So before we begin, a quick reminder of how you can follow us on our travels - other than via our wonderful (if a little sporadic!) blog!
We're now on Twitter and you can follow us by clicking here...
or by searching for us (@indianovember) on Twitter .
Or you can view our full photo album which is being kept on Photobucket at THIS LINK... , or on Facebook if you're friends with us there! They are pretty much in chronological order now, most recent will be first...
Another long break in between blogs - well what can I say… we're just so busy! We have been up to a tonne of stuff since we left Sausset les Pins (which, by the way, seems like an eternity ago!) although the full update won't be possible just yet. Due to the fact that we've been up to so many different things and learnt so much over the past few weeks, we're in the process of putting together the blog in a different way. The diary style has been good for us so far, but doesn't suit what we've been doing recently so a change is a-coming! Also, there is only limited time for typing at the moment as the "invasion" is due to start tomorrow - more about that later!
Right, well I mentioned in the last post that we'd discovered Workaway and at that point we were about to embark on our first ever Workaway experience. That was just over five weeks ago and now we're in the middle of Workaway experience number two! To sum it up quickly all I can say is that Workaway has been one of the best things I have ever done and cannot recommend it highly enough to other travellers wanting to get the best out of their experience abroad. Despite veering from our original plan of finding summer jobs to help save some pennies for New Zealand I think we are going to come away from these last and upcoming few months with far more wealth than simply financial ones. We will have memories, experiences, new knowledge and skills, and friends that will be with us for the rest of our lives, long after the money we could have earned would have been spent and forgotten. Workaway is going to be part of our life for a very long time, if not forever!
Our first Workaway was a wonderful entrance into this worldwide community so new to us. We had such an amazing host who treated us well and made us feel at home and part of the family from the very moment we arrived. For those of you who have seen our photos on Facebook or Photobucket you may already have an idea of what we got up to there, so we can fill you in on a few more details here.
We made our home for two weeks at Lei Chambris in a small town called Salernes in the region of Provence-Cote-d'Azur, South East France. Our host was Pamela, a lovely lady originally from New Zealand but who had spent many years in London and then the last fifteen years in France building up her chambre d'hôte business, Lei Chambris. Living at Lei Chambris was an extended family of three cats - Saskia, Suri and Simba; two dogs - Sam and Chloe; and four chickens.
Looking after these guys was part of our job whilst staying with Pamela, along with gardening, maintaining the pool (including checking temperature - no better way to do that than swim in it!), gardening, looking after the veg patch and helping out with changing over the accommodation when guests left. We had a really great time and learnt a few things along the way as we were pretty much left to it and could get stuck into things the way we wanted to. Ian liked the chickens as he wants to keep some in the future, so he made them a log pile to climb on and forage around and looked into ways to keep the rats away from the chicken house. My favourite place was the veg patch so I spent loads of time weeding and tidying up in there, and I built a compost heap too.
As we were there for only a short space of time we couldn't really get stuck into any bigger projects - really we were just there to fill the gap for Pamela between other people arriving in the summer. We also had the place to ourselves for almost a week as Pamela had arranged to go back to the UK to visit a friend so she'd asked if we minded being left in charge. Certainly not, particularly as she offered to pay us €150!
We ate really well at Lei Chambris and had some super meals, which were welcomed after our long stint of campervan meals (basically a rotation of tortellini and gnocchi in various tomato based sauces!). We cooked on the barbecue quite a few times and had loads of fresh eggs - four every day from the chickens! Also we were just in time for the veg garden to start producing some summer crops so we had lovely fresh salads with mange tout, green beans and tomatoes. Plus wine with our evening meals! On our two days off we took advantage of being in an area surrounded by national park and took a trip in the van to a place called the Gorge du Verdon which was simply stunning. We hired a canoe and paddled down the gorge and then the next day we swam down using our body boards and flippers! It was nice to have a couple of days off, although we had plenty of time off even on the days we worked - Pamela was quite insistent that we didn't work too hard (if at all!) during the heat of the day so we usually relaxed between 11.30am and 6pm. This gave plenty of time for swimming, sunbathing, reading, having a leisurely lunch and watching the Tour de France. We couldn't have asked for anything more whilst we were there - it truly was a superb welcome into the Workaway community!
