Vollie Day 12: The Biggest Yet

Today I took both the morning and afternoon shifts, and I was on my own, and the sunshine really came through for us, so we had a huge crowd through.  I took eight tours through: from a group of one guy on his own to a large group of thirteen people travelling together.  I'm pretty sure that I came through for all of them, but had to remember to stick to the script, or I'd tell a group the dragon story twice, or not at all about the forests.  I'm pretty sure that I sold a few people on some short walks out amongst the Himalayan Cedars and the Cork Oak, or at least into driving out via Dairy Farmers Hill.  Today was my best guiding yet: I'm really glad for that because it had kind of bored me this month.  Now I only need to stay committed to learning more about the forests: I should start with at least a few of the forests that are within view of the Village Centre.

Good questions:

• How big is the Arboretum?  (250 hectares (617 acres)
• Is there an orchardist specialist on staff to care for the harvestable forests, to ensure that they don't get and spread disease to agricultural areas? (Yes, the health of the trees is the responsibility of the wonderful horticultural team - this includes managing crops and seed collection.  Our volunteers help them all the time in working bees and in preparing for harvesting.)

Vollie Day 11: Chills

Winter wasn't going to show up - April and May were spectacularly warm, but there has finally been some frost in the last couple of weeks.  This morning was a good day to be inside.  I got to chat with a couple of groups of people about the apparently sparse forests, as they're almost all dormant now.  A lovely family holidaying from Sri Lanka even took a lot of pictures of us all.

Over the last week, the staff and volunteers have put the winter coats on the dragon trees, and people are even less inclined to venture outside.  Still, there was a large group on their way to the very south end of the Arboretum, and good health to them.

Vollie Day 10: Buddies

I'm approaching the end of my leave, and really starting to schedule in the volunteer days.  Today was a rainy one, and an artist group set up in the corner, out of the wind and the rain.  Chickens.  

Yeah I don't know why they can't turn the lights on

The morning shift was super-dooper quiet: neither of us on the shift took a tour group until my guide buddy left.  Of course this was just before my out-of-towner friends arrived and we'd set up a tour for 12:00, so I told my friends to wait by the sign and if we were lucky, we could disappear after waiting around for a few minutes.  The fifteen people showed up... so I sped them through the least-enthusiastic presentation I've given (so far) and tried to get my friends on the road for their eight-hour drive home as quickly as possible.