So over friday night and saturday we (the group studying here through IES) went up towards the southern alps to a small town called Springfield and spent the night there. The next day we did some adventuring in the area, or at least tried to though the bad weather.

We stayed in a nice backpacker’s place, and had a great meal there. Went to the local towne pub afterwards to catch part of the rugby game, and it seemed that the whole town was there (mind you, it’s a very small town). A good time was had.

The next morning we went out to a farm where we learning a bit about sheep and what not. Why this might interest us is because currently sheep outnumber people here in NZ ~47mil : 4.1mil, so sheep are the happening deal these days. (Although in the day, when sheep’s wool and sheep meat was more expensive, there were up to 72mil sheep in NZ). In any event, we learned some about the different sheep and goats that are around. The ones that are used for the nice clothes are Merino sheep, at the moment I’m forgetting the meat sheep, and the goats are Angora goats. This picture is of one of the Angora goats that we saw.

We also got to see how the sheep dogs work, and it’s pretty cool. The farmer has a bunch of dogs, some in training, some that aren’t, and well, we got to see Blue work a few sheep. Blue is a border collie (of course) who’s 18 months old and has been in training for 6wks. The farmer there told us that sometimes it takes up to 2 years to fully train a dog very well to work the sheep. I will also add that the dogs aren’t mean to the sheep at all, and if they actually bite the sheep, well, let’s just leave it as things don’t work out for the dog so well if they start biting sheep.

In any event, the following two pictures are of blue working a few sheep. He was so very eager to get out there and run around and work the sheep, however he clearly needed some more practice…

We also got to learn a bit about sheering sheep. There’s two ways of doing it, either old school (a big crazy scissor like contraption) or new school (basically a large electric razor). The merinos that live in the mountains get the scissor treatment to leave about a cm or so of wool on them in order to keep warm, but most of the other sheep are sheered with the electric razor.  Sheep sheerers are a wild lot, running from farm to farm sheering sheep.  They get paid by the sheep, and can do around 150-200 sheep by hand in a day, or around 250-300 electrically in a day.  Supposedly there’s a great shortage of sheerers around these days.  We actually got to try sheering the sheep with the big scissors and it was easy, although I could see getting it just right would not only be difficult but time intensive as well.  The following pic is of the farmer using the razor on the sheep.  It’s interesting because the sheep doesn’t move an inch, although as he showed us, if it thinks it can get free, it’ll sure as hell try.

The last thing that we really did that rainy day was go jet boating.  Jet boating is actually fairly fun, although certainly something that’s touristy.  I wouldn’t pay more than once I think for it.  The boat goes really fast and turns on a dime, it’s wicked good fun.  The driver even pulled a few 360° spins, and that was cool.  The scenery up there was wild, just really neat.  My only regret was that we couldn’t see it any better (because of the rain / clouds / bad weather in general).  In any event, this is a single picture of some of the not quite as good scenery from the jetboat, there was much bettre but I didn’t want to pull my camera out again, as it was kind of raining while we were on there (the rain, at that speed, feels like small pellets hitting your face.  It’s fun).

And that about does it for our orientation trip up towards the hills.  Hope you all like the pics and what not.  Also, I’m well aware that I’m a few days late in my posts. I’ll try to rectify this soon.

Until then, cheers.