The Loft preachers in NZ recently attended a retreat in Otaki, in the lower half of the North Island. Visnu-maya devi dasi posted photos to her blog. I saw them over at ISKCONNews.net.
It looks like the retreat was total nectar (which it was obviously going to be). I like these programs because they are efficiently organized, and the participants are all super-enthusiastic. Call it the naivety of youth, but let me remain young, naive, and enthusiastic until I’m 80. Now we’re all looking forward even more to the Lake Taupo retreat, to be held later this month. 10 or 11 of us are going over from Brisbane for that (we’re still working on tipping a couple of Loft guests over the edge 
). Riverslea retreat was a warm up for that one, which will have the entire NZ North Island Loft community from both Gaura Yoga and the Auckland Loft. It’s going to rock, no doubt about it. Concentrated nectar.
This year I attended all of three hours out of the three day festival Bhaktifest at the new Otford retreat center in Sydney, and caught parts of two days of the festival at our New Govardhan farm (which was smaller than last year, but is still one of the flagship events in ISKCON). Due to the Woodford folk festival catering New Govardhan was unable to concentrate resources for the festival. Now that they have more of an idea of what’s involved at Woodford I’m tipping next year to be a real humdinger.
