Woo Hoo! We've finished our 4-week stint as housekeepers, as despite all that previous stuff about being glad to finally find work, etc, etc, we're even happier to have finished! It's a demanding job physically, and we both faced difficulties, me with the management - I had a manager who didn't like explaining things, had a terrible attitude towards both customers and staff, somebody who thought it ok to leave me working alone over busy weekends, and who initially refused to acknowledge that I'm entitled to holiday pay, though I soon sorted that one out! And Su faced difficulties with language barriers - she worked with a large group of Samoans who liked to converse all day in their own language, which didn't help with the homesickness as you may imagine! But we survived! I had the pleasure of working with two lovely ladies during the week, Shamso, and Marie, the latter of whom said goodbye with a bottle of wine and a kiwi special, a delicious chocolate fridge cake which is fast disappearing! And as for Su, she had very enjoyable weekends with two young, high-spirited cousins, Jo & Rina and her boss said goodbye with a $40 bonus as she had mentioned we were struggling for cash when we arrived so he gave her the money to enable us to go to the cinema and have a nice meal, which is incredibly generous of him. At the end of the day we knew that as we are moving around the country and not staying in one place for longer than 4-6 weeks we were never going to get the best jobs around, and to be fair neither of us really minded the work - at the end of the day it's all money towards our travels in New Zealand and our journey home via Southeast Asia, not a career move - but it proves that it's who you work with that can really make the difference.

As for our stay in Wellington, it has been characterised by rain, and when I say rain, it has REALLY rained, and this is all too often accompanied by very strong, often cold winds, i.e. it rains hard and horizontally! But in a funny way we have been really lucky. It has apparently been the wettest New Zealand winter on record, and large parts of the country have been flooded several times, including Northland (where we had considered spending the winter for warmth) and Marlborough (where we had been planning to do vineyard pruning). And Wellington itself has suffered a number of landslides in the city, including a house not far from us and perched on a hill rather like this one.... So we've run to and from work in the rain, and amused ourselves by wandering around Te Papa Museum, cuddling up with a good book from David's ample bookshelves, treating ourselves with lots of hot chocolates & marshmallows, and a few visits to the New Zealand Film Festival. All good winter activities. We saw 3 films in total at the Film Festival, and all were absolutely superb, beautifully filmed, and each very different: Flower in the Pocket, a Chinese-Malaysian film about two young boys and their father, who were trying to get over the loss of their mother and wife - it was a gentle, funny film, and told by implication rather than explanation; Swedish Tango a Swedish film (rather obviously!) about two old lovers who wanted to try something new and decided to learn the tango, an adventure that took them to Buenos Aires in an attempt to improve - a charming, affectionate film that made you laugh out loud; and finally, The Song for Sparrows an Iranian film about an ostrich-wrangler who loses his job after one of the birds escapes and stumbles upon new ways of making money in the city, turning his previously happy family life into a scene of chaos - one of those films where you really care about the characters and what happens to them. All examples of the sort of cinema I adore, and I would recommend any of them should you have the opportunity to see them. And the venues chosen for the festival were fabulous, all allowing you a nice glass of wine with your film - very civilised. And speaking of tears in your eyes I must mention one book I've read from David's collection that really affected me, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Obviously I was aware of the book being a previous Booker Prize winner, but I'd never got around to reading it. Along with Keri Hulme's The Bone People, it is one of the best books I've read on my travels, with characters you care for so deeply it hurts, and I was sobbing in bed as I finished this book. Beautifully written.

Our absolute highlight of Wellington has been the Karori Sanctuary, the only urban predator-proof sanctuary in the world which is doing its best to restore a small area of Wellington to its former glory (before us Europeans arrived with our mammals and birds and began destroying this beautiful country, ripping out the native bush for wood, clearing land for farming, and introducing pests which killed off many of the unique birds and animals that lived here). Karori has a 500-year plan to restore this area, which has only recently begun, but their efforts to date has already brought back several species of birds and reptiles whose habitat had been destroyed so badly they were only living and breeding on offshore islands. It's a conservation success story and a magical place to visit. On our first trip last week (on a rare gloriously sunny day) we were enchanted by what we saw, Tuatara and Wellington Green Gecko, basking in the sun, plus an amazing amount of bird life, a mix of birds we had seen before, though in much greater numbers, such as Tui, Bellbird and Kaka, and 3 new species for us, the North Island Robin, Saddleback and Stitchbird. It was also notable for its tranquillity, its beautiful, luscious greenery and the amazing birdsong that can be heard there - we have been previously enchanted by the song of the Tui which has two voice boxes that combine to make the most unusual and unique song, but the combination of that with the other species and simply the amount of birds there made for a beautiful but unusual symphony of birdsong. We were so enthralled that we decided to do the night tour that evening, spending a further two hours in the sanctuary with a guide, watching the Kaka feed, I think my favourite event, especially when the Brown Teal arrived, another endangered species that run to the foot of the Kaka feeding station every evening to fight over the leftovers, and we also wandered around listening to the sounds of the Kiwi and Morepork (NZ owl) and looking at banks of glowworms. We returned yesterday to walk around some of the tramping tracks away from the main routes and were treated with a wonderful display by two Saddlebacks foraging in the bush right next to us. It is a wonderful place.

Other than that we've enjoyed the Te Papa Museum, especially the Rita Angus exhibition, we've seen a beautiful textiles exhibition at the Pataka Gallery, enjoyed a few nice meals in some of Wellington's lovely cosy cafes, most notably Fidel's where we had a delicious Eggs Benedict before our day at Karori, and have just had an interesting tour of the Parliament and Old St. Paul's. Suzanne has thoroughly enjoyed having a proper kitchen all to herself and has been looking after me well by baking a lot, we've both been to the hairdressers, a long overdue event and have been transformed back into human beings, and we've been to the Travel Doctor where I've been stabbed with Hep B and we've both been stabbed with Rabies in preparation for our visit to Southeast Asia, not so nice, but sadly necessary. And we are now planning to move on, which we are both more than ready for, we liked Wellington, we've enjoyed having a cosy place to ourselves to shelter from the weather, but we crave being back in the country again. We have a couple more days out planned (weather permitting) before we return to Raumati South to finish painting, we'll spend a few more days at Otaki, finishing the cleaning and enjoy the beach & tramping trails, then we head to the Interislander and South Island!

We have had one setback in the last couple of days though. We are planning to extend our visa by 3 months by working in horticulture and viticulture for the same amount of time, which will give us chance to work another vintage next year to save for our travels in Asia. This had been going quite well as we've already done 5 weeks at Ash Ridge Vineyards and 3 weeks in kiwi picking and packing, but we've asked Jon for a letter confirming that we worked for him for 5 weeks and he has refused as our work will apparently be seen as a benefit by the tax office so we lose out to enable him to avoid paying tax on work we carried out in good faith. We were initially really angry, as this means we have to now do 10 weeks work before we can apply to extend our visa, by which times the flight prices will have risen quite a bit, and the next month is the quietest in terms of seasonal work. Now I guess we are disappointed more than anything to have been let down so badly by somebody who we thought of as a friend, but c'est la vie, you meet some nice people on your travels and others who look out only for themselves. You take the rough with the smooth and end up the stronger (and better) people. At least we know in time to do something about it. We have found some promising looking work at a tree nursery in Nelson, so that will be our first port of call on South Island. Wish us luck!

Lots of love, Jo & Su, xxx