Peaks and Places | Travel and Adventure Blog

Our first WWOOFing experience took us to the Northland Region of NZ. WWOOFing is a program that allows travelers, like Taylor and I, stay with New Zealanders. The deal is we do 4 hours of work a day and in return we get fed and have place to stay. We also liked the idea of meeting some locals and hopefully get some recommendation of things/places to see. For this WWOOF, we were welcomed by a couple that was in their late 50’s. They owned around 700-hectacres but leased 600 of it out. The remaining 100 was where their homestead and there ~30 sheep and 8 head of beef cattle.

The Northland region is the northern most region of the country, and therefore, it has the mildest winter. This was nice considering we would be working outside. While we WWOOFed, we had a couple days off that allowed us to explore the northern most part of the country. We quickly learned that Northland had some beautiful beaches, but I’ll let Taylor tell you about those in a another post (https://peaks-and-places.com/2024/05/29/exploring-the-cape-lighthouses-spirits-bay-and-southern-lights/).

Our first day of WWOOFing, we showed up for lunch and got to know our hosts a bit, after lunch we helped them clean up some brush in the paddock (what they call pastures) and had a couple small burns. The next couple days we were tasked with weeding. Our hosts had replanted some riparian wetland (creek areas) with native plants, we were tasked with pulling out any non-native plants. This was primarily Taiwanese Cherry, Thistle, and Privet. I think I speak for Taylor here too when I say that weeding sucked. We worked a total of 5 days and spent 3 of them weeding. Towards the end it almost seemed like a punishment. Thankfully, on our last day we got to fix a section of fence instead of weed. I never thought I’d be happy to fix a fence. They run a 9 strand high-tensile fence of their sheep and cattle, wayyy overkill if you ask me, but I don’t know anything about sheep.

On Friday, we worked two four hour shifts instead of one, so that we would have the entire weekend off to travel up to the Cape. For this day, we went to our hosts father’s house, to help weed. He has a large hill behind his house, and is in his 90’s, so getting up the hill to weed is a bit of a struggle for him. After spending the entire day weeding, he took us to the local Yacht Club to treat us to dinner. This was our favorite part of our WWOOF stay, mainly because I got to eat steak. Every Friday night, the Yacht Club puts on a dinner for the members and any guests they bring. The dinner had steak, chicken, and sausage but we had to cook it ourselves. Luckily I didn’t overcook our steaks.

Our hosts had sailed across the world in their 20’s so they had a lot of cool stories and recommendations on where we should travel next. They still sail quite regularly, with some of there most frequent trips being to Australia and the Pacific Islands. On our last day the our hosts even took Taylor and I hunting for Peacock, this was a pretty easy hunt which consisted of driving the pickup around until we saw some peacocks. You can read about what we did with the peacock meat here: https://peaks-and-places.com/2024/05/25/peacock-farmhouse-chowder/

Towards the end of our WWOOF stay we were glad to get back on the road. Sadly, we were starting to not feel very welcomed by one of our hosts. We’ll never know for sure why they started to dislike us but my theory is that I ate too much. Overall, it just wasn’t the right fit for us for a long term stay, but we both were very glad to have had this opportunity.