Kārearea Opportunities

“As I get older and remember all the people I’ve lost along the way…

maybe a career as a tour guide wasn’t for me” anonymous

Over the past year, I’ve been volunteering at Zealandia. I started as a weekend volunteer guide back in September last year, working most weekends over the summer. In the winter season, I also helped out during the week as well as weekends, as a number of the summer season volunteers only stay for a short while; many are students or visitors to New Zealand who aren’t planning a long-term stint. The volunteer guides' duties aren't onerous: we give one short talk (5-10 minutes) per shift, and spend the rest of the time roving – helping visitors see the wildlife, pointing out birds and animals, answering questions, giving directions and advice about the best way to see the sanctuary.

This year, the call went out for more trained tour guides for the summer season. This is due to the increasing numbers of cruise ships that will visit Wellington over the coming months. Zealandia doesn’t have enough permanent guides to cope with this influx, as our tour is one of the most popular shore excursions for cruise ship passengers. I answered that call.

 

In September, therefore, I attended an “interview” – actually more of an audition – where we were all invited to give a short talk to our fellow interviewees on the subject of one of the animals in Zealandia. We were given a choice of four, and I picked tuatara. So, of course, did many of the others, so there was a certain amount of repetition in the process. What they were looking for was how well you could present to a group of people, rather than specific esoteric knowledge. One of the better presentations was basically just the contents of the Wikipedia page on tuatara, but it was delivered well. We only had one “choker” who literally could not get their words out.

Those who passed that stage, and subsequent references and police check, were invited to a training session in October. As I would miss the first day of training as it started on the day we returned from Tonga, I decided to go for the second session of training starting from 15^th October. I found myself in a room with nine other guide candidates, and one trainer, called AJ. Over the course of the next two weeks, we learned about giving a tour in Zealandia, with again the concentration on giving a good tour rather than filling people’s heads up with facts and figures. This included Te Reo pronunciation, learning the mihi, introducing the film that’s shown in the exhibition before we go out into the valley, health’n’safety, caring for our guests, and practising giving a tour. Despite the weather being a bit dodgy on some days, we were out in the valley every day at some point.

At the end of two weeks I booked a slot for my assessment. I’d originally planned to use this slot for a co-guiding session with an experienced guide, but decided to switch it so that I could get my “wings”. We took a group of 11 people from a cruise ship out on a tour. The experienced guide, Julia, was there to assess me but otherwise took no part in the actual tour. I had the “leisurely” group (tours are triaged so that the fitter guests can take the tour at a faster pace), so we didn’t get as far into the valley as some, before we had to turn back. But we made Rule Two of guiding – get the guests back before the bus leaves – so that was OK. (Rule One, I’m sure you know, is “always come back with the same number you started out with”. If they’re the same people, that’s a bonus.)

Afterwards I sat down with Julia and we went through the assessment form together with AJ. Long story short, I passed, and am now a tour guide at Zealandia. The next cruise ship is due in next week and I’m on the roster for taking a tour! As the season ramps up, I’ll be working more and more frequently, but to start with I have four tours scheduled for November. Woohoo!

p.s. Kārearea  is the New Zealand falcon. 

Whale Watching

The best-laid plans of mice and men aft gang aglay…

One of the attractions of Tonga as a holiday destination is the annual migration of Southern Humpback whales. The females come to Tonga to give birth to, or conceive, the next generation of whales, and do so in the shallow waters of the greater lagoon which surrounds Tongatapu, the main island. Whale watching is organised from most of the holiday destinations. We thought we’d go along, so talked to the resort manager, who booked us in with Deep Blue Diving. “Oh, you’ve got your own rental car” she said, “just show up at the wharf at 8:30”. Later in the day, however, one of the other staff told us “No, don’t worry about that, they’ll send a taxi to collect you and take you there. Just be outside here at 7:50. There’s some other people going too so we’ll start breakfast early for you as well.”

Easy enough, so we set the alarm (who sets alarms on holiday? Bah! 😉) and had breakfast at 7:00. We were back at reception and waiting for our taxi. One turned up, and the other three piled in. “No worries, there’s another on it’s way for us” we told them as they sped off.

As I said, the best-laid plans…

The manager arrived at 8 o’clock, and was, unsurprisingly, surprised to see us still waiting. After a quick exchange of phone calls, we decided to drive ourselves in and make craven apologies for holding everyone up.

We needn’t have worried. By the time we got there, two things became apparent: the registration and payment procedures were still under way, and we were woefully ill-equipped. We paid for our trip, but then decided, on reflection, it would be better if we equipped ourselves properly. So we decided to go the next day.

On Saturday, then, we repeated the process, with rather better results. Turned up on time, met the crew, and set out for a day's whale-watching. Most of the participants were actually equipped for whale-swimming, which I had understood to be with scuba gear, from the look of all their promotional material, but turned out to be with snorkels. I was a little apprehensive as my previous experience of whale-watching, at Kaikoura, turned out mostly to be watching the bottom of a snack sack. But the water in the lagoon was much calmer, and before long we’d spotted a pod, and come up as close as allowed to them.

After some observation it turned out that the group was a mother and juvenile, and another male who was trying to get frisky with the female. She wasn’t having a bar of it, though, and so the group was moving around quite a bit. Although the snorkellers put out to sea a couple of times, it took a while for them to be satisfied with their sighting. We spent a bit more time searching for, and finding, solo whales, before a call came from another boat – mother and baby, in shallow water, not moving. Pretty much the rest of the afternoon was spent with this couple, as they were very obliging. Tonga, like New Zealand, has laws about minimum safe distances to be kept from whales, but apparently this message hadn’t got through to these two, as the baby in particular kept coming up to have a look at what these crazy humans were doing. The dive groups (there were five on our boat) went out for a second round, and then a third. Eventually, though, the whales tired of us and moved out to deeper water, and the skipper turned the boat around and headed back to dock.

All in all, we had a pretty productive day watching whales. When we met up with the group who’d gone out the day before, it turned out that we’d had much better sightings than they’d had, so delaying by a day was a win for us. One of the crew was a professional underwater photographer, so we decided that we’d buy his package of photos from the day for TOP 60 to augment my surface-view pics.