Packhouse Blues

G'day everyone!

Tomorrow we celebrate: after two weeks of torture, we are at last emerging from the purgatory of a fruit packhouse job!

We are so happy it's over. It wasn't as hard, dirty and miserable a job as apple picking, but it was bad enough to make us count minutes till the end of the ordeal. My heart goes out to those poor souls who feed their children and pay rent on this sort of job. For us, it was just about making a little bit of play money for the rest of our holiday, so really, we can't complain.

Here's what happened: Last Monday, a few hours after writing our last blog entry, we set up camp in the kiwifruit orchard behind the Thomas Brothers packhouse outside of Motueka and on Tuesday we punched our timecards at 8AM for the first time. Ryan, the youthful healthy hunk he is, was immediately assigned to stacking full boxes, which, as it later turned out, is a job better suited for Bulgarian weight-lifters, not normal humans. I was put to one of the packing lines where I was happy to hear that I only had to worry about helping the apples into their trays and weeding out the ones with bruises, stem rips, stem punctures, discoloration, spots, rots, russet and any other "blemishes." And did you know that apples can also get sunburn? Sunburn was out, too. So for the next 8 hours, I stood by a conveyor belt staring at apples pouring onto my line as Ryan stacked 20kg boxes onto pallets 8 rows high. It seemed easy enough at first, but my back, neck, legs and shoulders started to stiffen after the first morning break and Ryan - poor Ryan. He and two other stackers were the galley slaves...

Here's our daily routine: Our alarm clock rings at 7AM, it takes us 15-20 minutes to motivate to get out of our warm sleeping bags and out into the cold and dewy orchard. At 8AM we clock in, girls put on their sexy hair nets, and we file in with dozens of other packers, graders and stackers into the bowels of the large and dusty packhouse where machines are already humming urgently. In a minute or so the hateful sound of apples falling on the lines is heard and we are busy at work till 10AM - the first "smoko." 10:10AM we are back, work till lunch that starts at 12:00PM. We wolf down sandwiches and are back at the lines and boxes at 12:30PM. We brace for the worst part of the day - the longest stretch till the next break at 2:50PM. We are all getting sore and bored, we complain to each other when we have time to look up from our work for a milisecond. We all think: "This is mind-numbing shit. Why am I here? I quit tomorrow. If they want me to pick out another f#$%ing bruise/stack another f$*#ing box, they better slow down the lines!" We all count seconds till the break. You hear the Irish girls laugh in the background - only the Irish can laugh in this sort of situation. Sympathetic glances, quick arm stretches, micro-conversations. The radio is blasting "the worst of the eighties, nineties and today", but luckily, the clicking of machines drowns out the howling of Avril Lavigne and Blink182. Then we exhale in relief - the break is here. We drink more coffee and tea (it's free!) and at 3:00PM we file in one more time. This is the home stretch, only an hour and a half to go - we can do this! At 4:30PM, the last fruit comes down the lines, the machines stop. We can't get out of there fast enough. We clock out and can barely stand, we're so exhausted. Ryan's face has a bluish tint from the blue dust that comes off the blue print on the boxes. We are happy the work day is over. If we take it one at a time, we can survive another day of this crap. So we go to our tent, rest, cook dinner in the kitchen, take a shower in the ancient orchard hut, go to sleep at 8 or 9PM. We notice that the orchard smells faintly like something died in it, and it's not until somebody explains to us that it's the kiwifruit - the fruit "that looks like sheep's nuts and smells like ass," as Ryan deftly put it.

And so this is pretty much how it went for the last 14 days. The lines were viciously fast every day and Ryan did some calculations with his fellow stackers: On an average day, they stacked about 90 pallets of boxes. Each pallet was 8 rows high, each row had 7 boxes. Each box is about 20-22kg. There were 3 stackers, so you do the math... Each stacker lifted about 1,600 boxes a day, which makes about 32,000 kgs in 8 hours(!) That should qualify Ryan for...something.

We got to know many of our fellow sufferers and thus met a bunch of fun and nice people - Kiwis, Irish, Hungarians, Czechs, Koreans and Americans - with whom we'll have a "barbie" tomorrow to say our goodbyes before the last leg of our NZ adventure. Blowholes and Big Ice, here we come!