The main purpose for working holiday is hoping to gain new friends, some work experience, and most importantly, some cash to burn for our travel. Our first seasonal job as an apple packer in McLean Packhouse for Enza Apple that located in the outer central Motueka.
We work 5 days a week, from 7.30am to 5.00pm, with two 10 minutes break amusingly called "smoko" and 30 minutes lunch, and with 11.70NZD per hour after tax. To be an apple packer, it doesn't matter what qualification and background is, as long as your legs and back works!
The packhouse atmosphere felt warm and friendly at once. People coming to work in blue uniform seemed to have arrived from every continent. China, Japan, Taiwan, the usual Kiwis and mostly Malaysia! A real international melting-pot gathered to provide the best apples to the world.
It’s not an easy job, involving a lot of lifting, speeding and 9 hours of standing. The job consists in sorting out good apples from bad ones, placing the good apples on trays, turning them around so they are lined up and have their red side up, and all this, at the speed of lightning.
I have spent my first two weeks at the the packing line (packing the fruit into boxes) then on the grading table (sorting the good from the bad fruit) for the last week.
The first day was a complete nightmare, I felt as if I were in hell, a place filled with apples, coming at you so fast that you got completely overwhelmed and ended up drowning beneath a sea of apples. My legs is killing me for a few days, but that after third week of work, I wouldn't feel any more pain probably my legs became numb.
To be continued.......
wow.....great experience u had!
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