Not-So-Fine-Dining

A little part of December that I forgot to address in the above post is as follows:

Glen and I decided to go for a nice lunch in Akaroa on our last day of flower picking. First up, you must be filled in on Akaroa itself. It is a very cute little town situated right by our flower farm that, sometime during the 1950’s, discovered it’s French colony roots – and the marketability thereof. So it is the quintessential sea-side tourist town further coloured with cheesy, grammatically incorrect business names, including:
-L’Essence (the Shell gas station)
-L’Hotel and Le Restaurant
-C’est Bon Boutique
-Le Bons Bay
-Le Bon Accord
-Le Mini Golf

In the spirit of tourist township, everything in Akaroa is really, really expensive. We knew we’d be paying through the nose for our lunch, but decided that it was all part of sampling the local flavour, no pun intended. Our original choice of restaurant was closed for a private function, so we went to a nice looking place called Ma Maison, which was relatively un-crowded and was situated smack on the harbour. The place smelled tasty, has great views, and we would actually be able to get a table. Score.

We ordered coffee, which came in tiny little mugs and cost around four dollars each. We ordered an appetizer, fresh baked bread served with a hummus dip and a smoked cheddar dip. There was about two tablespoons each of dip and five small pieces of bread. Cost: eight dollars and fifty cents. Glen ordered a chicken sandwich - $18.00. I decided that we wouldn’t spend all this time living on a harbour and not have fresh fish at least once. So I ordered the catch of the day, which was a grouper served over what they described as a mash of some description. Cost: $22.00

'That had better be bloody good fish,' Glen and I said to each other.

The food came out. The dip and bread was over priced and delicious. Glen’s sandwich looked and smelled delightful, although the chips served alongside it were the Mcain’s frozen shoestring variety instead of proper house chips. My muchly anticipated fish arrived…and it was a little triangle about the same size of a small Captain Highliner fishstick perched on top of a round of potato salad – not mash – that was about an inch thick and two inches in diameter. And over all this bounty was poured about a cup of viciously flavoured mayonnaise. One cup of mayonnaise for five small mouthfuls of food. It was revolting.

I attempted to scrape the mayonnaise off the fish and then off the potato salad (didn’t work particularly well), then tried to lift the potatoes out of the mayonnaise (that didn’t work either, the little potato round fell apart). I sampled a tiny bit of the potato salad, and was horrified to discover that it was made with Dijon mustard; I hate horseradish, and can detect it in dijon mustard from a mile away. Had I read on the menu that the “mash” contained Dijon flavouring or horseradish, I never would have ordered it, but such information is apparently not a worthy menu addition. I honestly wouldn’t have been able to choke down that salad, which meant that three quarters of my meal was inedible. I tried a very, very small bit of the fish. It was light and would have been quite tasty if it weren’t for the mayonnaise that slathered it. The meal was substandard, poorly designed and constructed, of stingy portion, and not worth the price.

So we tried to send it back. I politely gave the waitress my reasons (leaving out the fact that it simply wasn’t worth the price) and she went to talk to the chef. When she returned she cheerfully informed me that the chef could re-make the fish without the mayonnaise, but not the potato salad, because I had eaten some of it and it doesn’t contain any horseradish, just a special kind of mustard. I replied that I had eaten about one small potato square, not even a forkful, and the “special mustard” that it contains is Dijon, which contains horseradish. Besides, the fish was the most edible thing on the plate, now that I had shovelled off the mayonnaise, but the potato salad was simply beyond reconciliation. I said that I would rather just be made another dish, preferably the same sandwich that Glen was eating as it was quite good. The waitress went back to the kitchen, and came back out saying that the fish had already gone through on the bill so they wouldn’t be able to deduct the four dollar difference between the fish and the sandwich, and that I’d have to wait a few minutes to get the new order. That’s fine, I replied. I had ordered the fish and there wasn’t anything wrong with the way it was cooked, just that it was so far from what the menu described that I wouldn’t have ordered it had I known what it was, and besides, I fully expected to have to wait for my new order, just like everyone else. She went back to the kitchen again, and came out to inform me that this would be acceptable and that while the charge for the fish meal wouldn’t be deducted from the bill, they wouldn’t charge me for the sandwich.

Had they charged us for the sandwich, Glen and I would have simply walked out, then and there. Sorry, kids, but if you want to play with the fancy restaurants and charge an arm and a leg for your food, it had better damn well be perfect. And if it isn’t perfect or it isn’t as you had described it in the menu, you’d better be willing to alter the order when the patron realizes that the food is completely unacceptable.

I got my sandwich, and it was good, and I thanked the waitress for being so accommodating. She did do a lot of negotiating with the kitchen to fix the problem, and I was grateful for that. But I don’t think we’ll be bothering with any of the Akaroa restaurants again – they are uniformally overpriced. We shall save our coin for the larger city restaurants.

