When late November came around it became clear that we had spent too much money on the van and related upgrades. We were basically broke. It was time to get to work to fund the next leg of our journey.

We drove down to Te Puke (pronounced “Teh PUCK-ee”), known as the kiwifruit capital of the world. Kiwifruit orchards are always looking for workers, especially travellers, because the work is so boring that nobody would do it as a permanent job. We got our jobs at Pieter’s Horticulture, a family business that operated a small orchard. They also provided a pollen-harvesting service to nearby orchards; male flowers are picked and their pollen extracted to be used for manual fertilization. So that was our job: picking flowers! Only the perfect flowers could be picked. The flowers had to be buds, just ready to open, full of pollen and not too small. The flowers that had already opened were not picked, as their pollen had doubtlessly been taken by the bees, who were everywhere all the time. If you picked enough flower in one day (>20kg), you could earn a bonus depending on how much you picked. Telmah was much more proficient than I was, she earned the bonus somewhat regularly, depending on the quality of the orchard that day.

Work was from 7-5:30 with a half-hour lunch. But because of the incentives, nobody was eating lunch for more than 15 minutes. You just had to scarf it down and keep picking! The work itself was tedious and gruelling; one had to look and reach upwards all day. It took a week before our bodies acclimated, until then, we could hardly move our necks.

We were grateful for the opportunity, but happy to be done with it. We quit in mid-December and swore to never work on a kiwifruit orchard again.