Post 15: Dam

11th April - 12th April

This was awesome. We went to lunch at Time's place, outside of Waipukurau. To fill y'all in, Tim is the ex-mayor of central Hastings, and great fun. We found his obsession with building dams on his 1200-odd acres particularly amusing - then again, since the area's experiencing the worst drought in 20/30 years, it remains to be seen whether the dams will actually work.

Coolly, he's hooked them up to be able to generate hydroelectric power, and is also using a very simple paddle-wheel in the river on the bottom of his property to pump water up into a higher dam (it's incredible - he has river, valley floor, and mountains!)

So yeah - we went for lunch, having happily accepted the invitation to stay and the night, and proceeded to get rat-arsed. Again. Although we did have great fun, including a late-night drive to the local pub, some 200m away, for tobacco and to meet some of the locals. All of whom were also rat-arsed. Most amusing. I dimly remember claiming that I didn't think there were any Maori in SA, only to be corrected and told the were lots, and they were using the Cape Coloured population as camouflage :)

The next day we felt awful, but had great fun - we were treated to a tour of the place in Tim's ancient short-wheel base Landie, which was covered in cobwebs, and had to be jump-started using his tractor and the country road bisecting his place (see the picasa pics for the tour). Beautiful, beautiful place, so but so shockingly bone dry...

And then came time to move on to the next place, a bach on Ocean Beach, on the Eastern Coast, Hawkes Bay region.