conservazione not conversazione

//conservation, not conversation

My two week CVA working holiday comprised seven Aussies, two Italians (plus 20 or so drop‑ins), several rude stereotype‑enforcing French people, three languages, lots of pasta, innumberable weeds, some very blunt tools and a fair amount of questionable concrete mix.

Our tour took us from Carignano, near Torino, to the Mercantour Mountains in France before ending in Monte Carlo, where we enjoyed our last two days together eatng, drinking, and avoiding the casino.

We were assigned a search and destroy mission for week one in Carignano; search for the three or four actual plants in two parks and destroy everything else. We pulled, hacked, snapped and swore at weeds, unearthing a beautiful little castle in one park and a whole lot of white moths in the other. We met a lot of locals and while we had the impression that they thought we were completely barmy travelling all the way from Australia to do their weeding, they were kind to us. We were treated to a tour through Carignano (which has a spectacular fan‑shaped church), as well as various other towns, along with home‑cooked pasta, bocce games and mint tastings (nearby Pancalieri produces world famous mint). In Carignano we were shown a big, heavy stone and our tour guide told us with great relish that people who hadn't paid their debts were once dropped onto this stone, bottom first, from a height of about 5 metres. These days, locals who are deeply in debt tell their friends that they have "andato a culo" ‑ literally "gone on my ass".

Speaking of the locals, there were some truly unforgettable figures in Carignano and one of them was Gino, a tiny old man with a very cheeky smile and a taste for vino. He is a member of an RSL‑type club across the street from our accommodation, which is in fact more to do with wearing funny hats and playing Bocce than it is to do with anything else. Another notable was Loris, who materiaised every now and then to make mountains of pasta for us or to leave a container of hand‑picked wild blackberries on our kitchen table. He spoke to us only in Italian and laughed at everything. His pasta was the saviour of our BBQ to which half the town was invited while we were naively cooking for 20. I caught a few of the Italians conversing about the incredibly odd watermelon salad (watermelon with ONION!?!?) and noted that Loris' pasta was a very popular dish with the Italians, who are loathe to try anything that seems even slightly unusual. (Explains a lot about the country.) All in all, the Italians took good care of the weird Aussies who wandered the streets in work clothes and floppy green hats.

On a Monday morning we departed Italy for France. Our first day was free so we wandered through a nearby valley, where I developed a strange obsession with taking close up photos of flowers and insects. From Tuesday to Friday we worked very hard, some of us building an entrance to an old mine which will be opened to tourists while others jigsaw‑puzzled their way through creating a stone path masterpiece. We were ensconced in dorms on top of the world, at the bottom of a valley (up and down works differently in the mountains). We carted wooden planks, shook our heads in confusion at the French leader's idea of a concrete mix, stole a few moments to look for silver near the mine and collected a lot of rocks, putting them into the wall from where they were promptly pulled by our merciless Italian leader Stefano because they didn't fit properly. I will never again take for granted the beauty of a rock wall; it's harder work than you can possibly guess. We had a couple of interesting altercations with the French leader who seemed not to understand the difference between volunteers and slaves (I marched to his house one evening and lectured him while he sat on the stairs in his underpants, pretty funny really.) In the end though they came through for us and we were given excellent hiking advice, some very good picnics and even a few polite words. The French are perhaps more ignorant than rude... perhaps.

I enjoyed myself in both places far more than I expected to. I have learned to wield a whetstone, mix concrete, build rock walls (and learned that they invented bricks for a reason); I can now expertly hack at weeds with a scythe, paint the Italian way (add some paint to your water) and best of all, I have discovered a real love of hiking and, apparently, photographing flowers and insects. Two new hobbies!

However, the aspect of the trip that I enjoyed the most was meeting the inspiring, interesting people I worked with. Every one of them taught me something about how to make a success of life, the men were refreshing evidence that men with grace, tact and intelligence do in fact exist while the women were blueprints for the sort of person I hope to become. I definitely recommend a trip with CVA, whether in Australia or overseas. It was interesting, fulfilling and enjoyable.