Kin Kin cont'd - Blogabond

As time went on we got a little more settled at the property, learning to cook some fairly tasty food with what was available, playing with the dogs and exploring the surrounding area (although we were sleeping an incredibly amount, about 10-11 hours at night and usually a nap of some sort during the afternoon!) but we never really 'clicked' with the hosts. It all felt a little like they'd have preferred us not to be there, but needed us to help out with gardens too much to not. Plus a lot of their views (their devotion to naturopathy, a site called Doctors are Dangerous.com, and their religious beliefs which saw them watching dvds preaching hellfire on non-believers (and rockbands :-D) on the Saturday day-of-rest among other things) were so out-of-kilter with ours (and new WWOOFer Matt's) that we couldn't have a conversation with them without wanting to contradict what they were saying. It really felt like they would believe in anything as long as it wasn't 'mainstream', no matter how wacky. And, obviously, being guests, we couldn't argue or contradict them without causing serious tension, so we kept fairly seperate, apart from work and mealtimes.

It worked pretty well. The setting was beautiful; we would walk along the unsealed road out of the valley, up to KinKin to get our fix of chocolate milkshakes and yoghurt from the tiny general store, and a couple of times we followed sections of the Noosa Trail. On the longest of those walks we spotted a long, fat, red-bellied blacksnake slithering across the path. The forests surrounding us were so like English ones that the sudden sight of a large, poisonous snakes left us pretty unnerved as we walked gingerly along the trail through the long grass!
Nik and I would also go up to the beautiful dam area at the top of the property during some of our afternoons off, where there were mango-trees, birdsong and the forest stretching up to sky. In the paddocks you could also relax with a book in the sunshine, while the cattle and calves dozed on the other side of the fence, chickens clucked and pecked about, and the goats bleeted from where they were tethered.

One day us three WWOOFers went with Tom to an open house-garden organised by a member of the Noosa permaculture group. The man had built his house to be as energy efficient as possible; it was only one-room deep to minimise heat loss, and was angled perfectly to have the sun shine through the windows in winter, when the heat would be needed, and pass over the top in the harsh summer. He also had full solar-power, grey-water recycling, a permaculture garden (naturally), ducks, and goats for milk and making cheese. It seemed a fantastically sustainable way to live - and to us he seemed to be having more fun doing it (it wasn't just the fact that his compost toilet was indoors that swayed us, honest) than our hosts. Then again it helped that he seemed to be fairly well-off, still working as a house-designer and solar-panel sales contractor, and therefore was able to build his dream eco-home and design everything down to his converted-from-a-chestfreezer-fridge (freezers have better insulation). I was really impressed with it all. During our time WWOOFing we've been living and interacting with people to whom solar panels, growing your own food, compost-toilets and 'reduce, reuse, recycle' are a reality - not just concepts or nice slogans, and that man's ingenuity, and enthusiasm, was really inspiring.

written by

LizIsHere on September 5, 2010 from Cooroy, Australia

from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010

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