Solscape

Thanks to my good friend Seamus, I now am able to write a proper entry without paying 5$! Woo! It's amazing the little things you take for granted so much back home. Like unlimited internet access. like a stocked fridge. Like clean clothes. Like shampoo AND conditioner. Hair products. Condiments. You begin to realize you're a backpacker when someone leaves a half a jar of jam in the fridge after they leave and you feel like you've stuck gold.

I love it here. I've been in Raglan for a week, and I have easily settled into a nice little routine and the chilled back way of life here. I have friends (YES!!), a nice little cabin, I actually unpacked my backpack (What a feeling that was), and I feel like I have made a little home away from home out of my tiny eco-cabin. It's lovely here, and the views out my window of the never-ending pacific cannot be beat.

So life at Solscape is a bit like a surf summer camp for older kids. All of the wwoofers live in little eco cabins and train cabooses turned into bunks. There's about 8 of us, ranging from America, England, Spain, Brazil, Estonia, Canada, and Germany, and as you can imagine, everyone is kinda of here for the same reason. To surf, to be by the sea, to meet people, to have fun, and to live a healthy lifestyle. We work from 10:00 am til 12:30, doing an assortment of jobs such as cleaning the kitchen/bathrooms, making bunks, and then weeding, gardening, and helping Phil the owner with other various projects. Yesterday, we were making an adobe plaster to put on the outside fire-oven. We had to do it "Method traditional", meaning mixing the plaster together with our bare feet on a tarp. Kind of like stomping grapes for wine. All that was fine, but guess what the plaster was made up of? Clay, water, and....Cow shit. Yep. Straight up bovine feces, steaming hot and smelling gnarly. They scooped a shovel full on the tarp on top of the clay and Phil looked at me with my barefeet and grinned. "You want me to step...in that? you're serious?" When they said "poo" I thought it was just another kiwi slang for some sort of building material. But no...It was actually cow poo. And with a sigh, I rolled up my pants and got knee deep in the shit and pretended that it was anything else than what it was. Impossible, because the smell of cow shit really cannot be substituted for much else. I made sure to do a thorough cleansing of my entire body for hours afterwards. We also scrub toilets with no gloves, and I no longer will think twice about it.

Which is funny, because I have slowly found myself turning more into a "dirty hippie", if I should be so brash. I realized I hadn't showered except for dips the ocean in over 5 days, I have been washing my clothes in ocean water, and today I am planning on taking my guitar into town and "busking" (playing on the street). Mom and dad, I know you're proud. But why not? There's no surf, the weather is fine, and apparently, busking is a common way for backpackers to make a bit of spare change every now and again. And I just dropped a shit load of money on my new 6'6" fish (YAY), so I'd love to slowly start to pay it off. Maybe I'll get discovered (HAH!). And the other buskers I've seen and heard have been guys with terrible voices doing shitty covers of Green Day, and they made money, so I may have an advantage here.

Solscape and Raglan reminds me so much of Corolla in so many ways. I live with the people I work with, at dinner time, there's about 15 of us scrambling in the kitchen to make dinners, everyone is laughing and bantering, and there's surf talk and travel stories and music blasting. It's familiar, yet so, so far away from anything I've ever done. 2 nights ago we made home made pizzas in the brick oven, and the entire hostel got involved. It was such a fun night, and I taught everyone how a proper pizza should be because New Zealand hasn't quite caught on the what a real pizza should be like. I binge ate my way into a pizza and wine induced coma and could not have been more satisfied. And the stars here are incredible. We're on top of a hill and there are no lights on at night, so it's just us and the huge, huge night sky above us. I never saw Orion like I can see him here.

I've been surfing (without a wetsuit- the water is fucking freezing but I am too cheap to buy one now), playing soccer with the boys at the Raglan Pitch, and yesterday, we hiked an extinct volcano and came down for the sunset. Looking out over the cliffs of the west coast really makes you feel like you're at the edge of the earth. It's what's so nice about New Zealand- there's miles upon miles of beautiful coast line that actually isn't built up with houses and shops and hotels. It's rugged and wild and beautiful, the way it should be.

The only negative about raglan is the creepy guy who lives down the street with a sign posted "Wanted: 25 year old female, must be fit, preferably from Italian or German Descent, for housekeeping and "other" duties in exchange for accommodation", who walks around Raglan beach with boardshorts that say "In an emergency, pull down", that also happen to have a massive hole in the crotch that purposely show his junk for all the world to see.