W- world
W- wide
O- opportunities on
O- organic
F- farms
This is a volunteer organization Brian and I are a part of and have been utilizing in our time here. For those of you not familiar with the organization, WWOOFing is a great way to travel and learn without spending any money. There is a database set up almost like a social networking site where hosts and potential WWOOFers can make profiles to showcase what they have to offer eachother. If a traveler sees a host that looks like a good fit, they get in touch over email to discuss logistics, such as what type of tasks will be expected of the volunteers, what hours will be worked, and what is included in the WWOOFer's stay. On average the host provides you with a place to sleep, and 2-3 meals a day in exchange for 4-6 hours of work per day. There are wide varieties of options available, even for those workers who might be very specific in their search (not us). It is an amazing organization and I hope to take part in a lot more WWOOFing exchanges over the next 10.5 months.
That being said, WWOOFing can go many ways. The first experience we had was wonderful in every way. Waiheke Island, 45 minutes by boat from Auckland, is known in the area as an artists' retreat, and has two small main towns and 26 wineries spread throughout. It's very relaxed and pretty, with minimal traffic and good opportunities for cycling. The farm we stayed at is owned by a couple of doctors who have a modern vacation home on the property that they use some weekends. There is also another unit; half of which is used as a toolshed, the other half being the farm manager's living quarters. The cooking and hanging out area is an open-air room with a homemade pizza oven(!!!). Our accommodations were a HUGE tent on the other side of a garden bed. Some of my favorite features of the farm included an outdoor shower made of green and blue bottles and a composting toilet. The bathroom was SO cool. Forget about smelly old outhouses caked with sludge and swarming with bugs; this place was artistic and smelled fresher than a household bathroom. After you do your business, you cover it with a scoop of woodchips, and there is a tube (that's the technical term for it) that goes out of the roof and has a spinning fan on it. The waste and woodchips go down into a pit beneath the toilet, where they begin composting. Apparently human compost can eventually be used to mulch and help trees grow, and because of some scientific thing I don't know about, the bacteria does not go into the tree and the trees are happy to use it as normal compost. I realize how dumb I'm sounding explaining it like that, but... wikipedia "composting toilet" for the more accurate description. It was SO COOL! I want to have one of these someday for my vacation home. ;) Or maybe I'll just get a house without a bathroom in it and just use a composting toilet in the backyard! Kidding! (or am I)... I digress.
Uma Ripiti Farm, Waiheke Island
Amazing shower
the bathroom! <3
Betty Blue, cutest puppy around
A typical day looked like this: wake up about 7:15, cook and eat breakfast with the two other Americans (one being the farm manager) and a German. Around 8am we'd start the day's work, which included weeding, collecting mulch, mulching trees and plants, transplanting seedlings from the greenhouse, and building fences out of shadecloth. And weedwacking for Brian, which he seemed to really enjoy. Then around noon or 1 we'd call it a day, and have free time until dinner, which we would all help cook together. It was so much fun! I learned a lot and the people were great and we all got along really well. One night we had a pizza party where we got to use the awesome oven, and had a little dance party on the deck. Amy, our host (the farm manager, from San Francisco) was really well-informed about all the innerworkings of the farm. She taught us a lot and was also very sweet and accommodating of my special annoying vegan needs. All in all, it was amazing, and we wouldn't hesitate to go back and stay for a lot longer than our previous stay of 4 days.
biking to the beach after working
tidying up the eating area- oven is ready to cook pizza!
YUMMMMMMMMMMM
Fast forward to a few weeks later when we drove from Whangarei to Kaeo, a tiny town in the Bay of Islands. The unfortunate beginning of that WWOOFing experience all began with a misunderstanding as to who we would be staying with and where they lived, as we had emailed a ton of potential hosts and confused our email responses. John Beard lived 8+km up from little Kaeo, on a windy gravel road. As we were driving we felt very far from town, a feeling that only got worse when we saw the address and began trying to drive up the "drive way," 600 meters of bumpy, wrecked dirt and gravel, and promptly got stuck in a rut in the side of the road (later to find out no one dares drive up there without a huge truck and "hubs" (what the hell are those)). Feeling stressed and frustrated, we walked the steep hill up to where we hoped a house was, and were greeted by a ramshackle, paint-peeling, cobweb-covered house with a yard so unkempt you could barely tell where you should be walking and where there might be a fruit tree growing. No response to our calls, "hello?" but a dog ran out and at the time even that seemed frightning- will he attack us? It was all feeling very horror story-esque at the time. We walked through what we thought was the yard to a rickety old deck where a clothesline hung, and we saw the sign "Beard" over the door. I was ready to run and throw in the towel on this one, but Brian persisted, and when I saw this ship-captian of a man answer the door I thought we would surely be murdered. It turned out he was hard of hearing, which is why he hadn't answered the door. He took us on a tour of the house, which was better-kept inside, although the room we would stay in looked like a haunted child's room from the '80s. John walked down to help us get our car out of the ditch and on that walk he began talking and did not stop for 7 days.
Initially the Keao WWOOF was kind of awful. John's wife would leave for work at 5:30am and not get home until 6pm or later, during which time he was left at the house to "work on the garden" or whatever it is he was supposed to be doing. We didn't do any work the first afternoon we got there, and when we asked him what time we'd start in the morning, he said "sometime between 8 and 9, whenever I get up, no rush," which was simultaneously cool and annoying, since we wanted to know when we'd start and finish work for the sake of utilizing free time. For the first few days we slept in, had a leisurely breakfast and reading session (2-3 hours), talked/listened to John talk, and then around 1 or 2pm would go out to the gardens to see what there was to be done. Usually Brian would go off on his own weedwacking or mowing (later to be scolded that whatever work he had taken upon himself to do was "unnecessary"), and I would follow John around for a few hours while he talked and I tried to interject with questions. We did not like being there; we felt like we weren't being helpful and we also weren't able to utilize any free time since we didn't even start the day until the afternoon. But eventually we realized that John just liked to have the company. We started to really enjoy "getting away from it all" and spending 7 hours a day reading. He baked fresh breads every day, made us some dinners, and even took us out for dinner in town one night. He was crazy and hilarious, and with his hearing problem couldn't hear soft-spoken Brian 75% of the time so he just talked and talked and it was entertaining to listen to him jump from one topic to the next. Politics, family affairs, the state of the world, his days "playing hippie," you name it. He really grew on us and I think the story of John Beard is one of the best we'll get in our time here.
I think the only thing I actually did to help out there was help build a stone walkway, mow a little bit of the lawn, feed the chooks (Kiwi word for chickens), water the plants, and plant a few seeds in cups. We stayed a week.
the love of my life, Cosmo
chooks finding grubs
a little bit haphazard
so long John, we will never forget you
You just NEVER know what you're going to get with WWOOFing. That's half the fun. I can't wait to do more. We're hoping to work with animals at some point, maybe some cow milking or working with horses, since I love horses oh so much. I told Brian if we can't find any paid work right now and we need to save money we will just look for more WWOOFing because the hosts provide you with meals in exchange for your work. Or sometimes they just bake you fresh bread in exchange for your company.
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