we had been down several times in the meantime), but THIS time, we got to stay in an apartment we had all to ourselves, right in the centre of Wellington, on its coolest street. More on that later as well.

Anyway, we had, once more, to move on, but are going back for the apple picking party – yay! I love Otaki, and the people we’ve met so far have been pretty special, too…

Note: it is important to remember, when living in small countries, that one should attempt not to piss off anyone within 200km – word spreads.