Marianne was nice enough to give us a lift to 'Bundy', where we had a good part of the day to explore the town. I think in reality all you'd need was about an hour and a half in the slightly red-neck-y large town, but we filled the time with cafe wanderings, a visit to the BRAG art gallery, which had a digital media exhibition on, and by - of course, it's what we do best - sitting in parks.

Catherine, our new-short-term host, picked us up from the bus station in the afternoon and we drove the 30 km or so out of town to her olive and mango-growing property, Blue Gum Grove. Our host was English; she had moved out to Australia with her husband in 1973, though she still retained her London accent and devotion to Arsenal. The front of her property looked down a gentle slope to her 20 acres of olives groves and mango trees, and the dam, while out the back (well, the front really, but almost no farm people seem to use their front doors, so the back-door essentially becomes the front-door), was a domestic orchard, which grew an array of exotic fruits, including figs, 5-star fruit, mulberries, breadfruit (me neither), chocolate pudding fruit and the glorious custard apple (sadly not in fruit), and some others that I'd never heard of and unfortunately now can't remember. We also met her large, exciteable collie-type dog, Jess.

It was a little strange to land in a strange place to WWOOF for just two and a half days, but Catherine was friendly and understood the importance of regular cups of tea, so we all got on well. On our first day we rose at the fantastically leisurely hour of 8ish to begin work at 9am. Since the torrential rain which had begun on our first evening hadn't abated by the morning, we set about sweeping, scrubbing and tidying up the two large front and back verandahs for the morning. Then in the afternoon we spent an hour or so filling up water containers from an excess-water storage tank, and stacked these up. It was hardly back-breaking work.

The following day we spent a full day working alongisde Catherine mulching her domestic orchard with cane mulch (the bits left over after the cane has been cut. Did I mention that almost everywhere we've been the rural landscape has been crammed with cane fields? Endless, endless cash-crop sugar cane). That day left us all pretty tired, and we could only summon the energy to watch the legendary (well, probably only to us) Aussie music-comedy show Spicks and Specks before going to bed.

And that was the end of our Bundy WWOOFing. Catherine gave us a lift back to the bus station the next morning and we caught the Greyhound back to Childers, walking the thirty-minutes along the wide grassy road verges, past fields and farm properties back to Vintner's, our adopted Childers home.

written by  LizIsHere on August 13, 2010 from Bundaberg, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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written by  ella on September 1, 2010

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