Stewart Island - Church Hill Cafe

Well, let's start with a few facts. Stewart island is home to not only half of NZ's Kiwi population but also the southernmost fish & chips shop in the world. In a town with a population of around 400 everybody knows one another.

The trip from Bluff to Stewart Island was rough. The waves got to be about 8 feet high at times, and I had my first experience with seasickness. I was really surprised how much of a whole body experience it is, it's not like motion sicknes, it's more like being drunk (and not having fun) and having a fever at the same time. Alyssa and I weren't the only ones who threw up, and I played the gentleman and let her go first. I said to Alyssa "I think that was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life."

Once ashore, we didn't want to do anything but go to sleep for a while. Flopped down in the information centre, just by the dock, the staff came over and asked if we were ok, we just needed time to recuperate. After we'd dozed for a few minutes Alyssa walked me over to Just Cafe and we replaced our recently lost lunches. The woman at the counter was from Idaho. It's amazing how quickly we can pinpoint American/Canadian accents when we're out here with all these other nationalities.

I'm writing this post from Invercargill, we just came back on the ferry yesterday and stayed at a campground last night. There's so much to say about Stewart island though, such a different world than we've lived in so far. Any supplies or special items have to come "from the mainland", and people just don't mind waiting a few days or a week for them to arrive. The whole time I was conscious of the feeling that we were at the bottom of the world. In fact, if you were to get into a boat and head south the next stop would be Antarctica.

Church Hill Restaurant is situated at the top of a hill overlooking Halfmoon Bay. It has a nice old fashioned feel with Tigger, the cat, lounging on the couch by the open fireplace. There were lots of birds as well, Kaka, gulls, etc. Out back of the restaurant there was a small vegetable garden, where Gary (the owner) and the other wwoofers collected some of the ingredients for the nightly meals.

Gary told me he used to work around 100 hours a week, but recently he's let most of his staff go and runs the place with his manager, Nic.

There were three other WWOOFers there, Marko, from Slovenia (former Yugoslavia), Rotemm and Dor from Israel, and Bryn from NZ. Oh yeah, wait, that’s four, MOVING ON!

This host wasn’t like a ‘typical’ WWOOFing host, as we didn’t spend our time outside in the garden. In fact, we spent the past week learning how to wait tables at a high-class restaurant – something that neither of us ever expected. We learned about pairing wine with food, serving and bussing tables, and acting as accommodating hosts.

We got to play in the large kitchen as well and served everyone our speciality, Lemon Caper Chicken. For the vegetarians we made some delicious lentil burgers, along with the Church Hill signature salad at we are already missing now.

I had some time to play around with Gary’s two computers. He mentioned that he couldn’t get internet on the desktop, and at least four other WWOOFers had taken a whack at fixing it. I sorted it out in about 40 minutes. It was a Stupid broken firewall program, and disabling it didn’t work, I had to uninstall it. (Dad?!?!) Then I borrowed an iPod sync cable from the nice woman down at Just Café’ and hacked my iPod with rockbox since I’m so far away from my own computer, now I can add and play whatever I want without wiping my whole collection. (google it :-p)

The local library was interesting too, I think they had about 2000 books in total. I overheard one of the locals say “it’s so great that you have internet now”, welcome to the 21^st century guys. J Not only that, but it was run by volunteers, there was only one person on staff at a time, and only open four days a week for an hour each day.

As for the home life, we got to stay in the shed behind Gary’s house. There was some critter scuttling around at night, but we never did meet face-to-face/ face-to-beak/ face-to-snout, maw, whatever, with it. The beds were nice and we did get about a dozen pillows to work with. We’re getting quite used to adjusting to new beds/ showers/ kitchens/ toilets every day or so…ahh, the hidden joys of travelling.

After a full week of work, we’re heading to Fiordland, possibly NZ’s most famous landscape, the Milford Sound. After that, a visit to Queenstown and Wanaka, and some driving up the West Coast until we reach the sunny Golden Bay.