I arrived in Wellington after three weeks in the North Island rafting, base jumping, hiking, staying in hostels, and riding the Kiwi Experience bus, and I was broke. I hadn’t had a job since bartending in Queensland over two months beforehand and had done a considerable amount of traveling since then from the Northern Territory to Bali to Oz’s east coast and finally New Zealand. I was just about out of money.
Wellington & Base Housekeeping
I didn’t necessarily choose Wellington as my working base. It just so happened to be the most conveniently located city to break up my trip. Queenstown down south was much more popular with backpackers, but I had a Kiwi Experience bus pass and did not have the money to partake in activities the whole way down there to reach it. Wellington is at the very bottom of the North Island, exactly in between everything I’d done and everything I was planning to do.
I checked into Trek Global where I stayed for the first few nights. It’s a nice enough hostel near Willis Street with the plus that you can bring your own drinks in and the negative that it’s not all that memorable and wifi is pretty expensive. I walked to Nomads to pay a cheaper price for the Internet during the time I stayed at Trek.
The day after checking in, I set out around the city to find a hostel that would let me work for accommodation. It’s the easiest way to save a considerable amount of money, especially while you’re looking for a real job. Trek wanted a resume which I didn’t have printed out at the time, Nomads had a full on waiting list for housekeeping positions, and the YHA wanted you to fill out a job application, so finally I turned to my last resort, Base.
The Wellington Base was of an even lower quality than most Bases. It was in an old building with eight stories and was just generally dingy. I guess at least it wasn’t as generic and bland as the mass-produced Bases I was used to. Funnily enough, it ended up feeling like home to me, and I’m rather nostalgic about it now.
Basement night out
Basically, I asked at the desk about working for accommodation, so they went and grabbed Tom, the dickhead Czech creep in charge of housekeeping (clearly I have fond memories of him), who asked me when I wanted to start. That was that. I moved in January 2nd, 2014.
I spent the five days in between moving hostels drinking, watching movies, and finally opening a New Zealand bank account.
I bank with Westpac because of their Lego helicopters.
I also celebrated New Year’s Eve at Molly Malone’s Irish pub (which has sadly since closed) dancing to a really fun cover band.
Moving to Base was a great decision. I was put into one of the housekeeping dorms (there were about three rooms just for backpackers who were working for accommodation so that you didn’t have randoms moving in and out all the time), and the location is fantastic. It’s just around the corner from Courtenay Place, the main bar street, and two blocks away from New World (the supermarket).
I ran into my Californian friend, Jasper (team America!), from the Kiwi bus shortly after moving in. I was super happy to know somebody in Wellington, and we took some day trips around the city and spent most nights frequenting the downstairs hostel bar, Basement, which was a dim and grungy shithole, but it was kind of OUR shithole.
We judged Europeans playing beer pong, made some friends (mainly Frank from Germany and James from England), played free pool, and would hit up the bars on Courtenay, mostly Electric Avenue which was everyone’s favorite. It’s funny to think that I was hanging out in the same bar where Lewis worked for weeks before we ever met, and I wouldn’t even have noticed him because I never bought drinks.
Windy Mt. Victoria with Jasper
I also finally managed to get an appointment at the IRD office and sort out my tax number. I was all set to work! I just couldn’t find a job. I had an interview with a fancy French restaurant, but that didn’t work out, and I also signed up with a temp agency called GBL. I did really well on all my testing with them (WPM, Word, spelling, etc.) and hoped they’d be able to place me somewhere.
Meanwhile, I was doing housekeeping shifts at Base three times a week, 6 hours each day. They were repetitive but not so bad. On day shift, you’d spend the morning working your way down through the eight floors with a group of about 4-5 others changing the sheets on beds that had checked out, vacuuming, and dusting. Then you’d have a lunch break where they provided bread and cereal, etc. and afterwards you’d either do bathrooms or kitchen on the afternoon shift. I loved doing the kitchen (as much as you can love doing any kind of housekeeping work) because I’d just put in my earbuds and listen to music while washing dishes and cleaning. It went by quicker than the other options.