After two weeks the time came for us to leave as Pamela had already arranged for some other people to come for the rest of the summer. Whilst we were still at Lei Chambris we had decided that we'd look for another Workaway straight afterwards to see us through until September so we'd e-mailed a few people and the first one that got back to us we accepted. So this is where we are now, and we couldn't be having a better time!
 |
| Jess |
Since the second week of July we've been living with Pete and Janita at Bois de Plan, a small farmholding in Saint Christophe, in the Auvergne region. We're literally in the middle of nowhere, the nearest neighbours almost a kilometre away, and it is just wonderful! If we thought we were having the time of our lives at Salernes, then it got raised way above the bar when we landed ourselves here! Pete and Janita are the most friendly, welcoming and relaxed people I've ever come across and they've shown us a completely different side to life just by sharing their way of living with us. When we arrived we didn't know how long we would want to be here, or indeed how long they would want us here, but after a week or so we realised how much we were enjoying ourselves and we told them we'd really like to stay on and they said it would be fantastic if we could stay until September! So this is now our home until we make our way across to the other hemisphere for yet another exciting adventure!
There just been so much going on since we arrived here it would have been crazy to do a day by day account so instead I'm going to try and sum up what we've been doing, update on the projects we're involved in and try to give a general feel for the place. To begin with I'll introduce the family. We have the cats - Mungo, Cheya, Winnie, Willow, Vena (Vanilla), Vimal (Phillip) and Vector Vijay Vector Vroom (Vijay or V-Cat for short!). Vanilla and Phillip are Willows kittens and when we arrived they were just four weeks olds and simply adorable. Vijay arrived the week after us and he came from someone Pete knew who needed to get rid of some of their cats as they were about to have their first child. Vijay was also quite young at around two months and he's also really cute - he's like our little adoptee as he was given refuge in our room (more about our accommodation later) when he arrived so that he wasn't thrown straight into the realm of the other cats straight away. He still comes and sleeps with us at night time and keeps us company through the day, he's our little friend! Next is Jess, the border collie cross (not sure what with!), and she is just bonkers. She could quite literally outrun a Duracell battery and CANNOT be tired out. She loves to play fetch and would do so all the day through. Janita told us that once some people who were staying with them took it in turns to throw a stick or a ball for her and she kept going until they were all fed up! She's also a real sweetie and loves cuddles with everyone too. Then there are the donkeys, Oscar and Bibi. They keep themselves to themselves and you can sometimes forget they're there, until they start to bray which is often at unearthly hours of the morning! Jess likes to bark at them, which I think they just find amusing. Next are the sheep (x7), the chickens (x5) and the ducks (x5). They're all nameless, probably because it would be too hard to keep up with everyone!
It seems like a lot of animals, but it's really cool the way it works - they all live outdoors and they've all got jobs - the cats catch mice, Jess is guard dog (supposedly!), the chickens and ducks lay eggs, the sheep provide wool for insulating the buildings, and the donkeys… well, the donkeys are just for fun! Actually, they help to keep the grass down in the fields, along with the sheep, so even they've got a job! That's pretty much the approach that Pete and Janita have here at the farm - everything has a job and everything is for a reason. They do so many things that help to reduce their reliance on the "outside world" making them almost completely self sufficient and also really environmentally friendly! There's way too many things to mention in this short update, but I'm definitely going to write about them at some point, if only for my own future reference for living a green life!
From the day we arrived here we've been able to get stuck into projects but have also been included in Pete and Janita's social calendar. The very first weekend here we went to a "mountain party" for someones 60th birthday - basically it was just a party in a village hall up in the hills, but that was quite cool! Everyone brings some sort of food and drink and there's a big buffet for everyone to help themselves to. Loads of the people that belong to that circle of friends are musicians so there was a mini jamming session going on in-between the regular party music. On our second weekend we went to two parties! The first, on the Saturday night was a wedding party and pretty much the same set up at the mountain party except it was at the house of the people getting married. On the Sunday daytime we went to the continuation of another party that had been happening somewhere else on the Saturday night. This one had a really nice feel to it and people were just milling round, some playing guitars, others chatting and drinking (mostly coffee, it looked like it might have been a heavy night!), a game of petanque in the driveway, and a crowd of men looking after the barbecue which was getting ready to roast around 20 (yes, twenty) spatchcocked chickens to go with the rest of the food. Pete told us that this party had been going on every year for about 25 years so was almost like a little tradition in the local area. The parties were really good for us to go to, the only downside was that our French speaking was not really up to enough for us to hold conversation with anyone and most people here don't speak much English either! So we were pretty much just onlookers, but we still managed to have a good time!
