Help X in Czech Republic.

chilling on some hay

During Leah’s hours of research before we left Australia, she came across Help X. It’s a volunteering website where host families put you up and feed you in exchange for your help around their home for around 6 hours a day. You can do a wide variety of jobs; gardening, wood chopping, fruit picking, teaching English. We found a great place to try out in the Czech countryside. We both got excited at the prospect of working 10 days on a goat farm where the host family makes bread and cheese. 

Our journey to the tiny town of Lozice was beautiful with cute little towns, rolling hills and some forests. The bus driver who drove us into the town was quite funny. He was waiting for his last run of the day and Leah and I were his only passengers so he pumped up the radio and found some English pop music along with some Czech tunes for our journey.

our bus ride to Lozice

Vladimir, Denisa and their 4 kids welcomed us, fed us and made us feel at home. They live on a small farm in a big old stone house that used to be used for grain milling and bread making, complete with a huge built in old school bread oven. It’s a charming farm with big barn full of hay, a full vegetable patch that’s like a supermarket, a sweat lodge frame for sweat lodge parties, a couple of plum trees (of which we ate lots of), an old, nearly blind dog called Sistra (meaning sister in Czech), a couple of cats with kittens and about a dozen goats that supply the milk for cheese making. Along with selling their goat cheese and bread, they also hire out a huge room on the top floor to yoga and ti-chi groups or for weekend conferences. We stayed on this top floor, which sleeps 18 people has its own kitchen and bathroom. The meals that Denisa cooked us were so tasty and healthy. Denisa likes to cook organically with her own produce with a strong Indian influence (from their time travelling India). As you can probably guess, it’s not a meat-heavy diet but we did eat one of their old goats in burger form, and it actually tasted good!

about 12 plums a day plus some amazing plum slice Denisa made

34 loafs off to market

the house

the kittens

'hey sheep how did you get in here?'

They have been doing Help X maybe twice a year for a couple of years and love having people from all walks of life stay with them. We joined two Taiwanese girls who had already done Help X in France and Italy. The girls only lasted 4 days (we think they left early because the work was too hard for them). The first few days Vladimir had us helping with stocking up wood for the winter. It was good, hard, hands on work. We were moving, stacking, chopping and I hopped on the chainsaw too. Every evening we were very stiff and sore, even more so the next morning. Leah went a bit to hard with the axe splitting wood the first day and couldn’t back up her first day heroics the next day (and had the blisters to prove it).

chopping

our wood stacking

and the hard work result

The next task that Leah and I were given was in an old stone house probably used as a barn or tool shed long ago. I say long ago because it is meant to be over 150 years old and the floor that we were working on was over 300 years old!
Our job was to clean and re-grout the floor. This involved lots of hard work picking, flicking and cleaning old dirt that had been imbedded in between the stones making up the floor. Then we’d fill the gaps with cement to try and level off the floor to make it easy to sweep clean. Just like tiling. Well, sort of. It took a long time, around 5 days to complete but we were all happy with the end effect. Vladimir and Denisa run bread and cheese-making workshops for school children and the room that we were fixing is for the kids to mill the grain and learn how bread is made.

the 'before'  floor

look how fast Leah is working!

finishing touches

On our day off Vladimir recommended some nearby towns and offered us some bikes to ride. We got about 1km down the road when the wheel of my bike buckled and came off. Luckily it was an old bike (their grandmothers) and we were able to borrow another one instead. All up it was a 30km round trip, visiting some castles, palaces, a town fair and enjoying a well-deserved beer. My highlight of the trip was by far the ride through the countryside, along country roads, through little towns and forest hiking trails. I just loved going fast down the occasional hill.
Leah’s highlight was seeing some deer. Behind the palace in Nove Hrady, in the surrounding grounds are a few little museums, a maze and a big paddock with a heard of deer. We were able to walk through the paddock and got really close to some big stags rubbing their antlers in between the trees.

3km away in Luže there is a palace on the hill.

through some forest

we thought about buying this palace in Nove Hrady

enjoying a raspberry slushy in the palace gardens

then I got lost in a maze

Leah stalking the deer

close up shot for Ian

Leah was excited and nervous

We czech’d out a few places the locals go on the weekend, stopping for a beer at a biker pub where lots of families have a day out and bikers take a pit stop to refuel (by fuel I mean beer and by bikers I mean cyclists). We dropped in at the Luže town fair where we caught a traditional Czech band and a local rock band performing. The traditional band must have been playing all the hits because all the oldies around us were singing and foot tapping along. It was quite funny to see the older crowd disperse when the rock band replaced them, playing a very different genre of music. Leah was impressed because they played a cover of ‘Zombie’ by The Cranberries.

beers at the country pub, on the hill because there was no free tables.

traditional Czech tunes

Our first experience with Help X was a great one and it was great to have a base for 10 days, without having to worry about meals, accommodation and travelling. We would definitely do it again down the track and recommend it to anyone travelling for an extended period of time.

sunrise on our last morning run (well Leah ran I cruised on the bike)

arvi