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4 reasons to choose Tram Track Retreat
Date of experience: February Helpful Share. Jessica wrote a review Jan Nun Monkton, United Kingdom contributions 18 helpful votes. Beautiful location and great customer service. Lovely new equipment - we hired 2 x single kayaks and spent about 5 hours on the water. Lovely location, calm river and very quiet. Mick and Deborah responded to queries on email really quickly and couldn't have been more helpful. Highly recommend.
Find Transport to Kepplestone by the Sea - The Catlins, New Haven
Date of experience: December Great and Peaceful Kayak morning. We booked very easily online, Mick replied quickly for all my questions. It was a lovely morning, we hired a double kayak with my boyfriend. The river is beautiful, we saw old bridges, lot of birdlife and perfect reflection on water We meditated as well on the kayak.
Just peaceful place. The equipment is very new, steady and clean. Perfect for novice for me. Thanks a lot for everything Mick. He gave us extra time and nice places to go around the coast. Cheers, I highly recommend! Date of experience: January Fantastic Paddle. We loved our kayaking experience. Mick was really helpful and gave us some paddling tips and tricks.
Tram Track Retreat - Houses for Rent in Papatowai, Otago, New Zealand
It was a lovely area to paddle through, we saw a few different varieties of birds. I would highly recommend the experience to anyone. It rained when we did our paddle but it added to the experience with the lovely greenery. Portsmouth, United Kingdom 77 contributions 9 helpful votes. Highly recommend!!
My great grandparents only spoke Lebanese Arabic when they arrived and must have been unusual and strangely foreign to the predominant flow of English speaking immigrants from England, Scotland and Ireland into Otago at that time. Dad also remembered that he had a warm and loving nature but was firm with discipline and rules with his children and grandchildren. He would ask my father run to the local store at Kahuika to buy his pipe tobacco and time him with a stopwatch! Dad's grandmother Nurr was tall for a Lebanese woman and, was also very warm and nurturing.
She worked hard bringing up eight children with the very basic amenities of their farmhouse and cooked many traditional dishes of Lebanon.
Kibbi, made with minced lamb, bulghar wheat and herbs,was a favourite dish and still much loved today by the Lebanese community of Dunedin. I There was also imjudra rice, onions and beans ,lahie illos potato, onion and tomato , mishee cabbage rolls stuffed with minced lamb and rice , and fasulia green beans and tomato. Great Auntie Jessie recalls how her mother also made her own flat bread man'oushe , yoghurt luban , butter sumnee and white cheese arishi whilst her father Joseph raised pigs and cured his own bacon.
She also remembered they had large amounts of apples every year from their orchard on the Catlin's farm and many were preserved by an old drying method, such as they had done with the abundant fruits growing in the fertile mountains and hills of Becharre. My father said his grandparents always spoke in broken English despite many years in New Zealand as they mostly spoke the colloquial dialect of Arabic at home.
Dad remembered that they were hilariously funny in some of the things they said and told me that jhidi often told him how he hated bloody 'Bort' Chalmers as as that is where he first arrived in New Zealand on a cold, grey and windy wet day in Apparently there is no 'p' sound in Arabic so he always used a 'b' sound instead! Then there is the funny story of Nurr. She and Yousef shifted back to Dunedin in because of her deteriorating eye sight and the wish to give their now grown up children more opportunities in the city.
She was returning from town one day to her Dunedin home in Whitby St in a taxi. When the taxi driver had difficulty following her instructions because of her broken English, he drove past her house. Nurr had died in just before they shifted there. Nora remembers Jhidi as being a 'lovely old man' who enjoyed going to movies and being with his family in his retired years. Even though she was only 3 or 4 years old she can remember he had scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning made by his daughters Jean and Margaret.
He also had a cup of tea with a special wide brim to accommodate his large bushy moustache! He would always pour some of the tea into the saucer and give it to his grandchildren. He was also very playful and she remembers, on hot days he would often pretend to catch flies in his hands and put them in his mouth to the delight and horror of his grandchildren! They all adored him. He loved to take his grandchildren to the movies. Sadly he died at the movies in , his grandson Michael, only a toddler on his knee.
The ushers found him. Nora remembers him being in the open coffin at his home in Stafford St for some days. She remembers picking yellow buttercups and putting them in his hands. So why did they leave Lebanon to come to such a new and faraway landscape? There are many stories about this. Lebanon is a tiny country, about half the size of Otago and resources were scarce for the growing population. There was also a large famine in the nineteenth century which killed an estimated 50, people in the Mount Lebanon area. Thus opportunities to travel to new countries with green and fertile lands were probably very enticing.