December: In Summation

We have spent the entirety of December WWOOFing at a flower farm in the Banks Peninsula. First, I need to say that the Banks Peninsula area is one of the closest approximations to heaven on Earth that I could imagine: verdant green hills dropping straight into harbour waters that vary daily from slate gray to turquoise blue, and weather that changes at the drop of a pin.

The farm where we were working was such a fantastic find that I don’t think I could say enough good things about it. The family of four (the mom, dad, and two teenage sons) usually have WWOOFers around at any given time, and are cheerfully welcoming of those who come through their doors. There was a host of WWOOFers present during the month, with the total count going as high as seven at one point. As most of the orders of cut flowers need to be gathered and sent out in the week following up to Christmas, the family very much needs the help from the travellers, and so the house was bustling with representatives from Britain, Japan, Malaysia, and of course, Canada. Glen and I, being the only couple among the WWOOF crew, got the honours of being given the main guest room, complete with a queen sized bed and closet. We had our clothes out of the backpacks and hung in the closet within 15 minutes of getting our room. These sorts of things are exciting after living out of backpacks for three months.

As a point of interest, the flowers we were picking are called Lucospermum, and they are a variety of protea. The farm grows three varieties:

Highgold


Tango


Harry Chittick


The aren’t that difficult to pick, provided that the picking efforts don’t disintegrate into a snowball-style flower fight. The flower heads make excellent missiles, especially if the flowers haven’t opened completely. They also cause massive hayfeaver (the Japanese guy got hit the worst, and I made good use of the anti-histamines that I brought from Canada), and are filled with bees. No wasps, mind, just bees.

Here is one of the flower fields. The hill is deceptively steep; no need for squats when you've got flower farm hills to climb:



The work was similarly very good. Weather permitting, we made as early a start of the day as possible so that we would be finished picking before the sun got really hot. At the start of the month we had a few days off, and we were given time off when the weather was too bad to go out picking. We were usually in the fields at 7:30, and would often be finished both picking and grading (done in the packhouse, which is quite temperate) by noon or one o’clock.

Here is where we grade the picked flowers - picking off bugs and bird poo, cutting the stems to the proper lengths, etc. The packhouse is wonderfully cool, so we were out of the sun and the heat by the time things got really toasty. Plus, you can flick the cut-off ends of the stems at other people really hard if you get the wrist motion and timing of the stem snipping just right. If you aim is really good, you can bounce the stem ends off people's foreheads.



Once the final flower orders were sent out on the 23rd, we were given several days off until the family clears out the house on the 28th to make room for some visiting friends. We all spend a fabulous Christmas here, eating entirely too much food on the very sunny patio, which overlooks one of the harbours.

Christmas breakfast - the start of a day of gorging:


This is what the weather was like all day, as viewed from the patio. Are you jealous yet?



We’ve done quite a bit that wouldn’t make for a particularly interesting post, so I shall give you something of a point-form summary of a few of the highlights:

-meeting the family’s three legged cat, who drools everywhere when cuddled.
-having an entire travel mug of freshly boiled tea dumped on me by Glen, who felt that the tea would look better on my leg than in the cup. I swore extremely loudly and startled a conservationists’ meeting that John (the resident patrician) was hosting. Yes, it hurt. Yes, there are still burn marks.
-Doing large batch cooking with the most adorably hilarious Japanese girl ever (the food was prepared in advance and then frozen for the busy picking days when we would be too buzy/tired to want to cook dinner for 12 adults).
-Getting nailed squarely in the eye with an unopened and rock-hard Highgold head during a vicious flower fight. Much to my irritation, the eye did not bruise, despite staying slightly swollen and tender for a couple of days.
-Glen getting stung by bees twice in the space of 20 minutes.
-Making and distributing massively rich, creamy, fatty, boozy egg nog for a whole bunch of people who have never before discovered the delights of homemade egg nog – home made, not that vile store-bought stuff, which you can’t get here anyway.

We leave here tomorrow, and will be staying in Christchurch for a few days with Julie’s (the resident matron) cousin, who has kindly extended visiting invitations to the WWOOFers to stay with her while in the city. Indecision and procrastination has led us to be uncertain as to where we will go afterwards; we do have an offer at another WWOOF place, but the more we review it, the less pleasant it sounds. We’re hoping to find somewhere else to WWOOF at in this area, and afterwards we will do a road-trip, sleep-in-the-back-of-the-wagon style tour of the south tip of the island. Maybe we’ll spend a day or two here and there in a hostel so that we can get cleaned up and have a proper meal. There aren’t too many WWOOF places in that area that we are interested in, so we may or may not bother trying to set something up.

