I'M BACK

Okay I know I started off with a hiss and roar.  It can't even be said that things tapered off, it just came to a complete standstill.  In my defence, its been an incredibly busy month or two, which is always the case up here over summer.

We have had pretty much back to back visitors since Christmas, which has been great and has brought a little bit of civilisation to our sometimes uncivilised environment up the Coast.  We are becoming quite the tour guides, taking all manner of people on sight-seeing trips around the farm and giving them the potted history of the local area.  Its been really interesting to get other people's perspective on the place.  Every bloke we have ever come across has been incredibly enthusiastic about what a great spot it is....but most of the blokes we know are part of that most male of bastions "the hunting fraternity"...who of course love being able to go out and get deer and pigs in quite close proximity to the house.  Successful hunting in a short space of time of course gives more time for drinking beer and there's been plenty of that going on in the last couple of months too.  At last count, we have had at least five separate visits from hunters since the beginning of December.  Hunting blokes of course are large eaters so I am getting pretty good at whipping up massively large feeds to keep their massively large motors going.

Scott doing a blackberry dive to get to the pigs.  Note canvas leggings

A litle more blackberry and gorse bashing

One dead pig

Scott and Boy with the pig.  The dogs who did all the work seem to not like the camera.

What's great is that most hunters are the salt of the earth type who just turn up and make themselves at home.  They always bring plenty of supplies with them (including beer, obviously) and don't expect the house to be spotless or me to look my best. They've always got a story or several to share and we get a lot of laughs out of it.  They always take meat home with them, and leave meat for us as well, plus it gets Scott out of my hair.  One of the groups of hunters has since discovered that he can go diving on the back boundary of the farm as well, so next time is bringing his dive gear as well as his pig dogs.  Hopefully that means a feed of paua and crayfish. 

Summer has also seen a bit of United Nations theme happening with visitors from Japan, the Netherlands, Texas and Auckland.  I include Auckland because compared to Ruatoria, Auckland IS a foreign country.  What has been most surprising is that all of the international visitors have been so keen to get stuck in boots and all to the Ruatoria lifestyle.  We have had them out horseriding, hunting, tagging cattle, drenching and dagging.  Matt from Texas was a hitchhiker we picked up who eventually ended up staying with us for two weeks.  We really enjoyed having him and learnt alot about the good ole U S of A along the way.   He certainly got the real New Zealand experience staying with us as Scott made him go out to work, even teaching him to dag.  We took him to a hangi at the home of one of our staff, who incidentally are affiliated with one of NZ's most notorious gangs, and of course he went pig hunting several times.  He's shot off up the Coromandel now for a bit of a rest I think, having been mobbed incessantly for two weeks by the kids.  Unfortunately for him he is a reasonably handsome sort of a chap and a few of the local wahines took a bit of a shine to him.  I did let on to some of them towards the end of his stay that he was quite partial to fried chicken and I wouldn't have been a bit surprised to see a queue forming down our driveway of locals all with plates of fried chicken for our young Texan friend.  I haven't actually let on to all of them that he has left yet, in the hopes that they may turn up with said fried chicken which I will of course be able to put to good use.