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Rangitoto Island for Valentine’s day
Well, even in the apocalypse Stefan and I can’t seem to keep up with timely posts on our blog. We’re almost two months behind on our posts, so we’re throwing out a short one today! More to come on that, but first a quick update on our living situation: New Zealand, like most of the world, is currently on lockdown. They’ve handled the whole situation really well in our opinion–they announced the lockdown around four weeks ago with only about 100 confirmed cases, and as of the time of writing there’s only been 1 coronavirus-related death in the whole country. We’re also incredibly lucky that we were finishing up a…
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HelpX #3: I Keep Bleating Love
In November of 2019, Stefan and I spent hours reading through HelpX hosts’ profiles to find the perfect stay in New Zealand. One day I found a profile in which the hosts owned a place with farm animals (pigs, chicks, ducklings, horses) and, most importantly, 4 dogs (!). The photos of little piglets on the profile sparked my imagination of my future self feeding baby animals with a bottle, and that was the number 1 thing I was excited about for our trip to New Zealand (you can ask any of my coworkers). So on January 20th, we were picked up by our new farm host, Jim, in a truck…
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Primo Hermano – January 2020 Update
January was the month to get our feet wet and experience New Zealand through HelpX — and it was so full of new adventures, meeting kiwis, and learning new things! Here is a summary of our expenses for Jan 2020 per person (hover on bars for the interactive effect!): As you can see, we spent a total of $350 USD per person in the month of January, which is fantastic! And that $181 of transportation costs on 1/26 was a flight from Auckland to Invercargill, which of course that’s going to cost a lot! Fortunately, we have been saving our accommodation and most of our food costs by staying at…
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HelpX #2: The Good Place
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…
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Our First HelpX Experience
We decided on doing the HelpX program (short for “Help Exchange”) when arriving to New Zealand because we thought it would be a good way to meet some real-life Kiwis (and getting food and accommodation at no cost was a huge bonus, too). If you haven’t heard of HelpX, it’s a program similar to WWOOF and Workaway that connects hosts to “helpers” in exchange for lodging (we will go into more detail on this in a separate post). We ended up choosing Nat’s place as our first location because she had lots of animals, great reviews, and was one of the only HelpX hosts that was generous enough to let…
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Mahalo – Dec 2019 Update
After leaving the Midwest, we traveled to visit our parents and then spent New Years in Honolulu before heading to New Zealand for a year.
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Our First Post – Nov 2019 Update