Make Your EFL Holiday An Adventure With WWOOF

map1.jpgThe TEFL Logue has before mentioned WWOOF as an intriguing and generally low-cost way to greatly enhance your holiday by giving you the chance to volunteer on an organic farm in exchange for room and board: after making a small contribution to join the organization for a year, you get access to a list of hosts and their contact information.

You can imagine I was pretty psyched to hear that Carrie, the Bootsnall Business Travel Loguer, was going to WWOOF in Australia, and I followed her personal Australia trip blog (not to be confused with the official Bootsnall Australia Blog by Heather) to see how it went.

Where did she WWOOF?
In a town in Australia near Byron Bay. Her host was a “super liberal…Aussie hippie”, a former sculptor who makes his living playing the stock market and also, of course, working on his land.
The landscape sounds rather interesting, to say the least:
“You can see for kilometers to the park and the sea in either direction. From the home, you take a trail down to the beach over HUGE white sand dunes to the gold sand coast. Once you’re there, you reach the black sedimentary rocks with erosion holes created from an ancient forest.”

What did she do?

As for physical work, she did some weeding and mulching in the garden and rebuilding a set of earthen stairs: “I think you get such a sense of accomplishment through physical labor and seeing concrete results of your work. I’m afraid most of my techno-saturated generation is very much missing out on that feeling.”

Any bad experiences?
Unfortunately Carrie encountered one WWOOF host who openly shared some rather racist views. Luckily, she met this person only on a day trip and hadn’t arranged to stay there.

Read on for Carrie’s Advice To WWOOFers.