Post 16: The South Island - Part 2

Working in a Cherry Packhouse in Central Otago 🍒 

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The reason why I drove all the way down to Queenstown was the cherry season. There are plenty of cherry picking or packing jobs in this area, especially Cromwell and Alexandra. Romi (the Chilean girl I met in Opotiki) and I could luckily find a cherry packing job in Cromwell! For the first week, we stayed at a room shared with an Indian couple. We paid $160 a week each.

> We tried to make cinnamon rolls, but the oven was stronger than expected. Some were really good tho.

It was not bad, we had our own room and bathroom. But as we got to know that there is a couple of bunk beds available at the accommodation of the orchard, we decided to move out. It was located just next to the packhouse and the rent was extremely cheap - $50 (25€) a week!! Another advantage was that we could wake up 10min before work and be still on time.

⌚ Working hours

We usually started at 7am, sometimes later sometimes earlier depending on how many cherries were waiting to be packed. We mostly finished around 4pm. Mechanical issues happened quite often though, so somedays we finished already at 2pm. However, there was one week in January in which we worked almost 90h 😱 At least my wallet was happy. 

👷🏻‍♀️ Our job

The cherries are coming in white buckets, labeled with the date and the picker's name. These buckets were tipped onto converyor belts and some of us (graders) sort out the bad ones (too pink, too small). We also have to split the doubles and triples cause they get stuck in the machines.

The good cherries were transported in a stream of cold water to a machine that scannes them and sort them by size onto smaller converyor belts, where the packers are waiting.

Depending on the size of the boxes, we weight them and give it to the person behind. They will put the boxes into cartons with stickers on it (name of the cherry, date etc.). We packed 400g, 500g, 1kg, 2kg and 5kg. My favourive job was making boxes and stuck them on a palette cause there was no rush.

I also liked packing export cherries, because they have a high quality standard, so more cherries needed to be sorted out - our snacks during and after work! We were also allowed to listen to music while working. Some started calling their mother or watching YouTube videos 😂

👫 People I met in the packhouse

There were about 20 backpacker working, 40% were Chinese, 40% Latinos and the rest was German (including me). 🐼 and💃🏻🪇 were not always in peace :D My Chinese friends were really nice to me, they treated me like their little sister 🫶🏻

The engineer was a Kiwi guy, looking a bit like Ed Sheeran :D He was planning to visit Japan after the cherry season.

⛱️ On our days off

When the machines had some issues or there was a public holiday, we had a day off. On some days I went on hikes, on others I just drove my car to the lake and played on my new guitar. I also did a few runs along the river. A summary of what I actually did on my days off:

- First solo hike: Roy's peak!

- Rob Roy glacier with my Chinese friends and Romi

- Wanaka tree, Chinese restaurant

- Arrowtown hike with Chilean friends, market, pie

- purchased my first Camera & Guitar

- Running at riverside/rippovale road

- Meet Japanese airplane engineer I met in Christchurch

- Queenstown Skydiving with Romi and Chinese (Jayne, Leeloo, Raya, Brita, Ming)

- Chinese hotpot party!

- Bannockburn Track solo hike with my camera

- Solo day trip from Clyde to Cromwell by Mountainbike (Dunes Trail) I fell twice, but recovered with an ice cream

As you can see, I had a great time in Cromwell. The weather was mostly with us and I could make hips of money (a kiwi term for lots of). My next post will be about the one-week road trip with Romi, meanwhile my best friend in NZ.