“Maybe I am too old?” I tell myself. “What if I don’t fit their expectations?” I am getting increasingly anxious as I cycle towards hills just north of the historic city of Brescia in Northern Italy. What have I let myself in for? And why?  With a week-in-hand before I need to be in Venice, it had seemed perfect to check for a Help X position en route.  Now though, all I can think about is how the listing states a preference for ‘a young man for a month capable of chopping wood.’  I tell myself this may have been A Very Bad Decision. 

At home in Paihia, I host travellers from across the world via the ‘HelpX’ model. I offer accommodation and food, they assist me with 4 hours gardening, maintenance or housework each day. I value the connection with others, sharing stories, ideas, recipes, local knowledge, brief connections which have, almost without exception, seemed marvellously win-win. Today though, I am planning to swap roles.

Two weeks ago, it had seemed a good plan to contact these hosts. Now though, after a 70km ride over rolling hills, my weary body hijacks my thoughts. I advised my host earlier in the day of my arrival time by WhatsApp but I’m already late. I conjure up visions of a stereotypical Italian Mama who will shout, while my list of what may go wrong increases with each pedal stroke. “The dog will probably hate me and bite…. I don’t know anything about looking after sheep….I can’t chop wood for a week,I just can’t…..”

My logical brain reminds me that ‘new job/ first day’ anxiety is normal. However years of self-employment means it feels unfamiliar. “What about previous Helpers reviews?” asks this same side of my brain, because it was reading these that inspired me to confirm this placement in the first place. Obviously they don’t accord at all with my fears:   ‘L. and A… are fantastic hosts, I’ve never been met with more hospitality!’ ….’What I enjoyed most about my stay in [village] was spending time with L… and A…’ ….. ‘If you are up for some refreshing work outdoors, you are going to love it here…’ 

I arrive, hot sweaty and tired, to be greeted by a friendly young couple standing way out along the driveway in order to welcome me. Within a few minutes I know that last review is so true: I will.  

As I see it, the HelpX concept of work in return for board & lodging exemplifies the belief of Marshall Rosenberg, initiator of the Nonviolent Communication approach:

“The greatest joy we humans have in life is when we enhance the wellbeing of other people.”

As I begin to gradually remove the waist-high weeds obscuring the onion patch on my first morning, I feel the welling of that same joy.    

My host has injured his back so the vegetable garden has gone untended. Transforming the vegetable garden is precisely the sort of project I relish, as perhaps the pictures show: when I can be an ‘agent of change’, I’m in my real ‘happy place’.

Ringo the dog is an amiable companion but completely deaf. He barks with seemingly random timing. For me though, being able to hear the sounds of the day adds great joy, as it has done throughout my cycle ride. Today a morning chorale of church bells from the village below sounds across each hour, the start on the hour by one a little offset from the other, and as the day warms, a cuckoo calls in the forested hills behind.

Nearer home, just outside the re-emerging vegetable garden, the striking black rooster adds his own voice. He’s been up since 4am as I well know! Today he squabbles with the second rooster, the latter I’m told joined the flock of 20 hens and ducks by mistake: his gender unknown until he’d grown too tough for consumption. I later get to know the black rooster, a feisty chap who has no problem using his spurs, which I discover one evening when I attempt to move him into the night pen.

 My hosts both work as teachers at different local schools so when they head off early the first morning to set and mark end of term exams, I have free rein to weave magic into this vegetable plot.

For me, the best of garden magic comes in the form of compost. “Have you given them your compost talk yet?” my daughter queries from Auckland. When she competently lists the importance of layering, of shape, and of ‘greens and browns’, I’m aware that years of passionate mentoring on the topic has had some effect, at least on my children!  For while the world may have changed markedly in the 40 years since similar ‘compost talks’ to my high school agriculture classes in the Pacific, my passion for showing others the pleasures of compost remains a constant!   

Two days later, I excitedly bring my hosts to the bottom of their vegetable plot for a close-up view of their new compost heap. They have brought a bucket of kitchen scraps unsuitable for chickens so I suggest they lift the top layer and push the scraps out of sight underneath, but issue a safety warning too, “Be careful not to burn your hand!” The layers of weeds, chicken manure and hay now well over a metre high are steaming gently, a healthy sign that microbial activity is already underway.

I had spent an enjoyable morning cleaning out the chicken house and the rabbit hutches. Not only was it the perfect medium to add to the piles of weeds from the onion patch, it had also been a perfect opportunity to exercise some unused muscles. Cycling has strengthened and toned some areas of my body but it is definitely not a full body work out. Despite good intentions to continue with last year’s fitness exercises, as yet, weary after a day’s cycling, they remain just that! Now though I have the answer! If you seek the perfect way to practise squats, why not spend a morning scraping hay-encrusted chicken shit off a henhouse floor? 

In this beautiful location, misty hills behind me, the vegetable garden gradually reappears from under a cloak of bindweed, puha and rhizomatous grass. I divert some juicier weeds to the rabbits, who seem appreciative, but my joy at watching them is tempered: they are destined for the cooking pot.  Well, not Mario, the big grey male stud rabbit in a cage of his own, but the other cage’s four fortunately-unnamed brown & white inhabitants.   To honour relationships, I’m always prepared to set my vegan principles aside, but even so, when I pack up to depart, many wonderful dinners of local Italian cooking later,  I’m glad that Mario and all four of his friends are still in residence.

