HelpX #2: The Good Place

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After leaving our first HelpX at Nat’s place feeling great, we looked forward to our next one whose description promised a yurt and a location close to the beach in a small village named Huia. We stayed here for a week and a half (Feb 10th-20th).

We were picked up by Mandy, who was very into “girl power” and introduced us to her other HelpXer’s: a nice French couple, Alex and Sego (pronounced “say go”), who were also doing the Working Holiday Visa. They had been working hard on their campervan, building a bed, kitchen, and sink system from scratch, and were hoping to take their campervan all through the north island of New Zealand.

Our first few thoughts from meeting them were roughly “This couple is so badass. I hope our hosts don’t expect this kind of work from us!” And although it did seem that our hosts might have preferred a little more carpentry/painting experience from us, we ended up learning a lot from this HelpX experience overall.

We lived in a “batch”, which essentially was a little one-story apartment with a kitchen, living room, and bedroom. The first thing we found when walking in was a gigantic pile of about 300 DVDs which we went through with a fine-toothed comb, creating a playlist which we looked forward to choosing from each night at the end of a hard day’s work. With all of our selections made, we decided to go ahead and crack open “Swiss Army Man” for our first evening. Roadblock: the DVD was missing. Sorry, Daniel Radcliffe. The next movie on the list had an actual DVD inside, but when inserted it into the player, it got spit back out with an error message. We frantically tried several other DVDs, only to find the same error on all of them. It was like a Twilight Zone episode! Oh well.

This was one of several inconveniences/first world problems we endured over the course of our stay, with others including not having the toilet in our batch, having freezing shower water for some of the days, and the only available WiFi requiring us to endure mosquito swarms while nicking it from a local cafe (apparently a village tradition). Even so, Huia was so beautiful that it was hard to be down about it. In fact, our place was about 100 yards from the beach, to which we walked daily, and a 30-min walk to a peaceful dam overlooking the village and bay. Our hosts, Mandy and Kenny, were quite sociable, and Kenny in particular was eager to share his thoughts on politics and the current state of the country.

To give you a snapshot of our time at this HelpX, we will describe the hosts, the place, the work, and what we learned from our stay.

The Hosts

Our hosts were immigrants from Europe, Mandy from the UK and Kenny from Scotland. They decided to settle down in New Zealand about 12 years ago because they found it to be a beautiful and relaxing change from their high-stress jobs in the UK. They were also both about a foot taller than me. When do I get to stay somewhere where I’m the tall one?!

We didn’t necessarily see eye-to-eye with them as far as politics go—they, for example, were both pro-Brexit Trump fans—but they always had well thought-out views and held a mix of conservative and liberal ideals, so they were far from the “my way or the highway” stereotypes people often fall into on both sides of the political spectrum. It was refreshing to be able to actually have a civil discussion with somebody we didn’t agree with, especially with the election year in the US promising louder and louder shouting matches between opposing parties. Overall, we learned a lot about UK and New Zealand politics from a viewpoint we aren’t typically exposed to.

Kenny also deserves special praise for the effort he went through to give us a good experience. Mandy unfortunately had a chronic back injury flare up soon after we arrived, which meant she was out of action on the couch for the majority of our stay. This meant that Kenny, who already was spending full days at work, was all of a sudden responsible for feeding us at night as well. Although we weren’t getting the gourmet Master Chef treatment like at Nat’s (breakfast and lunch, for example, consisted of whatever we wanted, as long as we wanted toast, beans, or cheese), Kenny put in a ton of extra work to assemble a delicious meal every evening as soon as he got home. One day he even rushed home early so that he could take us fishing in his boat, and we were very grateful for his efforts to do twice the work while we were around.

The Place

Huia is a small village, 30 min west of Auckland with a population of around 600. It is named after a New Zealand bird which became extinct in the early 20th century.

Huia is indeed quite small, but very relaxing. It sits on a very shallow bay where the tide comes in and out over about 200 yards. When the tide was in, Mandy and Kenny let us borrow some kayaks to go exploring, and when it was out, you could walk around the black sand and check out all the seashells. Huia only has one store in the entire village, creatively named “The Huia Store.” I guess when you’re the only game in town, you don’t need to spend a lot of time coming up with attention-grabbing names like “Huia and Whatia Doing Here”—something we always dreaded hearing when we would sneak up and snag our WiFi at the end of the day after closing time.

We stayed in small apartments named “batches” which have a kitchen, living room, and bedroom. They were perfect for our stay, other than having to walk over to the outside toilets!

The Work

Our work at this HelpX varied over the first 4 days, from weeding to cleaning a patch for a mushroom garden. It was a little unclear from the beginning what kind of work and how much work we were supposed to be completing throughout our stay—it sounds like Alex and Sego (our fellow French HelpXers) had stayed on a bit longer than originally intended and taken care of a lot of the big projects, so the hosts didn’t know quite what to do with us. One day, however, they seemed to realize that they had people moving into a batch near ours very soon, and then all of a sudden we were burning the midnight oil to get it painted in time. There were some growing pains here, as neither Stefan nor I had ever painted a house before, and the hosts probably assumed we had Alex and Sego’s high level of competence (they had just built an entire children’s playground in one week!), which we most certainly do not. So we had some initial stumbles as we tried to figure out what we were doing with little to no direction, but we got it all done in the end!

Here is an outline of our work at this HelpX:

Sat, Jan 11 – 4 hours of weeding in the garden

Sun, Jan 12 – 3 hours of tearing up the hosts’ backyard to put in turf for their grandchildren to play in

Mon, Jan 13 – 5 hours of moving logs, using the weedwhacker and weed killer, and cleaning out an area for a mushroom patch

Tues, Jan 14 – 6 hours of painting the windows on the outside of a batch

Wed, Jan 15 – 6 hours of re-painting windows (second coat)

Thurs, Jan 16 – 4 hours of painting part of the front exterior wall of the batch

Fri, Jan 17 – 6 hours of painting 3 of the exterior walls of the batch

Sat, Jan 18 – 5 hours of painting the exterior of the batch (second coat and painting wood for new window)

What We Learned

Since most of our work involved painting, I certainly learned how to manage using a roller and brush pretty well on a tall ladder. I also learned that the wood on the windows need a gloss finish to keep the water from eroding the wood and how to properly paint them using painter’s tape.

If there is any advice I can give to anyone wanting to do HelpX, is to make sure you have the tools you need to do your job well and ask a ton of questions about what you are expected to complete and how quickly. We ended up spending multiple days working more than the 4 hours typically expected in the program, either re-doing work which we hadn’t realized we were doing improperly, or trying to catch up to our hosts’ expectations of where they thought we should be. It can be a bit disheartening to put in a long day’s work only to be told that the quality or quantity is lacking. So make sure you know the expectations before starting your work! We probably could have saved a lot of time and frustration if we had asked for a more detailed description of the job they wanted done.

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Hope you enjoyed this post! And for all of our readers, here is a fun trivia question if you’d like us to send you a postcard:

*Name the famous 2010s New Zealand movie where the main characters have believed they found a Huia bird!

Send an e-mail to [email protected] with the answer before Feb 13, 2020 to get a personalized postcard from us 🙂