Kia ora! There is much to write about our journey so far, I last wrote upon arrival in Huntly, where we had a rest over the weekend, engaged the public with a very visible stall in Garden Place on Saturday and received a lot of positive feedback from the community, definitely getting some people thinking and hopefully the word will go further.
On Sunday we all got dressed up in scary black toxic waste - space suits with massive perspex domes on the top to suggest the toxicity, danger and extremely unnatural and foreign coal fired power station across the river from where we set up our climate camp on the banks of the Waikato River, at Boaties Reserve on State Highway One. We attracted quite a bit of attention from passers by, and got some friendly travellers to paint on our chip wagon. In the evening we held a candlelit vigil for the future generations who will be the worst effected by the impacts of Climate Change. It was beautiful.
So on Monday we said goodbye to our friend Carolyn from the Changing Course Action Group in Huntly who had hosted us for the weekend, and set off for Ngaruawahia, stopping in at Taupiri to visit our other friend Dawn, also from Changing Course. Thank-you to these awesome people and all the others we have met along the way who have helped us with food, accomodation and facilities we don't see much of, like showers, washing machines, kettles etc.
Ngaruawahia was huge! We had more people approaching us there than in any other town we have been to, from the moment we started putting our banners up. We feel like we made a positive impact and occupied some of the youth doing painting on our car in the evening too, which unfortunately ended up adorned with some not so savoury things which have since been covered up, but also with some really nice comments and memories from our short stay in the heart of Tainui country. Then it was on towards Hamilton yesterday, most of the walk was pretty horrible for poor little vege me because the smell of death from the meat works reached far and wide.
Hamilton is Happening Now. We set up our climate camp in Garden Place right in the middle of the CBD here and had a lovely evening yarning to locals about the Save Happy Valley and Climate campaigns, organic gardening techniques, renewable energy alternatives, the pros and cons of chip powered support vehicles and other random stuff like coffee and the city council.
Being in the Waikato at this time the impacts of Climate Change are pretty clear to most people with sprinkler bans everywhere and fire engines frantically zooming around in all directions. We went past one fire which was still blazing all the way up a brown dry grassy hillside when we arrived with about 5 fire trucks fighting it. It seems strange that Garden Place here seems so green because the council are still allowed to put their sprinklers on ... although they haven't been since we arrived which is fortunate for us!
We will be having a hui and showing a DVD about Happy Valley at the environment centre in Ward Street (central Tron) this evening at 6pm and heading off tomorrow for Te Pahu, the small country community west of Hamilton where Helen Clarke grew up, incidently and our webmaster Tui Allen now resides. Tui will be hosting us and lives in a very central location in the CBD of Te Pahu, so we are looking forward to our stay there.
We are all in top health and revelling in the randomness of the journey. Keep in touch, all messages of support greatly appreciated
From Heather, Mick and Henare, Walk the Walkers
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