December 24th, 2005 - Sheep Mustering.

We woke up early to meet Jeff and Jane and go to Ben's farm, as planned the night before. We had to be at the farm for 7:30, which meant a 6:00 am wake up to drive around the lake in time. Ben, Chris and Mike's oldest son has a nice house overlooking the farm for him and his small army of a family. Sheep mustering is quite different from what I imagined. Nowadays, it seems horses aren't really required, since 4x4 trucks can take you anywhere you need to go. Laure and I hopped on the back of the pick-up while Jeff used the fasrm motor bike and Jane was in the cab with the farmer. We picked up the 3 working dogs and headed across the farm. Our first stop was the cattle to give a sick cow some medicine. It's quite an ordeal getting all of the cows from the l;arge pen into progressively smaller pens and then into the single file coral. The cows were kind of nervous with all of the visitors and proceeded to climb each others backs as we approached. Afterwards we drove through field after field of grass and sheep before we got to the sheep that needed to be mustered. Their are two main dog roles, the header dog and the noisy one. The header is the smart dog that zig-zags and cuts off the flanks of the herd, the noisy dog, just scares the sheep into motion. All of us in the truck just followed in the rear, needless to say I've seen enough sheep rumps for a lifetime - and I have them all on video. Chris and Mike built a retirement home at the far extremity of the property, having once been farmers themselves. The house is in the middle of fields on top of a hill overlooking lake Taupo and is absolutely breathtaking from every angle. If your not looking out over the water your looking at snow topped Mountains off in the distance past rolling green hills with sheep and forests. We left the farm that morning and had a long drive down to Martinborough where we were spending Christmas. On the way we stopped at a trout farm just for something to do, which turned out quite interesting and fun.