Kia Ora

Greeting from New Zealand, y'all!

 So its been close to a week since I've been here, and I only get 2 chances to use the internet during my 2weeks on the island so I will try to sum up all that I've done so far. (plus these internet cafes are expensive so im gonna do a quick write up)
So I guess i'll start from the beginning of when I arrived in NZ. I was greeted by my project leader, Kirsty, and then met up with the 7 others that I'd be working with for the next 2 weeks. We then loaded all of our stuff in a van and headed to Auckland where upon we took a ferry to our island, Motuihe (mot-too-ee-hey). From the moment I stepped foot on the island, I was in awe of how beautiful everything was. We took a trek to our house which sat up on the cliff side, overlooking the water and the city line...perfection. We didn't do too much our first day, besides taking a tour of the island (which is only about 400 acres)and getting to know one another. The Motuihe project consists of rebuilding the land with it's native plants and birds and getting rid of those that don't belong (piss plants). There is no other wild life besides the lizards and birds.
Day one of actually working consisted of planting some native trees. After about 3 hours, 10 of us planted about 500 trees. After lunch we did some work in the green house by planting seeds in root trainers so that they can be planted later in the future. Our evenings haven't been too crazy b/c we're always so tired, but we've been playing a lot of cards and jenga.
Day 2 we did pretty much the same thing in the morning by continuing to plant. This time we planted 600 more! Later in the afternoon, we did some plant/weed removal which wore us out, but it was pretty entertaining.

our house

view from our house

Day 3 we once again we planted, 550 trees. We've become professionals at planting by now. Our more amusing part of the day was working along the side of the beach and removing old fencing. I still can't get over how amazing the view is no matter where you look.
Day 4 we got to sleep in, and considering we have been going to bed around 1030 every night we got plenty of sleep. We took a chill day and worked around the nursery cleaning and preparing other things. Lastly, we rescued a very rare plant (kakabeak) from being pulled out by birds.
As for today, it is our free day and we took the taxi boat into auckland and are just gonna explore before we have to go back and do more work. Our goal before we leave the island is to cliff jump into the water, even though it's a bit nippy.
Until next time, peace!

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