Its official, I’m no good at keep my feet planted so as most of you know I’m off on a new adventure in a new country. Instead of a few weeks vacation this time, I’ve moved to the south island of New Zealand for an undetermined amount of time.
So why New Zealand people keep asking me? Well since I’ve decided that this travel habit of mine needs to be continually funded as well as keep me finding new places to explore and have adventures, I had better combine the vet work with travel. Since I started out with dairy cows and its what I know, New Zealand seemed like a pretty good first stop on my adventures abroad. They have the added bonus of having a completely different dairy system than the US and many interesting places to see.
On January 16th I left Detroit with a suitcase, a backpack, my fiddle and a small computer. I had at the last minute found people or trash cans to take all the stuff that I had accumulated over the last 10 years. It was a lot more work than I imagined. I flew to California, then boarded the 14 hour flight to Sydney. Uneventful, thank goodness and no accidental lay-overs in San Francisco. I finally landed in Christchurch, NZ on Monday, having completely lost a day when crossing the International Date Line. One of the vets, Chris, picked me up from the airport and I stayed at his home the first night. The next day I headed to Ashburton with him to start my new job with Vetlife. Vetlife, is a company that runs 14 clinics on the south island, and they are fitting me into their largest dairy clinic in Ashburton.
Jet lag never really hit me so why not start working right away! The first week was a bit of a blur. They had me set up to stay with one of the office staff until I found a flat to rent . I was also given a truck to drive…on the other side of the road!! That was a little nerve racking the first time. But all was well, and after a few days it started to feel normal instead of weird.
The clinic in Ashburton has about 10 vets and about 10 more vet nurses, technicians, and drug reps that sell products and consult for the farms. There is an endless supply of people to ask questions to, as long as I can think of all the questions. My first work to do was going with the Equine and small ruminant vet to castrate 10 llamas. 4 years of vet school and almost 3 in practice, and I had happily avoided doing any work on llamas or alpacas. Until that day. It was not that bad at all, apart from the vet being pretty darn unorganized and me trying to keep the owners and helpers happy, it was a beautiful outside, I figured out that they really aren’t that terrible of animals if you know how to handle them and most importantly they offered us lunch after the work. SCORE! I can now say that I’ve eaten alpaca sandwiches.
The rest of the week I joined some of the other vets on calls, just to get my feet wet and learn how their systems are different than ours. Chris does a lot of the sheep and deer work in the clinic so I picked his brain about those species trying to learn everything I can. That was another goal, I needed to start working on other species besides cows. I might even be venturing into the small animal arena. Don’t laugh! I won’t just be offering to give them a new dog or cat in lieu of fixing the broken one!
Keep looking for more! I’ll try to post new happenings and adventures!
please do keep posting! it is such fun to read about new places!
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