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HelpX #4: Tentin Quarantino
It all started out as an adventure to do another HelpX in Warrington, New Zealand. Little did we know that we would be staying at the place for 7 weeks during NZ's Level 4 lockdown during the COVID 19 pandemic.
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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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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…