There were three other possibilities for shifts, the morning (6-11), evening (5:30-9:30), and night (9:00-1 AM). The later ones are super easy because you’re on your own with a checklist and just do what you want. Nobody at all is watching you and most of the time whoever was working them would just work for maybe an hour before coming sit out on the patio with everyone else and hang out until their time was up to turn in the keys. It’s great to have options too since when you have a real job, you can organize your housekeeping shift around your working hours.
Unfortunately, these housekeeping shifts were not putting money into my bank account. My friends were buying me drinks. I was such a bum. James and Frank kept joking that I’d have to just start working at the strip club, Mermaids, who handed me hiring flyers every time I walked by.
After just a week, I decided I needed to head down south to the vineyards and look for work in the fields. I put in a week’s notice at the hostel and booked my bus and ferry to Blenheim. I was pretty torn about it, honestly, because I was just settling in, made some friends, had wifi again, and was feeling comfortable, but I didn’t want to waste any more time if nothing was going to come up jobwise.
The Blenheim Vineyard Experience
So, I left Wellington after three short weeks. I woke up at 7 AM on my morning of departure, used my Kiwi Experience pass to get the bus to the ferry terminal, and also used my one included ferry ride to the South Island on the Interislander. I found a nice seat and napped for three hours down. We disembarked in Picton, and I caught the Intercity bus I’d booked down to Blenheim, only a half hour away.
A lot of times in working towns like this one, you can find long-term accommodation. Hostels will have special dorms for people who are staying in the area for work, and you pay weekly instead of nightly. I had booked my first week at Blenheim Backpackers, and it was THE WORST. I have stayed in very few hostels that I will wholeheartedly tell you to avoid, but this is one of them! The first night was misleading because they put me and my roommate, a French girl named Marie, in a temporary room. This was nice with a big bunk, couch, TV, and fridge.
Unfortunately, the next day they moved us into a long-term accommodation room, and it was nothing like that. It was so tiny, and they had crammed in a fridge, table, wire shelves, and a bunk bud with a DOUBLE bed on the bottom. In what universe is that a good idea for two single workers? How do you decide who gets the bottom bunk (which everyone usually fights over to begin with) especially when that bottom is now also a double? We agreed to switch weekly, and I took it first, but I ended up moving out after a week anyway. On top of the cramped space, the room was also swarming with flies. They were everywhere and there was no getting rid of them.
This hellhole.
The hostel overall was more like a compound. Everything was in separate buildings around a rocky parking lot. The showers were concrete and like being at a public pool. The whole place just sucked. The receptionist was nice though and gave me a list of phone numbers for contractors that work the vineyards in the area. I started calling down them and had no luck, but one guy told me to text him my name and passport number in case anything opened up.
It was extremely fortunate that I did this. The second morning (it rained on the first), we went down to the iSite at 6 AM. We had been told the best way to get a job was just to show up in the parking lot where this company, Focus, takes the vans out every morning and hope that they need to fill slots. There was a large group standing around when we arrived, and the manager told us there were no available spots for work. We stuck around anyway while they did roll call, and some people hadn’t shown up. Still, there were a bunch of backpackers waiting around for jobs and only a few openings to fill. Well, they started calling out the names of people who had sent in their information. I had no idea this was the company who I’d texted my details to, so I was beyond elated and relieved when they called my name! I had work!
We got on the bus and went to the vineyard, Spy Valley, where they were thinning the grapes. We were all given bright orange vests, shears, and chalk to write our names on the posts of the areas we’d finished.
That glamorous backpacking life.
Now, I had some delusions about fruit picking and similar jobs. Loads of people had done it in Australia, and I was always a little jealous. In my mind, you were part of a tight-knit community where you’d go out, spend all day in the sunshine, pick a few oranges, and then go back to your hostel home and party all night. I mean, I’m picturing wicker baskets and laughing in the fields. Some Disney shit.
