We’re skipping forward a bit in time here. Our last blog post was about doing the Rakiura Track in mid-February, and this one will be about our lockdown experience starting in mid-March. We’ll likely cover our adventures in between soon enough (Cliff’s Notes version: I spent two weeks on solo travel around beautiful Dunedin while Stefan was off securing a job in Denver for the fall, then we met back up in Christchurch and finally purchased a car), but we’ve been putting off new posts for too long, and this one has lots of meat to dig into!
Everyone will have their own unique story to tell about how they handled the COVID-19 outbreak, but we were lucky enough to not only be in one of the safest countries in the world during that time, but also to be near Dunedin, our personally favorite area of that country! We had our own share of rough times, as you’ll see us dwell upon below, but don’t let the length of our whining distract from how truly grateful we are to have been in New Zealand during the outbreak, and to have been taken under the wing of gracious hosts who had no obligation whatsoever to help us out.
Getting to the HelpX
We actually had picked out our fourth HelpX before COVID really hit New Zealand. We were in Christchurch at the time and doing lots of research on the ‘tiny house’ movement, which essentially consists of people who have decided to forego the classic four bedroom, white picket fence house and the multi-decade mortgage that goes along with it in favor of downsizing their belongings and living space for a more minimalist, debt-free lifestyle. I won’t go into more detail on the movement here, but if you’d like an introduction to all the incredibly creative ways people design beautiful, fully-functioning homes with footprints from 200-400 square feet, you can check out the extremely bingeable YouTube channel “Living Big in a Tiny House” (actually hosted by a Kiwi!). Here’s a sample, if you’re interested:
With Stefan having just received a full-time university position for our eventual return to the US, we were doing a lot of thinking about moving to a new city, and the low cost and minimalist nature of tiny houses really appealed to us. So for our next HelpX, we did a lot of looking to find a place that would get us involved with that sort of lifestyle. We found our match with John, a host who built tiny houses and lived in one himself. We scheduled to stay there for a week; little did we know that we would be there for closer to seven!
The Hosts
John and his wife Sabine were from New Zealand and Italy, respectively. The most descriptive thing we can give about their character is that, in a time when hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and bread were flying off the shelves of first world countries in apocalyptic, “every man for himself” panic, they didn’t hesitate a moment to give us a place to stay for as long as we needed it.
As we were finishing up our work on March 23rd, John came by and asked if we had heard the news that within 48 hours New Zealand would be proceeding from Level 2 to Level 4 (Note: one of the many things New Zealand did very well in handling COVID was implementing a clear system of response levels, although I suppose those levels don’t mean anything to someone who wasn’t here during the events: Level 4 essentially equated to full lockdown, with people being asked to stay in their homes and not to leave for anything except essentials). He immediately said that we would be welcome to stay as long as we needed to. And in fact, he invited a Czech couple who had previously HelpXed for him to stay at his place as well. In uncertain times, he really went above and beyond the call of duty!
Like I’m sure many people did during that worldwide panic phase, we watched plenty of pandemic-related movies that show all the many ways humanity could turn on itself–but John did exactly the opposite, taking four foreigners under his wing rather than kicking us out to fend for ourselves. You always read about the inspiring stories of people who take risks in crisis situations to do the right thing, and John was absolutely a testament to Kiwi niceness during a worldwide meltdown!
The Property
If that last section sounded excessively saccharine, it’s to really counterbalance what’s coming next! I’ll again emphasize that we are beyond grateful for having had a place to stay while being 8000 miles away from home, and that is our main takeaway from this whole experience. On the other hand, we are writing a blog here, and famous writers aren’t fun to read because everything is hunky-dory for their protagonists: Harry Potter isn’t great because a little rich kid grows up in a loving family which sends him to a school where everyone likes him and nothing goes wrong for seven years straight. So humor us as we indulge in some complaints, and don’t take us as entitled little brats who don’t realize how lucky we are.
Disclaimer out of the way, let’s take a tour of where we stayed.
Hopefully our conduct as spoiled (and now that we think of it, perhaps somewhat racially insensitive) ingrates hasn’t driven you away; again, we want to emphasize how EXTREMELY grateful we are to have had a place to stay during Level 4. But after multiple weeks of sub-optimal conditions, we may have gotten a little slap-happy with our criticisms.
