How would you fancy spending two months someplace solar-kissed and extraordinary for less than 600 quid? This became the question placed to our closing week by way of TG4 climate presenter Mairéad Ní Chuang, and we’ve got to mention she hugely turned our head.
We did the math and reckoned we ought to handily Airbnb our residence in Dublin.
Flow to a natural farm in Thailand or Barbados or California till the Irish summer season – which includes it is – and in reality, make money from our experience.
The go back and forth to paintings could be a nightmare, mind you. And the college the Popes’ kids visit may not be first-class pleased with their disappearance. So perhaps it isn’t always for Pricewatch right now.
But Ní Chuang has found out a manner to make it work for her. She managed to include a -month trip to Thailand, closing yr into her day job with the television station. The result of her adventures on organic farms in southeast Asia has now emerged as 5-element series, which starts on TG4 later this week.
It isn’t her first time with a little-recognized – to us at any fee – corporation known as Worldwide Opportunities On Organic Farms, or WWOOF for short. Similarly to Thailand, it has taken her to Australia, California, throughout Europe, and a Buddhist retreat in Cavan.
But what within the world is Wwoof? It is an “international motion linking volunteers with natural farmers and growers to promote cultural and educational stories primarily based on agreeing with and non-monetary exchange, thereby supporting to build a sustainable, global community,” is how the website – www. Wwoof. Internet – places it.
You decide wherein in the global you want to go, sign on as a volunteer.
The WWOOF organization is liable for the USA you plan to go to, and also start contacting hosts thru its platform to set up your visit. You cover the value of getting to and from the region, and also you pay for any visas that may be needed. Then, in return for between 4 and 6 hours’ paintings a day, 5 days a week, all your meals and accommodation are blanketed. Pick the right area, and also, you won’t need to pay for wifi either.
How did a weather presenter from Connemara emerge as being part of this global? “I’d been running as a freelance with TG4 for some years, and like all freelancers, there have been instances when I had free time on my palms,” she says. “It was during one such time when I had the lady from America staying with me. She turned into a health practitioner, and I remember her pronouncing she’d been Wwoofing in Aran, and I was like: ‘What the hell is she speaking approximately?’”
Ní Chuaig determined to discover. She googled the time period
Wwoofing and one of the first hyperlinks she came upon changed into a TV manufacturing employer in Northern Ireland searching out Wwoofers for a program they had been planning to make approximately the whole notion. “They weren’t looking for a presenter, and the deadline had surpassed, but I nonetheless were given in contact,” she says.
Random conversation
That random communication with an American health practitioner and her selection to get in touch with a production corporation, notwithstanding having overlooked the closing date, ended up starting the sector to her. It has additionally seen her make a number of the most revolutionary journey television ever broadcast in Ireland.
She has now Wwoofed (yes, it sounds bizarre to Pricewatch, too) in Australia.
California, Ireland, across Europe, and – maximum lately – in Thailand, and when we spoke ultimate week, she turned into in the early degrees of making plans her subsequent adventure.
There is a lot of trickery involved in tv. There is very little real about reality tv, and even much less this is actually about travel programs. Hosts tend to fly in for a few days and work like demons whilst on location. Then they fly domestic, leaving the viewer with the impression that they’ve watched someone taking part in an extended holiday someplace lovely.
Ní Chuang and her co-presenter Tomaí Ó Conghaile don’t try this, and they sincerely live the real revel in and spend a full two months in Thailand, dwelling inside the identical lodging as all their co-people on more than one natural farm.
