When you have been traveling and living in a foreign country for a few months, you begin to adapt to its rhythm, its routine and its style.
We have been in New Zealand for about 9 months, 9 months in which we have traveled many kilometers, in which we have settled down doing housesitting, in which we have worked and in which we have enjoyed feeling always welcome.
This was over a few days ago, when we set foot, in the small town of Cromwell.
Cromwell is a small frutilandia: here, in fact, is where every year industrial quantities of tasty fruit are produced that hundreds of temporary workers collect (mostly with whv and I would say Latinos).
If we have come here it is not to collect fruit, which we are still recovering from the housekeeping experience, but to finish the Lety book at once: we needed a town with free camping (just outside Cromwell there is a beautiful campsite where you can sleep for 3 nights in a row), with wifi (although in the library there is NO free wifi in the town there is a Spark cabin that allows us to enjoy 1gb a day for free) and with library (to write and edit we need a PC with battery and living in van we don't have plugs available).
What a surprise we found when we first entered the library ... if the fact of not offering free Wi-Fi seems questionable there was something that we classify directly as unfortunate: charging $ 2 for an electronic device plugged in to the current ("only to backpackers" according to the words of the librarian).
Now, speaking with the affable old lady who attended us in the literature we have discovered that this "rate" has been an "... inevitable action given the immense number of backpackers that every hour, in this high Cromwellian season, populate the library ..."
It must be said that in Cromwell, the vast majority of backpackers come simply for one reason: work and it is that the town is not that it is this wonder-catcher that makes you want to stay more and more. Well, no. So considering that these backpackers are working during the day and the library opens at 10am and closes at 5pm, when are we supposed to be using the library sockets abusively?
Let's be serious: not even in the Auckland library where there are plenty of backpackers, have we seen such a neighborhood standard! Charge for charging the computer? Or charge for not having some guys here that seem welcome just to work in the field?
We do not want to generalize, we know that there is a lot of backpacker living here and that he will surely be delighted with Cromwell and his people, we personally leave with a bad taste because we not only had the feeling of being out of place in the library but also in the i-site where perhaps, instead of just giving out free maps and answering, WE DON'T KNOW, they should deliver a little good education.
I hope little Cromwell follow the example of the other dozens of villages that we have walked in these months and stop being the rotten apple of this country so beautiful and cozy because if one thing has become clear is that there is more than one son of fruit.
P.S. The day after finishing this article we find the following letter:
One more confirmation that travelers here are not so welcome outside the field. (Luckily, not everyone in Cromwell thinks like the lord of the letter, for example we find an old woman who worked in the New World suuuper maja).
USEFUL INFO
Where to sleep in Cromwell: The best thing about the town is its campsite, well, the campsite is really just outside, about 3 km away, in the town of Louburn. It has a lot of space, some construction bathrooms that are very good, areas with a lot of shade and a very cool lake where to take a bath every morning to start the day well. The worst thing is that in theory you can not be more than 3 nights in a row, the ranger himself told us.
Where to find free wifi in Cromwell: There is a Spark booth near the public baths of Cromwell and a few small bars that offer it in exchange for a drink. You better have a coffee than pay $ 2 to plug in the biblio :-p at least enjoy yourself a little! Ah, with those 2 $ at least they give you a 25 megabyte bonus with which you can… check your email…
What to do in Cromwell: if you have time you can approach the old city of Cromwell, it is still an alley in the style 'far west' but for a walk it is nice.
