Paying to Muck Out in South Africa

I will be honest with you. I have never set foot in Africa. I want to get that out of the way early, because I am about to talk about a horse yard on the Wild Coast of South Africa with the confidence of a man who has read the listing more times than he has read his own mortgage.

We travel a lot, my family and I. I have stood on the inner ice of Greenland. I have lain on a Thai beach doing absolutely nothing for long enough to feel guilty about it. Africa has sat near the top of the bucket list for years, and every time I think about finally going, the same completely unreasonable idea surfaces. Not a safari. Not a lodge with a plunge pool and a man who brings you gin at sunset.

A month of mucking out. On purpose. For money.

Twenty-Nine Days and a Broom

Here is the listing that started all this. Twenty-nine days on the Wild Coast, described as a working riding holiday. Live like a local, connect with horses. From around 17,300 kroner.

Do the division and it comes to roughly 600 kroner a day, for a month, in another hemisphere. A hotel breakfast in Copenhagen costs a third of that, and the breakfast does not come with a horse.

There is no catch, or rather the catch is right there in the title and it is the whole point. You are not a guest for a month. You are labour with a bed. You will feed things, sweep things, haul water, and at some stage somebody will hand you a fork and point at a stable, and you will be delighted about it, which is the part my wife finds hardest to understand.

The bucket list. I am not being metaphorical.

I Blame the Farm

I grew up on a farm, though not the sort you see in films. It was a disused farm. My dad rented out the fields to neighbouring farmers and kept animals as a hobby, not as a job. We had dogs, a pet pig, chickens, turkeys, goats and whatnot. There was always something to feed, something to muck out, something making a noise in the barn when you were trying to have a lie-in.

My sister has ridden all her life. I am the one who ended up a townie with a bit of country in the background, and what I miss is not the riding lessons.

It is the yard. The early feeding when the animals hear you coming before they see you. The sweeping that is never finished. The endless, honest business of a place where creatures live and somebody has to keep it going. A riding holiday that takes me out for four hours and hands me back to a swimming pool has removed exactly the part I would have gone for.

And a month is long enough for the thing a week cannot do, which is stop being a visit. Somewhere around day ten, I imagine, they stop showing you where the wheelbarrow is. That is the moment I want. Not the first ride out. The first morning nobody explains anything because you already know.

Where the Ships Gave Up

The Wild Coast is not a marketing name. It runs from the Mtamvuna River in the north to the Great Kei River in the south, a stretch of the Eastern Cape that South African Tourism describes with words like jagged cliffs, sheltered bays and wild beaches, and it earned the name the hard way. This coast is known for its shipwrecks. Port St Johns is probably named after the São João, a Portuguese ship that broke up off this coastline in 1552, and survivors of wrecks like it settled in the communities along the shore.

It is the heartland of the Xhosa people, part of the old Transkei, and it is still largely untouched by development. Rolling hills that fall straight into the sea. Not many roads. Not many people.

I find that irresistible. I also find it slightly alarming, and I think those are the same feeling.

The Version That Fits in a Suitcase

There is a shorter one on the same site. Fifteen days, self catering, a farm stay on the same coast, from around 13,200 kroner. Fewer days, more money, less of a commitment to being useful.

And I will be honest again, because this is the awkward bit. Twenty-nine days is a long time to be away from a job and a family, and I have noticed that the version of this trip I actually daydream about is the one where I go alone. Just me, a fork, a coast, and a lot of horses who do not care what I do for a living.

So there are two trips in my head and they do not fit together. The one with my daughter is four days somewhere warm with a beach and a horse she can swim with. The one that is really mine is a month of somebody else’s chores on a shore I have never seen. Both are good trips. Only one of them is going to happen first, and it is not the wheelbarrow.

What I Would Ask Before I Book

What the work actually is, and how many hours of it. Whether “connect with horses” means being handed a job or being handed a horse, because those are different holidays and I would take either, but I would like to know which one I am buying. What happens on a wet Tuesday in week three when the romance has worn off and there is still a yard to do.

And whether they want somebody who can already ride, or somebody who can already work. I am considerably better at the second. I suspect they have met my type before.

Why This One

I have been on the ice and I have been on the beaches, and the thing I want next is not another view. It is a wheelbarrow at sunrise on a coast that sank Portuguese ships, a horse breathing on my neck while I try to remember where the feed bins are, and a month long enough to stop being a tourist and start being the bloke who does the mornings.

Africa is going to happen. Whether it happens with a fork in my hand is a conversation I have not yet had at home.

I have already checked the flights. Do not tell my wife.