And now, in order to make you even more wildly jealous, a few pictures of our lottery-win December situation:

This is the view from the living room and TV room:


A bunch of us trooped off to an isolated beach one afternoon. The resident heard of cows took a keen interest in the vehicle, and surrounded the truck, poking their runny noses inside. They were skittish and backed off as soon as we came up, but they may have very well attempted to steal the radio:






We went to Christchurch during one rainy day. While inspecting the Christchurch Cathedral, we discovered that there was no way to escape the flowers - the Harry Chitticks had followed us to town and took up residence on the pulpit:




Our rainy day trip also took us to the Christchurch art gallery, which was great fun. There was a display of knitted bonsai trees that were particularly ticklish:




There was also a weird exhibit that was basically a big cardboard tube with a gentle suction. We didn't realize what it was until I looked into it and it sucked my hair right up the tube:




Glen wanted in on the vacuum action:




In Christchurch there is an import store that supplied all sorts of foreign items. The store is teeeeeeeeny, doesn't seem to be organized in any sort of recognizable pattern, and is possibly one of the most delightful stores we've ever walked in to:




December was fantastic, and this was due in no small part to our wonderfully hospitable hosts, who went above and beyond to make us feel at home, and the other WWOOFers who we chummed around with. We'll be stopping in again some time to visit on our way back up the island, to say hello and share whatever wine we pick up along the way. We had a blast, we made friends, we struck gold!

Road Trip Canterbury

We have come round to our December establishment, faithful readers, and I am pleased to announce that it is a wonderful establishment indeed! After finishing up at the Swedish Cow-Shed, we took a couple of days to do a relaxed drive around some of the highways of the lower Nelson and upper Canterbury regions. Our first evening was spent attempting to find a good place to park the car and sleep in the back. The first attempt to bed down was thwarted by a huge swarm of sandflies that occupied the car as soon as we had pulled over and opened up the doors. We got them out by piling back into Sparkleypoo and driving as fast as we dared down the highway with the windows open. It did work, most of the flies got sucked out, but it was unfortunate that we had to abandon that sleeping spot. It was tucked away in the trees by a river and a swing bridge and was quite pretty, especially compared with the gravel-pile occupied "picnic area" we slept at afterwards.

The following morning was wonderfully sandfly-free. We stopped for breakfast at the Maruia Springs hot pool resort at Lewis Pass, and were so delighted by the prospect of enjoying the stunning and quiet mountain scenery in the peace of a traditional Japanese hot spring that we purchased two guest passes to the pools and stayed there for most of the morning. I would highly recommend stopping there if you are ever passing through the area, and the room prices seemed quite reasonable too.

From Maruia Springs we drove to Hanmer Springs, and wandered around the tourist down before having a late lunch/early supper at the springs restaurant. The food was decent, but aspired to too much and delivered too little, flavour-wise. The bold-as-brass sparrows, on the other hand, were a riot. They would fly right into the restaurant and perform elaborate begging routines at the feet of the diners.

After finishing up at Hanmer Springs, we drove along one of the less-travelled and more-windy section of the Alpine Pacific highway, and found ourselves at Kaikoura. Kaikoura is quite the recreational area, complete with the best whale watching in New Zealand, a sizable fur seal colony, plenty of random shopping, and the Kaikoura Winery. We went for a tour of the winery and their underground cellars, which of course came complete with a rather extensive wine tasting. For the record, I was the one who spat out the samples this time around, while Glen got pleasantly buzzed. We came away from the winery with a bottle of their Kaikoura Cream, a crème liquor similar to Bailey’s Irish Cream, but made from wine instead of whisky. It goes down like slightly boozy liquid milk chocolate. Irresistible.

From Kaikoura we elected to follow south highway 1 straight through (or around, as the case may be) Christchurch and spent the night at a scenic picnic site not too far away from our destination of the Banks Peninsula and our next WWOOF destination.

The Banks Peninsula area is breathtaking. It is a coastal caldera formation and is composed of steep green pastured hills dropping sharply into very, very blue ocean waters. The roads themselves are somewhat hair-raising for someone who did not learn how to drive on them, and while I’m certain that we infuriated many drivers by going much slower than the posted speed limit, we don’t regret going that slowly. The roads were steep and narrow, and the scenery was just too go to want to hurry through.

The road trip ended at Akaroa, the closest town of any size to our WWOOF location. Akaroa is, like so many of New Zealand towns, picturesque and touristy, and that is just fine by Glen and myself. It is an easy place to spend several days in, despite it’s tiny size, and is only about an hour away from Christchurch. There are plenty of harbour-side cafes at which one may soak up the sun, and plenty of scenic hikes and drives in the immediate vicinity. It practically forces one’s spine to unwind. The abundance of fresh fish is a bonus. Despite us having been in the area for a couple of weeks already, there are a few attractions in Akaroa that we’ve yet to investigate. But we will investigate them, and I shall forward you a report when we do.

This map more-or-less plots out our exact driving route. Find Lewis Pass on highway 7, go to highway 7A to Hanmer springs, take highway 70 up to Kaikoura, then highway 1 to Christchurch. It’s a great loop to make, and well worth the time taken: