WWOOFing - Blogabond

It was a bit hard to settle into my first 'real' WWOOF place at first - it wasn't quite what I'd been expecting, and the couple I was staying with also had a 6yr old who wasn't mentioned, for whatever reason, in their book entry. Argh! Child(ren)!!! Add that to the fact that I was staying in a strangers' home, it was all a bit odd for the first day or two. But Alisha and Jay were really down-to-earth (and young, mid-20s) Aussies, and made me feel welcome - they'd had over 100 WWOOFers over the past two years, so they were used to randomers coming through their house to help out. Though the WWOOF entry emphasised their bee-keeping business, this had been partially destroyed during last year's wet season, when flooding wrecked about 450 of their 520 hives, so most of the work would be around their House and garden, which help fruit trees, beehives, some chooks and a goose, and their veggie patch. This meant that Alisha and Jay had had to re-open their lock-smithing business in a shop in town, with honey-products as a side-line, though they still had their impressive extracting room below the House.
I spent the 5ish days I spent at their place doing a variety of chores: weeding the veggie patch, collecting eggs, mulching the fruit trees, gurneying (jet-washing to us poms) their walkways, making honeystraws, painting shelves, blue-tacking on labels (that was the best job, honestly...), leafleting cars to advertise their joint lock-smithing and honey businesses, and running errands to the bank etc. It wasn't tough work, by any means, and their House being right in town meant I could check out Ingham, a nice-enough small Australian town with a large Italian population, during my afternoons off.

I was also lucky enough to arrive on a weekend when the family were going camping overnight at Mount Fox, a mountain about an hour's drive from Ingham. We loaded up the car, and trailer-tent, and drove through fields of sugarcane, over sealed and unsealed roads, finally winding up the narrow road up the mountain (which apparently collapses sometimes in the wet season) to the cooler airs of Mount Fox. A small community lives up on the mountain - mostly cattle farmers - and everyone has to keep stores of fuel and food in case they become stranded during road washouts. There is a tiny community school up there too, though older children are either home-schooled or packed off to boarding schools in Ingham or Townsville.
The campsite was run by the local LIONS and was lot less primitive than i was expected; there were toilets, showers with water warmed using a donkey-boiler (the suggestion that we 'spark a fire up under the donkey' as soon as we arrived left me confused on the drive until i worked out what a 'donkey' was), a cooking/bbq area and even an ancient rusty fridge. We cooked BBQ, drank Milo when the temperature dropped, and ventured out onto the small 'village green' area next to the campsite to gaze at the millions of stars. Earlier in the evening six kangaroos had visited the green to graze. I ended up sleeping on the backseat of the car, which actually turned out to be a much better deal than freezing in the the fold-out trailer tent like the others, though it was so cold we all had to sleep in jeans, jumpers, coats and socks!

written by

LizIsHere on June 6, 2010 from Ingham, Australia

from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010

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