We woke this morning to clear skies and thousands of sand flies visible just outside the tent. It was nice to know that they were outside!
We had coffee and breakfast, said goodbye to Smokey who was on his way to fish, and then walked down to the dock. The tent was drying over a line, dripping on the ground. We are staying in a motel this evening, and so we can hang the tent when we arrive to get it fully dry. The groundsheet is beginning to leak, and so we need to address that at some point.
The lake was like a mirror and the sky was blue. I was happy since that would mean that we would get views along the way to Haast.
The ride to Haast was pretty on gently rolling hills with a couple steep ones along the way. The day was short at 34 miles and so we had time to stop at a couple places and enjoy the views.
And then, into Haast…
I became aware of Haast a few months ago, as an article in the New York Times popped into my “for you” section, about this remote tiny town in New Zealand, and its search for a biodiversity supervisor. And so I read it with interest, and then located the town in relation to our TA route. And we went right through it! So, I’ve been looking forward to arriving in Haast since before we arrived in NZ.
If you subscribe to NYT, this is the whole article. For those who don’t, below is some of the article.
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The “advertisement for a dream job in a land far, far away” is a distinctive subgenre of viral news stories. Maybe you would like to relocate to Saalfelden, Austria, and become a professional cave hermit. Or you might envision yourself quitting your desk job to become Japan’s first full-time foreign ninja.
If either of these sound like the sort of escapism you crave, you might have been one of the 1,383 people from 24 countries who have applied to be a “biodiversity supervisor” for the Department of Conservation on New Zealand’s remote West Coast. Applications closed on Tuesday.
The job will be based in the township of Haast, which has a population of about 85 people, and involves working with endangered New Zealand wildlife, like a rare sub-breed of the southern brown kiwi; monitoring fur seal populations; and working on the country’s innovative and extensive predator control measures.
“Haast is an extremely special place to live, surrounded by mountains and ocean, with endless activities for an outdoor enthusiast,” the advertisement reads.
Even by the standards of New Zealand, which in the 1990s marketed itself as at “the edge of the world,” Haast is remote. The local school has just eight students. The nearest airport is a three-hour drive away, the nearest hospital four. The town rates a 1 out of 9 — the lowest possible score — on the Bortle light pollution scale, putting it on a par with the most uninhabited areas of Alaska, Utah and Wyoming.
And so when this job was originally posted, only three people applied for it.
None had the required qualifications (one optional but “preferred” extra included full accreditations for handling kiwi, the national bird), so the deadline was extended. Stuff, a New Zealand news outlet, then picked up the story — the job in paradise that no one wanted — and it went viral internationally.
A subsequent interview with Wayne Costello, a regional spokesman for the Department of Conservation, by Agence France-Presse was reprinted in outlets around the world, including in Austria, Germany, Romania, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, and India, the department said.
Of the hundreds of applications from 24 different countries, which included Finland, Paraguay and South Africa, only a few dozen met the criteria and had the required work visa.
Unsurprisingly, a few things were lost in translation: One German-language version of the story, which had relied on an online translation from English, erroneously suggested that the job included saving not a rare flightless bird but “New Zealand’s rarest kiwifruit species.”
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Coming into Haast, we stopped at the Visitor Center, and learned some about the geology and flora/fauna of the area. We’ve learned (and seen lots of evidence along the trail) that NZ is actively working on eliminating the introduced animals who are killing the native birds, including stoats, possums and rats (and feral cats). The program is called Predator Free 2050. And they sell this book on how to help. Looks like a Girl Scout guide to me somehow.
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