How adventurous travellers are trading their skills for working holidays

Anna Vedat held the tensioner while I snapped a metal wire with clippers. She passed it to me, and used the wire to loop it around a steel post. “Well done,” she said, kindly.

Vedat and I were just outside the village of Vauvenargues, in the south of France, patching holes in a chicken-wire fence with French instructions. In three hours, we had cut sheets of chicken wire, forced them through brambles, and covered three ...