 |
| Ducks next to the veg patch |
 |
| Dressing the stones |
 |
| Preparing the mini wall |
In terms of the work we're doing, it's been nicely varied. There's a sizeable vegetable patch where Janita grows lots of nice veggies and there's also a selection of fruit trees and bushes. As it's summer time there's plenty of weeding to do, so that's been a bit of an ongoing project of mine to help keep on top of the weeds. Janita said it doesn't normally look this good at this time of year, so it's nice to know that my weeding is making a difference! Ian has done some weeding too, but on more of an industrial scale! He's been in charge of strimming the huge amount of nettles that were taking over in the one of the fields and at the back of the house. We've also done some collecting of logs from the woods as it needs to be piled up to dry out for the winter. That was fun because we got to drive the tractor across the field and into the woods to load the logs onto the trailer - good fun, but pretty hard work too! Pete is a builder by trade and so is out at work during the week and on one day we got to go along and help out on one of the renovations that he is doing on a run down pigeon folly and we learnt how to put up scaffolding and how to mix a lime mortar for brick work. That came in handy for another project we have back at the farm as they are converting one of the outhouses (an old pigsty) into a yoga studio for Janita (she is a yoga teacher). Ian had already finished off digging out the old concrete base that had been started by a previous Workaway couple from Taiwan who left the day before we arrived. The next thing we had to do was to build a mini wall at the front of the room to support a full width stone step which would bring the floor up to the required height for the rest of the room. That was more mortar mixing, stone selecting and spirit-levelling! The next stage was to build the step and that meant we had to learn how to dress the masonry with a circular saw (pretty good fun) and then back fill behind the mini wall ready to place the newly finished stone blocks on top to create the step. Once the stones and the backfilling had been completed we managed to lay the stone in just one day which we were pretty chuffed with. When Pete got back at the end of the day he said it was just how he wanted it! Yey! Next is the concrete floor, which we're doing this afternoon.
Ian has another ongoing project of sorting out the trench where all the waste water flows into. He's dug it out to create a sort of pooling system and then he's going to select a bunch of plants to put in there to filter the water as it flows out, creating a pool of clean water at the end that the animals can drink from. That's work in progress so we'll keep you updated on that one! We've also been doing loads of cooking in the evenings which has been a good learning experience for us as Janita is vegetarian and we've been having a vegetarian diet since we arrived. That's gone down really well for us and even Ian isn't really missing meat all that much! It's interesting for me to notice how lazy cooking with meat can make you - it's so easy to make a meal out of practically the same veg/pasta/rice/potato base and just chuck a different meat in to get the 'variety', but with vegetarian meals, unless you get adventurous, that would more or less mean ratatouille everyday which wouldn't be so great. So it means that you have to be more inventive with cooking and that can only be a good thing! We've had some fantastic meals and Janita is a great cook too so we're certainly not going short in the food department!
 |
| Pete, Janita and Ian on a daytrip to Chateau Montgilbert |
In our spare time, which is mostly in the evenings, we tend to spend our time with Pete and Janita after we've all eaten dinner together. They've introduced us to strategy board games and we're hooked! We have played a game literally every night that we've been in the house since we got here! They've got stacks of different games and they're all brilliant! We'll definitely be getting some for playing in the winter - better than re-watching the entire set of Scrubs DVD's again! We also spent a nice afternoon in the garden with Pete's guitars (and mine!) playing a little bit of music - Pete's a musician and even has a CD on iTunes! We also have comfortable starts in the morning, long lunches and a generally slower paced day so we're never particularly stressed! It's still pretty tiring though, but that's mostly because we're up until gone midnight every night playing games! After that we get to crash out in our own little outhouse, another old pigsty already converted. It's really basic, but we've got electricity and we actually don't spend much time in there anyway so it doesn't matter.
So we're generally just having a really fantastic time and hopefully this little update will have given a flavour for what we're up to and what it's like here. Things are about to get a lot more hectic here though, as from tomorrow, because 'the invasion' is about to start… Basically there are hoards of people who all come to visit over the summer and Janita said there have been up to 20 people all here at once! There will also be a party at the end of August which a load of people come to, so that's another thing to look forward to!
Okay, that will do for now… we'll definitely get another update in during August before we go to NZ, so hopefully you'll read us again soon!
Ciao for now!
November signing out
November signing out
No comments:
Post a Comment