This is the Chateau Life

Our first taste of work in New Zealand lasted for exactly one month. Raring to bring our budget back on track after splashing out early in our trip, we took on the role of kitchen hands at the Chateau Tongariro, which is set in the Tongariro National Park... funnily enough. The job pretty much entailed helping out the chef’s and keeping the kitchen clean and tidy at all times, but it was more than just another source of income for us, or in fact even another experience; the chateau would be our new home, our new everyday restaurant, our new workplace and suddenly, before we knew it, our whole lives would be tangled up in and around it.

It’s hard to imagine how life can revolve so much around work whilst you’re travelling abroad, but perhaps one day you’ll find yourself in our shoes - metaphorically of course, even though Liam actually likes to lose his shoes on beaches... so somewhere, someone is probably literally walking in Liam’s shoes.

Let’s start by saying that just like any job, there are some downsides to working here, but thankfully the chateau’s good at making things up to you. Firstly (and this is a big one) accommodation; living somewhere so remote can be extremely expensive, maybe because there isn’t much competition in these places to keep the price of rooms in line. In the chateau however, accommodation is provided as part of the package.

The rooms, which are reserved for staff only, are around $100 a week for a single and $150 per week for a double (March 2019). These rooms are in their own block, separated far from the guests accommodation which means the staff have plenty of privacy and can relax with colleagues after work. For this money though you can’t expect much luxury, or in fact much at all, except a bed and some basic facilities including shared bathrooms and free-to-use washing machines. Despite sharing these with other staff, we never had an issue with getting in each other's way.

By the way, the weather in Tongariro during the winter months can be bitterly cold, so you may want to invest in a portable heater if you plan to stay/work there; the rooms aren’t cold, but they’re not exactly toasty either.

The second best perk of working at the chateau has to be the FREE FOOD. Yes, free food! This consists of breakfast, which is of the cooked variant every other day, lunch, and dinner for all of the employees regardless of whether they are working that day or not. There’s also free tea and coffee, and bread to snack on between meal times, or if you’re Liam, there is bread to snack on 24/7. As you can imagine, all this saved us an immense amount of money which we were proud to be able to put to one side (But this is only because Sabina wouldn’t let Liam spend it on even more food).

Once again, the food is free so don’t expect Gordon Ramsay-style fine cuisine. What you can expect however is edible food every day and also a couple of little things called ‘Pasta-Tuesday’ and ‘Burger-Friday’. We won’t tell you what the specials are on those days though, because we want it to be a surprise for you. To give you an example of the type of food you can expect on the other days, one of the most common dishes was rice, meat, and mixed veg. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can enjoy some dessert afterwards and other times, if you’re unlucky... Liam will eat your dessert when you look away.

As an employee of the hotel, you will also get a discount on food and drinks in the restaurants and even some local activities, such as ski equipment hire. During our stay, we used our staff discount to get half-price on the shuttle bus for the Tongariro Alpine Crossing.

Now for the only major downside... the WiFi. It’s not included in the price of accommodation, but of course for this money, we really wouldn’t expect it to be. The problem we had though was the quality of the WiFi, which is provided by Firestar and works about as well as a fire-guard made of chocolate. There are several plans to chose from, but none will be as quick as driving to a neighbouring town and using another source of WiFi, one that’s actually capable of connecting to the internet... want to check if it’s going to rain later?... it’s probably easier just to wait and see.

While we are on the subject, the WiFi is also expensive, only lets you connect one device at a time, and disconnects with every change of location. For internet that works, Spark is the provider of choice for most long-term residents - they’ll happily set you up with something reliable if you’re willing to pay for your own broadband installation, and the other option would be to set yourself up with a good mobile data plan.

So now you know a little bit more about what to expect when living at the chateau, but what about working there? As we mentioned, we were working as kitchen hands. It’s not the most glamorous job, but certainly not the worst - here’s the rundown.

JOB DESCRIPTION

The main task is doing the dishes. This is split into two sections - cleaning the serving dishes and cutlery or cleaning the cooking equipment that the chef’s use. “Both are equally as fun to do” - technically a true statement...

In addition to keeping on top of the dishes, there are a range of other tasks to keep you busy during your shift, a few of them being: prepping the vegetables without adding your fingers to the recipe, changing the bins whilst hoping the bags don’t split, resisting the cakes as you clean the walk-in fridges, and if you happen to be on the evening shift, cleaning the kitchen at the end of the day - top tip by the way... always check the drains are not blocked before hosing down the floor or the kitchen will fast become a swimming pool (Liam!). The deliveries are dealt with by the morning shift.

