After returning from my road trip, I moved into a bedroom in a house with 2 other women, both in their early thirties. One of them I had done field work with back in June. The first week there I spent getting my life back together – I had just been traveling for a month and had many neglected computer tasks to attend to and friends and family to catch up with. I also still didn’t have concrete plans for what my next couple of weeks would look like, so I tackled that as well.
The next week, I was trained on how to identify ectomycorrhizal roots on Kānuka trees (Kunzea ericoides). When certain mushrooms come in contact with tree roots, they will form a sheath around the root tip and grow between the trees cells, allowing for exchange of nutrients and sugars. The tree, in turn, alters the shape of the root tip – it will lose its root hairs, which are thin structures that increase the root’s surface area, and the root will swell and become rounded. To a trained eye, this is visible under the microscope.
I had prior experience recognizing ectomycorrhizal roots, and so the training John and I received from Ian Dickey was more of a species-specific refresher for me. I was glad to have a basic understanding to build on, because otherwise this would have been quite challenging. As it was, I was able to start collecting data for John next week.
As a part of the data John was collecting for his project, he wanted to know what proportion of roots had ectomycorrhizal root tips, because it can vary widely with each tree, and can be correlated with environmental factors. My job then was to take our root samples, put them on a plate, and look at each root tip and decide if I thought it was mycorrhizal or not. Some samples had over 200 root tips, and in the end I could do 8-10 samples a day.
I spent a whole week counting root tips – it was tedious work, but was interspersed with regular breaks. Manaaki Whenua LandCare Research Center has a great work culture where at 10, 12, and 3 every day, many employees go out to the common area to drink tea or coffee or have lunch together. There were 2 very fancy coffee machines which would spit out a variety of coffees and even chai lattes that you could select on the touch screen. While drinking their drink of choice, people would talk to each other. It scared me almost every time, but I would sit down next to a random person or group of people and talk to them, usually about their work. Everybody was very nice, but it never got any easier during the short time I was there.
On my last day, I went on an herbarium tour. Manaaki Whenua hosts the largest herbarium in New Zealand, with some specimens that are almost 200 years old. You could spend hours and hours in there, and some people do. There have been new species found in the herbarium because somebody had a close look at a species of plants and realized that there were two distinct species
During these couple weeks, I went on several excursions and hung out with friends. The biggest one was Bushball with the tramping club, which was an overnight trip to a hut to effectively have a big party. It was Christmas themed, which given the winter weather, actually made sense.
We hiked 2.5 hours to Woolshed Creek Hut, which is a hut you have to reserve in advance, and we had booked out the whole thing. There were a couple people there who had placed bets on there being open spots without reserving it, but after we talked to them and informed them that the whole hut would be full of partying college kids all night, they left very quickly.
We explored the area a bit, and some some people even decided to go swimming in the freezing cold water! Definitely not me though. While some were swimming, others were decorating the hut to make it feel festive.
That evening we had a bit of a potluck style dinner, hung out, danced, and generally had a good time. The good thing about partying at a hut is you can just go to bed when you’re tired – if you can stand the noise coming from the common room. Some people brought tents so they could sleep in peace, but I brought a good pair of earplugs and was fine.
Cleaning up the next morning was quite a task, and it took a while for us to get out of the hut – thank goodness it wasn’t a long hike back. There was, however, a small group that decided to climb Mt. Somers – they had to bring ice axes and crampons as the mountain was covered in snow.
I spent quite a lot of time at Noah’s apartment, he had a good group of friends going and we cooked together once a week. I also gave some haircuts; mullets are very common in New Zealand, especially for men, so I helped Noah and another friend named Oscar fit in.
I also went on several small hikes near Christchurch by myself, which were quite beautiful, and great for an afternoon or evening outing. Anja and I also met up a couple times. It was starting to sink in that I would be leaving soon, so I was trying to make the most of my remaining time in Christchurch.
Suddenly, the three weeks were up, and it was time for me to move on. The people whose room I had rented came back earlier than expected, so I lived in the livingroom there for 2 more days before moving out. I moved out to the Banks Peninsula for a week to live with Paul at Manaaki Mai. Paul is an older man who Anja had volunteered with in exchange for room and board for a couple weeks. He and his ex-wife, Andrea (who lives in the other half of the house – they’re still friends) own a sizeable piece of land. The cool thing is that they are entering into a co-governance agreement with the local hapū (subtribe), Ngāti Wheke, to co-manage the land now and then fully turn it over to them when they’re no longer around. Now, they run a small AirBnB for extra income, and Andrea is a wedding officiant. The name Manaaki Mai kind of translates to “place to be taken care of”. Paul has a lot of life experience and cool views on things, and I really enjoyed talking to him and learning from him.
