Having signed up for Workaway before starting our backpacking adventure, our idea was to stretch our thin budget as far as possible. We decided that the one and a half months we would spend in Malaysia before re-entering Thailand would be a perfect time to get started with some volunteering opportunities.
Being our first experience with Workaway and volunteering in general, we thought that mucking out cow farms in the middle of nowhere would be a step too far, so instead, messaged the host of a beach campsite on the picturesque island of Redang. The opportunity offered free accommodation (in the form of a tent on the beach) as well as kitchen facilities to cook our own food. In return we were required to do three hours of work per day with two days off a week. The work described was “general maintenance tasks” and “helping with guests” but when we arrived to an absent boss and no guests, this soon devolved into 30 minutes of raking a morning, followed by basking in paradise. We spent most of our days snorkeling and kayaking at no cost, taking in sights like sharks, turtles and clown fish, the likes of which I never ever imagined I'd see. This experience was shared with an Italian couple whose pastimes just happened to be spear fishing and cooking, leaving us baffled at what we had done to land in the world's first functioning utopia.
After four days however, came the inevitable dystopia...
After four whole days with no rule or visitors on our beach paradise, the boss arrived with six unexpected guests and a desire to rebuild an outdoor shelter that had fallen in a storm. Then, as quick as he'd arrived, the boss left, saying he'd be back at some point in the following few days, leaving us clueless as to our responsibilities.
Having clumsily settled the guests into their bamboo huts, the four of us set to the task of repairing the shelter very cleverly named “The Chill Zone”. Made from logs and bamboo, the shelter was a very basic construction covered by tarpaulin. It needed fixing as one of the four skeletal pillars and its perpendicular roof component had snapped. At first glance, a very easy fix for four people to carry out, however, upon realizing that the boss had provided no materials and the three tools available were: a machete, a hand saw and a rusty drill, the task more than tripled in difficulty. With no one to oversee the labor, deciding how to go about the task took a lot of debate. The next three hours saw: me chopping down a tree with a machete and coming within an inch of cutting my leg off, one of the Italians sketchily rocking at the top of a ladder, the four of us carrying a whole tree through the jungle, and the shelter falling on our backs multiple times, amongst a lot of other cock ups I've either forgotten or don't have the words to mention. Proud of the lengths we had gone to repair the rickety shelter, we all came away with a few scratches and scrapes but mainly intact and ready to celebrate the first bit of actual volunteering we had done (by celebrate I mean drink of course).
Despite this horror story, the rest of our time returned to the idyllic snorkeling and general chilling of before, sprinkled with a few routine tasks such as maintaining a generator and filling sandbags. The overall experience of being self-sufficient on a remote island in Malaysia was one I will never forget. If doing it again meant repeating the trauma of almost chopping my leg off I'd take that deal in a heartbeat.
If you are a prospective workawayer, instead of being put off by my ordeal, I'd use it as a lesson that volunteering means taking the bad with the good. Workaway hosts use the site as a means of cost cutting on labor and this shows in the work you will have to do. Before arriving in Redang the Italian couple volunteered at a home stay and were tasked with relaying a decking with no new wood. They ended up pulling it up and putting it back exactly as it was. However, as volunteers we are doing the same, we use workaway to cut costs so this hand in hand agreement works both ways. Not everything will be brilliant but we saved £300 in living costs whilst volunteering on the island. Volunteering meant spending two and a half weeks on an island that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford to stay on and as a couple it made meeting people so much easier. We spent our weeks with individuals we would never have normally crossed paths with and learnt a lot. Workaway is definitely something we will be doing again and I would recommend it to any traveler.