Of the two shift patterns, it is generally said that the morning shift is the better one to have, typically because if somehow time doesn’t allow you to complete one, two... any of your allocated tasks, the afternoon shift will have to do them, even if it means staying until 3 am to get everything finished. Of course this is just hypothetically speaking right? The morning shift would never do that to the afternoon shift would they? Well... let us just say that this number wasn’t pulled from thin air... The truth is we’ll never really know what it’s like to both do the morning shift because we were always given the evening shift (and hence always working until very late), this ultimately being the deciding factor when we eventually left.

Time for a positive, and if you don’t mind rolling the dice between a relaxed morning and a late night, the privilege of being able to manage your own time is great. In this job, nobody is supervising how you conduct your work. This means as long as you work at a good pace, you can do the tasks in whatever order suits you and take breaks almost whenever you want. We always had our breaks together, and always when we wanted, this was a really nice aspect of this position.

Ok now back to the bad stuff. Obviously most of the time we were cleaning, but that goes without saying. The problem here is that not everybody was cleaning to our standards and so sometimes, we found ourselves making up for this by cleaning more than we would normally have to. This got tedious pretty quickly as you can probably imagine. Another thing that made things harder than necessary was when other people stepped in to ‘help us’. It’s a lovely gesture but guess what?... using the rinse sink to clean an entire bowl of chocolate only creates much more mess, and also means the sinks then have to be refilled again with clean soapy water afterwards. This was even more annoying than the times when somebody would look for us for ten minutes just so we could wash a spoon for them... no really, this happened more than once.

After taking care of the washing up came the everyday cleaning. The Chateau is a well known hotel offering the best services possible and that means that the cleaning standards are high. As kitchen hands, we were also responsible for the cleanliness of the staff dining area. Once we had cleaned and sanitized our work-space we could move on to the checklist:

• Clean the staff dining area

• Sweep and mop the corridors

• Clean the kitchen mats

• Empty all the bins

• Sort the recycling

• Sanitize the walk-in fridges and freezer

• Clean the floor in the walk-in fridges

• Oil the pans and put them away

• Clean the drain(s)Clean the kitchen floor

• Refil the cleaning products

Of all of these, cleaning the floor was no doubt the hardest task. All of the counter-tops, trolleys, stoves, fridges etc. had to be moved to ensure a 100% clean of the floor every night. The first step was to sweep, in order to get rid of any large debris, dirt and small children that may have got stuck under the appliances during the day. After that, we would flood the kitchen floor with soapy water and scrub with a brush before using a squeegee to get rid of the water. Lastly, we would mop the floor to sanitize it.

On average, we would finish at about 1am if everything went well and there were no additional jobs to be done left over from the morning shift. The key to an early finish is organising your time effectively - some of the tasks can be done before the kitchen has closed and keeping on top of things before they build up can have a big impact on the amount of sleep you’ll get that night. Once everything on the checklist has been ticked off, we usually sat in the staff area for 10-15 minutes and had a well-earned coffee or snack. Ok, we’ll admit, sometimes we had more than one snack... but Liam never took cake back to the room...

...much.

Well, that’s a summary of our experience at the chateau (The other stuff - not the part about Liam taking cake). It’s obviously not the easiest job in the world but it sure isn’t the hardest either. We knew that being kitchen hands wouldn’t be the most enjoyable thing we could have done but to be fair, it’s better than a lot of things we could have been doing. We also took on the role hoping to save quite a bit of money during our stay and this played out as expected, giving us the funds to continue travelling. As a couple, we managed to save up around $600 a week which really helped us out.

While we were in the area, we managed to visit quite a few nearby places, walked most of the tracks in Whakapapa village, did the breathtaking Tongariro Alpine Crossing and even attempted to hike the highest mountain in the North Island, Ruapehu (but Sabina got scared of a cloud so we had to turn back).

We had some good days and some bad days at the chateau. We also explored some amazing places, met some incredible people and took advantage of the free washing and drying facilities many times. Even though we eventually got fed up of the job and left earlier than we planned we don’t regret working at the chateau. In fact, we are really glad to have had the opportunity to live in such a beautiful place and whilst also re-fuelling our bank balance. The question is, would we do it all again?

Sabina: “Absolutely!”

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Liam: “Yes, but I’d take a fridge for the room”

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