Today's Achievement: Pancakes

Another day of riding. I'm planning on taking a break in the next town for a couple of days. Today's route had two sections to it: a pretty short ride to Te Puke, the self-proclaimed kiwifruit capital of the world, and then on to Wakatane (pronounced fah-cah-tah-knee).




Te Puke:
I made a stop at a kiwi orchard that has tours all laid out for the public. It was a little touristy, but informative overall. We were loaded onto a trailer and hauled throughout the orchard, where some of the history of the kiwifruit and it's uses today were explained. There are a couple of unusual parts of the kiwifruit growing cycle. The fruit itself needs a very rigid amount of heat and cold at different stages of its growth. If the New Zealand climate gets too cold, the fruit growers will sometimes hire in helicopters to fly above the fruit. These helicopters do not spray anything onto the fruit, but just by flying above them the spinning helicopter blades pull the rising warm air in the atmosphere down and the vacuum created sucks the cold air around the fruit up and away from it. This can be pretty expensive though, so the orchard I was at had installed a windmill that did the same thing on a smaller scale.


To prevent too much of the fruit from growing too close together and scarring, cedar trees are planted all along the perimeter of the tree groves as wind barriers. You can always tell when there is a kiwifruit orchard around as you are riding by because out of nowhere a stand of trees, perfectly trimmed to the same height and aligned in an untterly straight row will appear out of nowhere. Apparently there are 2000km of these trees across the North Island.


Some of the growing process was actually pretty shocking. New Zealand is capitalizing on their reputation as the "Kiwifruit Capital of the World," and as such kiwifruit growers rigorously prune and discard any of the fruit that might disprove that reputation. During the pruning season nearly half of the growing fruit gets torn off the trees. Any fruit that is too small, the least bit oddly shaped, or bearing the tiniest scar gets discarded. When the fruit is actually picked in the fall, then it goes through packing houses where after further scrutiny around 70,000 tons are pciked out and thrown away. Out of these 70,000 tons of rejet fruit, around 10,000 tons will be reused as mulch or in goods such as wines or jelly, but still, that's a huge amount of fruit to waste. Also to defend their reputation, all of the first class fruit is exported globally, while only the second class friut is sold domestically in New Zealand and to Australia.

I am taking a break and staying in Whakatane for a few nights. There's a marine volcano right off the coast which can be toured from here, so I am planning on doing that tomorrow. Since I have a few nights I bought a bag of flour and eggs and am planning on making pancakes for dinner/breakfast. We'll see how it turns out!

My road out of town: took an old railroad bridge to avoid the traffic.

A newly-planted kiwi grove. Not at the same orchard as earlier, just one I saw along the road. You can see the cedar trees growing in front of the rows of kiwi trees.