What is life like living on a farm? It's interesting during the first few days but not so fun anymore after spending a month in Mamaku. Behind the lovely scenes of sheep grazing on green pastures were plenty of inconveniences and uncomfortable cold nights. Nonetheless, it was a good experience learning to make do with the simple and crude facilities in the countryside.

Meet the family cat, Blackie, supervising the sheep. Besides growing blueberries, our employers own a big sheep farm too.


Our accommodation on site is in one of these old caravans with no insulation. It was so cold at night we had to plug in an electric heater to stay warm in summer! The rent is $5pp per night including the use of shabby facilities in the shed located about 50m away. This means running with a torch along this stretch of the road to visit the bathroom at night...



This primitive washing machine has no spinning function. To squeeze out the water from our clothes, we have to manually feed every piece of clothing through two rollers like making mee hoon kway. Not much water gets squeezed out and anything with zips or buttons would get stuck. If you're not careful, your fingers might turn into handmade noodles. Dangerous and useless!


Give up la, use hands faster!


No place to hang laundry so we hooked our line in between caravans. Most would end up on the ground because there wasn’t any pegs around. At least I had something to hang our wet clothes...

 
This was the first night we cooked in the shed. It was past 8pm and we were still stabbing our frozen mince beef. We had no idea the microwave could defrost meat. How embarrassing! T_T


Sharing my tasteless rice noodle soup (I forgot to add seasonings lol) with other pickers


Our cooking journey begins...


A rice cooker appeared in the shed!?