We actually lived about 10 minutes down the road from where we worked for John, in a house he had purchased for $100, sawn in half, and moved to its present location. We aren’t sure exactly how long the house had been uninhabited, but it was definitely under renovation…for those who might not have watched the video, here’s a list of features offered by our accommodation:
Leaky roof (from where the house was sawn in half and along the walls)
A bucket taking the place of a shower
Builders coming and going all throughout the day, leaving unwashed dishes and all the panic about contaminated surfaces you could imagine at coronatime
Moldy food in the fridge that was months or even years past its expiration date (including an opened packet of bacon and about 12 jars of who knows what)
A couch smelling like some combination of urine and death
Mouse feces pretty much everywhere along with the mice that left them
Something in the detergent gave Stefan itchy red lesions all over his body
It was cold.
Let’s talk about the cold.
The place was probably built in the early 1900s and had 15-foot high ceilings evidently designed to dissipate the heat from the Mexican desert. Large portions of the house never got sunlight and ended up colder than the outdoors most of the time. The wind howled through inch-wide cracks under the door, not to mention the four foot square broken window when the particle-board covering flew off into the garden. Even sleeping under 8-9 blankets, we would wake up with ice-cold noses and whatever other part of our body had foolishly dangled outside of the covers. And, at mid-March in the Southern Hemisphere…well, you know House Stark’s family words.
Stefan relaxing in the cozy bedroom after a hard day’s work.
Complaints aside, as time went on, some adjustments were made which made things slightly more bearable:
The builders bolted the particle-board more firmly onto the window such that it stopped ripping off, then put in a shower before heading home for a couple weeks. The shower was a particularly welcome addition: first because it was the only warm place in the house, and second because by the time it was installed we had gone something like 9 days without a shower (a record-breaking stretch for as long as either of us could remember). Astute readers will recall that we mentioned a bucket we could have used, but they’ll also recall that we mentioned it was quite cold.
We found a bunch of bricks outside and stacked those up by the exterior doors (for the cold wind) as well as our bedroom door (for the mice).
We put all of our food in plastic containers and got a mousetrap to add eight mice to our New Zealand kill count. We would have preferred nonlethal traps, but none were available, and considering we had found the mice running across the kitchen counter and inside the stove coils, we couldn’t really coexist without serious health concerns.
John gave us a couple of space heaters for the bedroom, which frankly didn’t do much as all the warm air shot straight up to the 15-foot ceiling and promptly out the uninsulated roof, but it was better than nothing. We ran these sparingly to avoid racking up too large an energy bill, but still tried to compensate John with cash.
We also discovered that there was a small heat pump in the kitchen, which encouraged us to spend less time huddled under the bed covers. That did mean more time by the stinky couch in the kitchen though, so who knows.
We finally put the tent we’d been lugging all around New Zealand to use. Setting it up on our mattress and then blasting the space heater into it for a couple minutes before bed every night made things a bit cozier.
At this point, I think you’ve got the message: the house wasn’t great. On the other hand, as soon as we stepped outside the house, things were much better. On sunny days, the northeast-facing porch was terrific to thaw out while munching on some breakfast. The yard (or “garden,” as they say here) was huge and green, and gave Stefan and me plenty of space to do our Insanity workouts. And as long as the sun was out, it was actually super comfortable outside, so it was great to have that as a change from the cold house. Most of all, the place was less than a 5 minute walk from one of the best beaches we’ve seen in New Zealand.
We took a walk along the beach almost every day, often staying there for several hours at a time. It was basically deserted, too, meaning there was no threat of infection. It could get a bit cold and windy, especially as March turned into April, but this beach still probably singlehandedly got us through Level 4! I even got to take the builders’ cute dogs on walks there from time to time!
Taking little Logan (one of the builders’ dogs) out for a nice walk on the beach
So although we had a fair number of gripes about the interior of the house, we couldn’t have asked for a better location to have spent lockdown.
The Work
The work started out on a high note. Like I said above, we were interested in learning about the construction of tiny houses, and as we were messaging potential hosts, we said that while we would be more than happy to do more menial tasks around the property like weeding on the side, we were principally interested in being involved with tiny house-related construction.
We got right into it on the first day, with Stefan learning to use an angle grinder to cut steel beams which would later be welded together into z-shaped frames for the tiny house loft.
Stefan cutting steel beams for the tiny house. Hopefully his technique isn’t too hazardous—he only had about 5 minutes of training!
I spent that time breaking apart a box with a power drill. More destructive than constructive, but still fun!
Dagmar destroying a small shed with a power drill (and perfect form!)
After that, there was talk of insulating the tiny house, but that got delayed several times in favor of a couple other more pressing odd jobs around the workplace. We painted some walls, moved a shed, organized a bunch of windows (we had never thought about how HEAVY windows are!), and relocated wooden weatherboards. We actually had to do the last task twice—once moving them away, and again moving them back to almost exactly where they had been in the first place—because of a bit of miscommunication about the instructions…see our previous post for the importance of asking lots of questions to ensure you don’t mess things up!
