Thursday, November 4, 2010

Hello all from Tauranga. We've been staying at Penny's Aunt and Uncle Vonnie and Barry's place for the last few days. they have been unbelievably generous, putting us up (and putting up with us) while we have been job hunting around the Bay of Plenty. We jacked in the tomato picking to give us the freedom to find some work that really enables us to grow and to take in New Zealand while building some great memories and forging new friendships.
  We start gutting fish on Monday.
  Oh, we went for our second whale and dolphin watching trip soon after our last blog. We found a pod of dolphins pretty quickly, thanks to flocks of dive bombing gannets, and it was a big one; they must have found a fishy motherload, because they were soon joined by a couple of other pods of comparable size. In total, there were about 3,000 common dolphins in that single hunting group. The only way I can describe it is like being in the middle of great fields of the things, as far as it was possible to see from the deck, travelling in huge leaping herds, or playing in the bow waves of the tour catamaran with that effortless agility and showmammalship that they have.
   We have also: climbed Mt. Maunganui 4 times, come joint 3rd in a pub quiz, and run several times into another prophet of the end of the world, who wears a bicycle helmet at all times and is well known to the locals.