It’s hard to leave.  In the visitor’s book, I sum up my stay with phrase, ‘Arrive as a Stranger, Leave as a Friend.’  I sense that my hosts and I have learnt much from each other. The three of us exchange ideas, discuss books, life, the environment, and debate cultural commonalities and differences. When we serendipitously discover we all aspire to practice the ‘Nonviolent Communication’ approach, it forms a common bond. Lxxx relates how at the beginning of each school year she introduces NVC to her Intermediate Maths classes and during my stay develops an idea this could be her future PhD topic. When I share my own plans to write a story, my hosts bring out some of their favourite allegorical tales. (If you haven’t yet read ‘The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse’, I recommend it!)

I have enormous gratitude at how my hosts’ thoughtfulness at keeping me included at all times by speaking in English, even with each other, when I am around.  And when friends come over for dinner and even when we visit their local Church Fair, they patiently translate. It means a lot.   I’d like to reciprocate by learning more Italian but regrettably there’s too little time: my 90-day visa for Europe is all but up.  

Can it really be 3 months since I arrived in Lisbon?  Those qualms I had about this solo bike journey have morphed into a kaleidoscope of joys and memories.   My bicycle has carried me more than 2600 kilometres across Western Europe. And each day has felt such an honour and a privilege, and an opportunity to experience both the longevity and the vulnerability of our world.  

A touring cyclist in Europe is surrounded by history. One day I pass a Roman aquaduct, its 3 storeys of arches still standing 2000 years on. On another occasion, I stop to admire a neolithic menhir just a few metres off my road, and later cycle through Cork Oak plantations where generations have harvested the bark from the same old trees once each decade. In Turin, I drink a ‘Bicherin’, a coffee/cream/chocolate concotion that people have been enjoying at that same cafe since 1763, while in Verona, Shakespeare’s tale comes to life as I view Juliet’s balcony ( though choose to leave the Instagram poses and the romantic graffiti at the entrance to the Capulet mansion to others).

I also value how easy it is to connect with the natural world on a bike. I pedaI alongside Crested Grebes who neck their mating dance within the moat waters of an ancient walled-city; hear the croak of frogs in roadside ditches; and catch sight of a deer silently ahead on a woodland path. An otter-like Coypu plays with its young in the Canal as I head towards Milan. It’s an introduced species, considered a pest, but fun to watch, yet near their playground are floating islands of plastic drink bottles and other flotsam.

I feel sad to see colour-coded recycling bins stuffed with unrecyclables in each country I travel through. I sense the recycling concept is an outmoded symbol of a bygone era. Swathes of decaying homes across rural areas are another symbol of the past: cycling through completely deserted villages give me a sense of a post-apocalyptic world. Violent graffiti sprayed across glorious historical sites does little to alter my view. And I mourn the absence of birdsong as I pass farmland where discarded plastic irrigation tubing seems welded to the very fabric of the soil.

I’ve picked up over 600 pieces of plastic and other rubbish, ten pieces per day. Yes, it’s a drop in an ocean but it’s my way to honour the non-human life that gives me joy on a daily basis ( and perhaps, like the well-known starfish story, my action may actually save the life of a fish or a bird).

All along my journey I am aware of our human ability to create and enjoy beauty. And to destroy it.

I connect with extraordinary people face-to-face as well within history. In Barcelona I enter the most beautiful building I have ever visited: Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Church. A day later though, I pass a protest march pleading for affordable housing and in every city, amidst Gucci and Calvin Klein, I watch people asleep in doorways. Others sit with a cup and a sign, the language immaterial: they have unmet needs and view cash from passers-by as a solution.

Time and again I’m humbled by kindness from strangers. As I cycle from my HelpX placement to visit the castle of Brescia one afternoon my phone drops out from its handlebar holder, right into the path of a following car. I look back in horror: my phone is my only map and I’ve reluctantly become hugely reliant on it to the extent it now seems my lifeline. Amazingly though, a pedestrian passing in the opposite direction sees what has happened, steps directly into the road with her hand up to stop the traffic, retrieves my phone, hands it back with a smile and continues her walk. I’m sure you can imagine my gratitude.

More kindness comes when I stay with hosts I find through the ‘Warm Showers ‘ website. Cyclists when home host cyclists who are touring. (I do the same when I’m in Paihia. ) One night I’m in my sleeping bag in an attic, another on a couch in the lounge, but what I remember most are the kindnesses, the meals, the exchange of stories, and the growing understandings of life in another culture… same but different.

  For now though, I must take my leave of all mainland Europe has come to mean to me. I’ve cycled more than 2600 kilometres over the past 3 months. In a few days time I reach the beautiful city of Venice, pack my bike into a carton, and travel on by air.

I’ll welcome progress reports from my friends in Italy as they host new HelpXers. I’ll look forward to their own news, progress in the vegetable patch, and of course, news about the compost. When it comes to Mario and his long-eared friends though, I’ll be happy to hear nothing: that way I can continue to assume ‘no news is good news’!