Once Level 4 was announced, however, we weren’t supposed to be traveling back and forth between our place and John’s, so he gave us some tasks to do around the renovated area. We cleaned out a completely overgrown garden, moved a chicken coop, tore down a chicken wire fence, mowed the lawn, painted the walls about 17,000 times (we weren’t much more fond of this than we had been at HelpX #2, especially when we were painting the side of the house that didn’t get any sun), weeded the yard, planted a garden, and Stefan’s personal favorite: split wood.
Once Level 4 was reduced to Level 3, we were allowed to go back over to John’s, where we did some staining of the weatherboards on the side of the tiny house. To be honest, we were pretty disappointed that we didn’t end up doing more tiny house work and ended up primarily doing the same gardening and wall painting that we were expressly trying to avoid, but circumstances were very obviously not what we had thought they would be when we initially contacted John.
All things considered, we didn’t have to work anywhere near four hours a day (once Level 4 started, John proposed us doing less work in exchange for us buying our own groceries, which meant we ended up averaging ~1-2 hours/day as ‘rent’), and we honestly enjoyed the opportunity to be working outside breathing clean air and listening to birds when so much of the world was trapped inside a stuffy apartment.
What We Learned
1. New Zealand absolutely rocked its COVID response: The country has been making international headlines for its handling of the virus, and we can vouch for that firsthand. It went fast and hard on its response, closing borders quickly and triggering the highest level of lockdown with only roughly 100 confirmed cases. Even after four weeks of the lockdown seemed to have been highly effective and the country was bursting to ease restrictions, the decision was made to extend Level 4 an extra couple of days to ensure everyone’s sacrifices wouldn’t have to be repeated.
We are no political analysts, but it seems like this decision stemmed from two big factors in Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s leadership: letting science guide policy and prioritizing the lives of citizens over the country’s economy. New Zealand was lucky to be on the tail end of the world’s infections, and by that point it was evident that time and time again, countries ignored the early warning signs and dithered about while things spiraled out of control. During the crisis, New Zealand’s government also stood out for the way it chose to communicate with its constituents: where other leaders worldwide have employed language evoking wartime imagery, Ardern’s government cultivated a “we’re in this together” mentality. Some of the many ways this empathy for the common person manifested was through the Prime Minister holding regular Facebook live chats dressed in sweatpants at home, and through high-level government officials and public sector CEOs taking a 20% paycut to show solidarity with the country’s financial hardship.
You’ll notice that this section is written in the past tense. While the impact of the coronavirus will be with New Zealand for a long time to come, at the time of writing there are ZERO active cases in the entire country according to official accounts, and only 22 people died since the virus touched down here. That doesn’t mean more infections won’t crop up, but for the time being, it seems that the worst of the crisis is over.
I’m not here to stand on a soapbox and we want this blog to be enjoyable regardless of your political sensibilities, but one of the things you do when traveling to another country is to compare your own culture with the one you’re visiting. Some things you like better, some things you like worse. And obviously New Zealand, a remote island nation whose population doesn’t even reach five million, has a ton of advantages the US does not when it comes to dealing with the outbreak.
Even so, it’s hard not to compare their responses from a political standpoint. Whether or not you think Trump’s response has been an example of good leadership, journalists in one country after another agree that Ardern has shown exemplary leadership. Read some of these articles (or find some of your own if you’re worried about my biases) and see what takeaways you find about good leadership. Then, compare those takeaways to how Trump has handled things in the US. Remember that comparison when it comes time to vote in November.
2. We’re incredibly fortunate to be in New Zealand
This isn’t exactly something we weren’t aware of before this HelpX, but it was definitely reinforced in a way it hadn’t been previously. Not only have we faced very little danger to our health in comparison to virtually any other place we could be in the world, we managed to enjoy lockdown in an unbelievably beautiful part of the planet. Furthermore, the country’s successful response means that, even though we had a couple weeks of discomfort, we feel like we ‘earned’ something during that time. Whereas the US has started opening up with the virus still at large, now that it’s happening in New Zealand, it really feels like the country has gotten past something. And the cherry on top is that, as you’ll see in future blog posts, we now have access to all the tourist sites in the country without any of the tourists!
3. We really don’t like painting houses Lest you think our HelpX #2 experience might have just been a fluke, I think we’ve confirmed that we’re throwing in the brush for the foreseeable future.
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Hope you enjoyed this post! And for all of our readers, here is a fun question if you’d like us to send you a postcard:
*What is the funniest experience you had while under shelter-in-place orders?
Send an e-mail to [email protected] with your story before June 19th, 2020 and the best 3 answers will get a personalized postcard from us 🙂
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