Last week’s highlight was a chance meeting in the woods. I took a visitor for a big lap, showing him a side of the local trails he had not seen previously. One was a dotted line through the primordial jungle that survives on the wilder side of the forest. We heard a kaka on the way up there, and we talked about how various outfits are running trapping programmes in the forest to give the birds a fighting chance. Cats, rats, weasels and possums are just the front runners in a tribe of interlopers who all eat birds, or out compete them for the stuff the birds eat. At the top of our next climb we met a fellow on...
When I have got time, like three hours or so, and I have enough gas in the tank, I like to do what I regard as a big lap of the local woods here in Rotorua. There are endless variations that can be added in, but the basic touchpoints are the same. I start on the town side of the forest. I ride to the top, the highest road in the joint, and ride through the cathedral of native bush on the trail named for Tuhoto Ariki. After that, I get as close as I can to Rotokakahi, a lake steeped in history and a precious taonga to everybody who lives around here. Then I make my way back to...
2020 has so far been the single weirdest year of our existence as a company. We are sure most of you will have a similar story, but in our case its has been so weird that we had to shut down for a while. The shutdown was called right in the middle of the best period of sales we have experienced since we went online in 2009. Things were going really well, even after we sent a newsletter saying deliveries were going to be slow and unpredictable. We also put the same message on our home page. Those two warnings about less-than-ideal service standards turned out to be the stimulus we have been looking for all along. Orders poured in, which...
Hi there from Lockdown! We are entertaining ourselves by keeping an eye on your orders, and reading the discussions on social media about what constitutes responsible outdoor exercise. Our leaders gave us guidelines for our first month of home time, and added that we may go outside to exercise, provided we stay in our bubble and keep it local. One side effect of this is that people who haven’t exercised since 1997 have understood the exercise clause to be an order, and bubbles are out in force. The other is the argument about what constitutes ‘local’. You might as well ask how long is a piece of string. Five days in, we are looking for other ways to divert ourselves...
Down here in New Zealand, we are about to go into Covid-19 Lockdown, with a capital L. Well, semi-lockdown. Supermarkets will remain open. Apparently a lot pf people didn’t get the memo, our neighbour just reported a queue to get in to our local. I did a quick shop last night on the way home from the trails, and was amazed to see people are STILL hoovering up the toilet paper. In our little island paradise, a lot of stuff gets imported. But not toilet paper. The stuff is made 40 minutes from where we sit. That last word is possibly missing an H, but this is a family newsletter. Nzo will go into Lockdown in a close facsimile of...
