Campsite courier work, France 2005

After spending summer 2004 working in the USA, I returned to university in the autumn and after a week or two was soon wondering what I was going to do with my next summer. I didnâ€™t want to go back to camp in the US, as I fancied a change, a bit more freedom, and a little more money. After searching many summer job websites, I came across Canvas Holidays and other companies who were looking to recruit Campsite Couriers to work in Europe, mainly in France. After a bit of investigation into the best options, I applied to Canvas, had an interview at the start of December, and was offered a job a couple of days later.

Fast forward to July 2005. On Saturday July 9, I had to get up early and make my way by train to Stansted Airport (having adjusted my travel plans so as to avoid central London in the aftermath of the 7 July bombs). At Stansted I met two other people who were going to the same area as me, although theyâ€™d both been Campsite Couriers before, so they had a better idea of what they were letting themselves in for! From Stansted I flew to Bergerac â€“ a tiny airport in the Dordogne region in southern France. The airport was so small that the baggage hall was in a sort of marquee-type structure, with a single slide-type thing that your luggage was pushed down by your fellow passengers! From the airport, we were picked up by our area manager, and taken to our camp sites.

Stephen and Louise, the two people who had also been on my flight, were taken to their site, which I saw very briefly. Then it was about 15 minutes drive to the site where I would be working, Camping Les Granges in Grolejac. I was shown my â€œinnerâ€ (section of a large tent, where I was to live for the summer) and met my new colleagues.

The next morning I was shown how to clean a tent and a mobile home â€“ pretty much the biggest part of a campsite courierâ€™s job. I also learned about all the bits of paperwork here and there, how to welcome a customer to the site, how to set out a bottle of wine and two glasses for their arrival, and how to fold the end of the toilet roll into a neat little triangle…
Anyway, that was work. We did some, most days (having a day and a half off a week), and it mostly involved cleaning accommodation, showing customers in, solving minor maintenance issues, visiting customers every couple of days to check everything was OK, and so on. It wasnâ€™t terribly exciting, or terribly well paid, but there were major advantages: being able to spend your time when not working in the sunshine by the pool, your evenings drinking cheap wine and beer in the bar, and just enjoying the general silliness that seemed to happen every day. Generally, the team on site all got on very well with each other, and we all had a lot of fun working, living, eating, and drinking together. On days off we would cycle to Sarlat, the town/village 10km away, which was a very picturesque place, and also had essential facilities such as an internet cafe and Leclerc supermarket. Oli (one of my colleagues) and I went on a couple of cycle rides through the countryside and little villages around the site. (He had a habit of shooting up the (inevitably very steep) hills in front of me, although I soon caught him up when I reached the top and had gravity on my side). We went canoeing down the Dordogne (for free â€“ since we recommended it to our customers â€“ except Oli managed to lose a watch and a pair of sunglasses in the river!). We spent hours sitting around and drinking tea, or coffee, or beer, or wine, whilst listening to the same music over and over, and repeating the same silly catchphrases and in-jokes over and over too. We watched The Office and Peter Kay DVDs over and over too (thanks to Joshâ€™s portable DVD player, which sadly died towards the end of the summer). We ate dozens of plates of spaghetti carbonara (made with lardons, because the French donâ€™t seem to do whole slices of bacon) and bolognese (made with mashed up frozen hamburgers, because they donâ€™t do minced beef either) and â€œturkey in some sauce with riceâ€, and omelettes, and baguettes. We sang Good Vibrations very badly, on two occasions, at the campsite’s kareoke evenings. We also drank silly amounts of red wine, some of which was donated by our customers, who didnâ€™t seem to think much of the bottles we left to welcome them into their accommodation. (At 1 euro and 7 cents a bottle from Lidl, I think Canvas Holidays had really splashed out…).

Of course, we werenâ€™t always in good moods. There were a few problems with staffing on site, which meant that after Iâ€™d been working there for two weeks we were given a Site Supervisor who did little to motivate or encourage us (not helped by the fact she did little work herself). People who we had become good friends with left to go home or move to other sites, and new people arrived. There were one or two of our colleagues that we didnâ€™t always get on too well with. There were also the inevitable fussy customers, who seemed to complain about anything, and the messy customers, who would leave their mobile home with every dish unwashed, every surface covered in dirt and hair, and somehow managed to get short curly hairs into the back of the fridge…

However, every cloud has a silver lining, and the minor problems we faced certainly taught me a lot, including how to be a good manager, how to tactfully placate stroppy customers (in our case often involving a free bottle of wine), and how to get along well with my colleagues. (When youâ€™re spending every hour of every day for 10 weeks in close proximity with a group of people, you tend to manage to resolve your differences pretty quickly). The problems we faced with our site supervisor actually brought the rest of the team closer together, and at the end of the day nothing was as bad as it had seemed earlier when you were fed up to the back teeth of polishing glasses and scrubbing limescale out of shower cubicles.

Over the summer I made great friends, formed great memories, learned an awful lot about work, and can now cook fantastic tuna pasta in only two pans. Iâ€™d really very seriously recommend spending a some time working abroad in this sort of environment to anyone with a few months to spare over the summer. Just donâ€™t do it for the money.

My photos from the summer are here.

For more info about working as a Campsite Courier abroad, see:
Canvas Holidays/Camping Life recruitment
Holidaybreak Jobs (Eurocamp/Keycamp)
SeasonWorkers (Lots of info about seasonal work)