This was also the time that gold was discovered in Otago so Dunedin was prosperous and word spread about the opportunities in Southern New Zealand. Perhaps most importantly, my great-grandparents were Maronite Christians, as were most people dotted through the villages and hills of Mount Lebanon and the Kadisha Valley in northern Lebanon.
The Maronites are followers of St Maron who was a priest and catholic monk born in Antioch now part of Syria. They lived mostly peacefully in this area for many centuries but Lebanon came under the control of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th century until the end of the first world war. As the Muslim religion became more dominant, particulaly in the nineteenth century, there were increasing threats to the security of the Maronites.
In fact this tension culminated in three wars between the Druze a Muslim sect and the Maronites with the largest one in where an estimated 12, Maronites were killed. So the call of safer pastures in other Christian lands must have played a strong part in the diaspora of Lebanese who immigrated to many countries of the world, including New Zealand. But why the deep south of New Zealand when many Lebanese went to the warmer more hospitable climates of Sydney and Melbourne? One funny story I heard is that the Lebanese from Becharre were so busy playing cards below deck on the ship that they missed getting off at the Australian ports so ended up in Port Chalmers!
It seems the Lebanese have a penchant for cards and a spot of gambling and perhaps that also contributes to the entrepreneurial spirit they are well known for in setting up and succeeding in new ventures. Many started out as hawkers with little but the clothes on their backs. My father says that comes from their Phoenician blood as merchant traders who travelled throughout the Mediterranean buying and selling various goods.
This did not happen without hard work though, the first Lebanese immigrants of the late s and early s had to face great hardship in their impoverished beginnings. They faced racism and misunderstanding from the dominant cultural groups around them. They were not allowed to vote or draw a pension until when the Labour government finally changed the laws.
Most of the Lebanese immigrants lived close together in the Southern part of Dunedin city, and thus looked after each other in a 'ghetto like' extended family. My father remembered how lovely it was to walk down Carroll St,and get many hugs and treats from his beloved aunties.
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Perhaps that was where his love of boxing began! Dad remembered that despite the hardship of those early years, there was always warmth, love and great food and socialising to be found in the Lebanese community. The sense of playfulness and fun was important too with many social events, whether weddings, funerals or Christmas parties and picnics, would bring people together to share, dance and sing.
Uncle Victor Coory could always be counted on for showing us old movies and teaching us a few more Arabic words! My journey to our ancestral village of Becharre in Lebanon in was a wonderful and moving experience for me. I was the first member of our immediate family to go there nearly one hundred years after my great grandparents immigrated. Many even had the same surnames…Khouri Coory ,Fakhry Farry etc.
I remember feeling both overjoyed and amused to realize my relatives were no longer in the minority.
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We were touched by the warmth and hospitality of the local people and were often invited to eat with people when we had barely met them. We lapped up the great food and I basked in the familiarity of great balls of kibbi, fasulia, mishee, falafal and homous just as my relatives make in Dunedin. Clearly these warm-hearted people were so happy to have visitors in their village again and I remembered they had been through 17 years of civil war where very few people dared to visit Lebanon. Becharre seemed remarkably untouched by war with its beautiful old houses, churches and abundant fruits growing in the gardens and steep valleys below but my few halting sentences of Arabic was not enough to truly find out how it had effected them.
I had seen the horror of machine gun holes all over walls of once grand buildings in Beirut, tanks rusting away in disused gullies and massive amounts of demolition and rebuilding going on. But here in northern Lebanon it felt very peaceful. Even though I visited Becharre in the warmth of summer I heard how cold it can be up there in the mountains in the winter, sometimes covered in snow for 3 months or more. This helped me see how my great jhidi and siti would have adapted well to the cold, wild weather of the Catlin's area in New Zealand!
They were definitely hardy mountain people who had a strong pioneering spirit to take to their new land in the South Pacific! I had learnt the ancient art of Middle Eastern dance Raqs Sharqi or belly dancing in India in and it had become an important part of my life as I introduced classes in Dunedin. As well as being a wonderful form of exercise for women I explored its history and found it is one of the most ancient dance forms in the world dating back to sacred dance rituals for women and a way of taking care and honouring the sacred aspects of fertility and childbirth.
Since this dance originated from many countries of the Middle East I decided I would find out if it was still part of life in Lebanon. I was disappointed to see little evidence of it in the public world but I had not stayed in Beiruit long enough to see if there were any remnants of the once famous shows of the s where women in spectacular costumes rode on stage on colourfully decorated elephants!
I decided it was highly unlikely as the civil war had reduced much of Beiruit to rubble and rebuilding was still evident from the heat, dust and chaos we saw there.