Noah and Halley drove me out there – it’s a 45 minute drive from Christchurch. We then went on a hike up the hills there and had a great view of Whakarāupo (Lyttelton Harbor). We had a quick dinner together before Halley and Noah drove back, and I settled into my room.
Paul’s house is such a cozy place – wood floors and ceilings, a big fireplace, and two very cute dogs. Paul is “retired”, but is very active with the effort to restore the harbor’s ecological and cultural functions. The harbor faces a lot of problems with sedimentation due to grazing of cows and sheep in the watersheds, and planting native vegetation along the rivers and streams is one great way that can be minimized. There is a greater restoration effort going on with many of the shareholders of the harbor, and Paul coordinates much of the restoration work and funding for it, including acquiring funding and contracting people to build fences so that native trees can be planted and not get eaten by livestock.
That week, I followed Paul around as he met with a variety of people including the director of Living Springs, an organization that has its roots in religion (or god-bothering, as Paul likes to call it) but now is a center that hosts all sorts of school groups and organizations for retreats, and has restored a huge section of their land.
We also went to talk to the people in Rāpaki, which is the village of Ngāti Wheke. There I was invited to attend a Pōwhiri, a welcoming ceremony onto the Marae, less than an hour before the start of it. This was the fourth Pōwhiri I had been invited to, but the first one I actually attended – the rest were cancelled because of deaths – all unrelated but kind of a creepy coincidence. The ceremony was beautiful – it begins with a karanga (call), which invites the manuhiri (visitors) to approach the marae. The visitors slowly approach as a group, and then enter the wharenui (meeting house), at which point the two groups sit facing each other and each side is represented by speakers who do a whaikōrero, which sets forth the intention of each group. This all takes place in Te Reo, and it is beautiful to be surrounded by the language in that way. After the whaikōrero, every person shakes hands or does a hongi (pressing forehead and nose together and sharing a breath) with every person from the other side. After this, the visitors are given a kapu tī (cup of tea) and kai (food), which lifts the tapu of the manuhiri, making them noa and able to come and go on the marae as they please.
After the Pōwhiri, I had a perspective-shifting conversation with a Pākehā (non-Māori) woman named Ellie who works for Ngāti Wheke. She told me about how she got to where she is now, working with the iwi, and what my path could look like for me to be where she is in several years time. The key is to focus on relationships; when working with indigenous people, especially as someone who is not indigenous, the relationships you form are the most important part of the work – everything flows from there and not the other way around as it often is in western society.
I also went with Paul on one of the days as he went to inspect the process of setting up a fence on a farmer’s land. This fence was being put up to protect the land that was eroding into the bay from the sheep in the pastures. After the fence went up, native plants would be planted there to hold the soil and filter runoff before it reached the harbor. This ended up being a 4+ hour conversation between Paul, the fencing contractor, a farmer leasing the land to graze his sheep, and a friend of the farmer who owned the land. Every single fence post was discussed at great length, and the whole process felt very nitpicky. At the same time, though, these four men were deciding what would effectively become a permanent feature on the landscape, so it made sense to be put thought into it. It was interesting to think about how this process could have gone very differently had there been other people there.
Paul and I also went out in his waka-ama, which is an outrigger canoe. We went paddling out on the bay and Paul instructed me on the proper paddling technique – it was way harder than I expected! The water was beautiful though, and we got a view from a different angle of the fence that was being put up.
I also got to hang out with Andrea, Paul’s ex-wife, a bit. She is a really cool woman who used to be in the police force and is now retired. She is Māori and is working on reconnecting with her Māori side, which includes learning Te Reo and weaving kete (baskets) out of harakeke (New Zealand Flax, which is actually in the lily family). She taught me how to harvest, prepare, and weave a basic basket, which was so cool to learn.
Before I knew it, the week was over and I had just over a week left before I left New Zealand! I had one more big trip planned. Unfortunately, in the two days before I left, I began to get a runny nose, cough, and itchy throat – although it seemed like I was getting sick, I think I was actually having an allergic reaction to something in the air, either from inside the house or a flowering plant. I left Manaaki Mai in bad shape, but was doing better even by the time we got to Christchurch. Unfortunately my sensitive lungs were irritated and I proceeded to cough for several days, which was not the best start to a tramping trip, but didn’t interfere too much thank goodness.
Anyway, thank you as always for reading, and keep your eyes out for one more post about my time in New Zealand!