For the last decade we have all admired Didymo Dave’s continual battle for a decent humanity as he drives around the river banks on Didymo patrol while also fixing problems like access road drainage etc. and in particular collecting other peoples rubbish.
The volume of bags and amounts of smaller items like trace material that he has collected is quite extraordinary considering this region has a free weekly rubbish collection (unless you are a motel which have to pay commercial fees).
But some unfortunate people cannot wait that long and abuse the laws of common decency by dumping their garbage on river banks.
That really hurts. Our river keeps more people employed than any other industry in this region, whether they are fishing guides or tackle shops or petrol stations or rafting or bike hire or accommodation or cafes and other food providers, whatever.
Tourism is the biggest most important industry in New Zealand, so it is painful to local residents when people just do not care and spoil the 100% pure image by dumping their garbage where only tourist anglers will find it.
A local lady called last weekend after taking her dog ‘walkies’ down to the Stag Pool car park to report six big smelly bags of household garbage had been abandoned on the walking track from the car park. That is when we felt the annoying infection.
We tried to fight the infection by keeping busy on other mindless laundry tasks but in the end the nuisance became overpowering. We (Pumpkin helped) could feel Dave’s telepathic force field dominating us so we had to fix the problem to get it off our conscience. Otherwise, how could we ever face him again?
On the first trip we could not even find them so collected a discarded container truck mud-guard instead to justify the trip. But then returning anglers also complained about the garbage so we had to return again with clear instructions on where it was hidden. Many thanks to the receptionist at the Turangi tip that waived any payment when I explained the circumstances and that I didn’t have any cash.
At least we fixed the dreaded infection again…for the meantime.