NO. This was more like slave-driving. It was hot, exhausting, and stressful. We’d get a quick break in the morning around 10 and another for lunch, but otherwise, we were on our feet consistently from dawn up to when we headed back around 4. You spend hours walking up and down row after row of identical vines cutting grape bunches. You’d do a bay at a time, and each bay had about three or four plants. The first day we were meant to cut 10 off each tree, but after that we moved up to 25-28. There were rules too. You cannot cut off a “bottom bunch”, the one closest to the branch, and you cannot strip a vine of all its grapes. So there is some searching involved in the process, especially when you get a leafy tree, but you’re expected to be fast. I was not good at this job. I was very slow. Oftentimes there would be ten bays between me and the last person in front of me.
On top of this, the overseers (as I think of them) were MEAN. On my third day, one of the supervisors who had only just come over to watch our group for an hour stopped to yell at us about how our quality was shit, our speed was shit, and our attitudes were shit. We had been allowed to work in teams that day which makes everything seem just a little bit easier, but after this they made us go back to solo work and threatened to fire anyone going too slowly. We spent the whole afternoon on edge thinking that we’d lose our jobs at any moment.
Another time, I saw them fire a girl right in the middle of a shift for cutting one too many bottom bunches off the vines. We had one shift working on the vineyard rows near to the mansion of a house where the plantation owner (also how I think of them) lived, and apparently he had been watching us from his balcony and was not pleased with the speed of our work. Our overseers yelled at us again during lunch saying that we’d all be replaced with Asian immigrants if we kept up at that sort of pace. We had one decently nice supervisor who was probably the only reason I survived past day 1, and I came in one day to find he’d been demoted to field worker like the rest of us.
My favorite story is that one morning, they told us that a bunch of people that week would be getting fired due to them not needing so many workers, and then at lunch that same day, they yelled at us for spreading rumors that people were getting fired. The next day, they cut half the group (how I made it through that culling I’ll never know).
To summarize, on our best day, they gave us popsicles and didn’t yell at us at all (I was suspicious- was this a disarming tactic?). On our worst day, they fired half of their workers. So you go ahead and weigh the pros and cons. I still get post-traumatic flashbacks.
The only way I made it through the two weeks I worked there (even taking optional Saturday shifts because I needed the money) was because I knew I had an end date. By God’s grace, the evening after my first ever shift in the fields, I got a call from the GBL temp agency in Wellington offering me a data entry job starting in a little under three weeks. She gave me a day to think it over, but I called her back an hour later saying yes. Get me out of Blenheim. This meant I had to book a bus and ferry back to Wellington, but I would have some money by then, so it was not a problem. Oh, and of course by this point in my travels I had shipped all of my office clothes home thinking they’d be unnecessary, so now I had to make a trip to Warehouse to buy some cheap outfits to last me a couple weeks.
Coming to Blenheim did have its perks though. After my first week, I moved to a more central hostel called The Grapevine, and I stayed in the long-term accommodation house with other workers. It was actually a house. We had a yard, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, our own washing machine, and a separate lodge across the driveway with a pool table and TV. There were only 14 of us staying there, and I was in a bunk room with 5 others. Literally every single person in the house was German aside from me and one Danish girl. Coming back there after working the vineyards felt like actually coming to a cozy home which was fantastic.
The best part of this was meeting my German bestie, Eileen. She was the only German in the house who was sick of German people and wanted to speak English, and we clicked right away. She’s super cool and laid-back, and we’ve stayed friends ever since. She even came to see me in Scotland last year, and I’m going to visit her in Germany this fall! She also had some friends with a car who worked at the vineyards with us, and they offered to drive us back and forth every day for just $10 to cover the entire week. This was great, because Focus actually took $6.80 out of our paychecks each day to cover transportation if we used the vans and bus they provided.
Eileen and I would drink beers in the pool room, walk to town (Blenheim is nothing to write home about), and borrow the free Grapevine kayaks to take out on the river. It’s really pretty out on the water with grassy banks to either side, ducks swimming, and sheep and cows in the fields. One day the boys came out with us and we visited a rope swing. It was nice.
That said, I was psyched to head back to Wellington and see my friends again! I took the cheaper Bluebridge ferry back this time, and I preferred it to the Interislander. It had nice, quiet below deck rooms with light dimmers and power outlets, wifi through the ship, and announced that they were selling everything left in the cafeteria for just $2 an item at the end of the journey.
Back in Welly
I spent my first week back in Wellington at Nomads. There were no openings on housekeeping at Base, so I figured I might as well stay in a nicer hostel. It was great. Clean, quiet, comfy lounge area, and a free little dinner at the hostel bar every night.
My temp job was at the Ministry of Education. It was about a 25 minute walk across the city from Nomads every morning through the business district and past Parliament. There were about twenty temps, and after a briefing, we were out on the floor. Basically, we were entering data into the computer off of forms filled out by early education schools around NZ for their funding. I loved it. It was so easy just sitting in front of a computer all day keying numbers. The building was nice and had great views out the huge windows. We got up for our breaks whenever we felt like it and were allowed to listen to our iPods. The days flew by.
This is Parliament, not my office building... just to be clear.
The job, unfortunately, only lasted a little under two weeks. On the following Monday, they only asked four of us to come in the next day to finish up and file, then surprisingly, I was the only person they asked to stay on for another two days after that! I even got to go back for an extra day a couple weeks later. I don’t know what I was doing right, but I was grateful.
The first weekend I was back, I had to move out of Nomads because they were booked up due to a festival in the city. I was a little panicked because it seemed nowhere had availability, but Frank told me he’d seen signs up around Base looking for housekeepers, so I emailed Tom and he told me to come back the following day.
It was so nice to move back into Base and see everyone again. It felt like coming home. I even was put into a better housekeeping dorm which is where I ended up living for the next two months. Now that I had money, I was actually able to enjoy myself too. The housekeeping staff formed the best little Base family, and we had a blast drinking Diesel (bourbon & coke cans- 7% and only $12 a pack!) on the patio every night and hitting the bars on Courtenay Place. Even housekeeping shifts were more fun because you were basically screwing around with your friends all day.
These people!!
Of course, I still needed a real job. The money I’d earned from my one month of work was not going to last me forever or pay my way through the South Island. I may have been a bit preoccupied with going out and partying all the time though, because I didn’t actually end up finding work again until a full month later.
An English girl on the housekeeping team, Nichola, worked at Electric Avenue and in mid-March she told me that they were in need of female bartenders. I was reluctant to go back in asking for a job because I had dropped my resume off there in January and never heard anything. It was my favorite bar though and I really needed work, so I let Nichola bring me in one day when she was headed in for her afternoon shift.
She introduced me to the general manager who was really friendly and asked if I could come in that night for a trial. I was nervous so I went back to the hostel to chill and have a couple drinks, then came back in at 9 or 10. One of the other managers, Mauricio, had me fill out my contract upstairs, and I was out on the bar. It was a Wednesday night and really busy (it’s one of the most popular party bars in town), so I didn’t have much time to think. The night went really well though, I got the hang of things quickly, and the duty manager, Josh, asked me after just a few hours if I wanted to come in and work that weekend.
The Ave
So I had a job! Electric Avenue basically became my home for the rest of the time I was in New Zealand and was entirely responsible for me staying a full year beyond what I had planned. Well, that GM I came in to meet was a big part of that too. His name was Lewis Anderson. You might have heard me mention him sometime during the past three years.
I have plenty more to say about Wellington, the capital city of NZ and my kiwi home, but since I’ve successfully detailed finding work in the country and already written a novel, that will have to wait for another time.
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