LizIsHere

The Red Centre - it's hot

LizIsHere — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I flew to Alice Springs on the 16th, to spend one night in the town before heading off on my three-day camping tour of the Red Centre on the 17th. Expecting hot weather, I donned shorts and t-shirt for flight. As we landed I peered outside, eager to see baking earth and blazing sun. Instead I saw... rain. And that was what I saw for that entire day and the night, pounding, monsoon-style rain, hammering on the roof of the hostel, splashing into the swimming pool, filling the near-constantly dry Todd River-bed, forcing the desert to spring out rare green foliage. Luckily when I awoke at the bright and painfully early time of 5am the next day, it had miraculously stopped, and my fears that Uluru would be obscured by cloud faded away.

We set off at the 6am in our Mulgas Tour minibus, with our guide G-J, a young, fun guy with on his last tour with Mulgas. On the way to the Rock - our first stop of the tour - we picked up seven of his mates from Uluru airport, who'd come for Brisbane for his last tour. The guys were all just finished with uni - rowdy, loud and fun, and injected a huge amount of entertainment into the long bus journeys we undertook over the next few days - although we probably could have done without their gratutious farting on the bus...

Our first day, helped by G-J's extensive Ipod selection, we drove for hours... and hours.... and hours... Through a desert of red dirt covered with pale-green scrub, stretching to the endless horizon and punctuated with burnt-orange and ochre rocky outcrops. The sky seemed endless too - genuine Big Sky. And by the time we reached a rest stop at 1 million-acres-plus Curtain Springs Cattle Station and Roadhouse at around 9am, the temperature had risen to decidedly warm. A hot wind blew across the expanse of red-dirt forecourt as a solitary emu stalked around the four petrol pumps.

After picking up our swags - a sort of hardcore sleeping bag with a mattress inside, which the old bushmen in Australia carried and slept in on their tramps in the outback, and which we would sleep in out under the stars for the next two nights - we drove onwards, past Mount Connor, or 'Fooluru' as it's also known for it's slight resemblance to the Rock when spotted in the distance by eager tourist, to Uluru-Kate Tjuta National Park.

Many Australians had told me that no matter how many pictures you see of Uluru, it won't prepare you for seeing the real thing, rearing up in a solitary mass of rock in the distance, and it was true. It looked both absolutely like the pictures and nothing like them - it seemed, like the Opera House, almost like a movie-scene background, until we got closer and could make out it's true shape - far craggier and with more variation in it's rock formations, shades and texture than the postcards show. It's The Rock. And it took our breath away, the sheer natural mass of it, even without our being able to truly grasp it's significance to the Aboriginal people of the area, to whom it is where their spirit ancestors reside and an extremely sacred place. Which is why they keep telling everyone not to climb on it, naturally enough.

The climb was shut the day we arrived, anyway (it's only open about 50 days of the year, on average), and our small group set off on the base walk, a 10 km walk around the base of rock, taking in some of the spectacular formations in it - wave caves, arched caves, soaring walls of red-orange rock, and even water holes nestled in giant crevices, where it felt as if we could almost walk inside the rock itself. It was a hot day, and the walk had no shade, so we took it slow, meandering along, gazing upward and around, refilling waterbottles whenever possible and sheltering under hats (mine a rather nifty cowboy number borrowed from the hostel)... apparently it's pretty horrible to do in the middle of summer, in 40C heat.. who'd have though it?

From the base walk we drove to Ayers Rock resort, and our campsite - a large fenced-off square of red dirt on which to unroll our swags, with just enough for a dip in the pool before we headed back to a viewpoint to eat dinner and watch the sunset on Uluru. It was just slightly surreal to eat spaghetti while watching the rock change colours from bright orange to dark red to a greyish purple as the sun settled under the horizon...

The final WWOOF

LizIsHere — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I spent 10 days WWOOFing for the Groateurs, on their 2 acre property in the Yarra Valley, about an hour on the train from Melbourne. And a packed 10 days it was! From the off I realised that despite being 'retired', Patty and Victor were not exactly made for doing nothing. As they are working towards self-sufficiency, with a large, thriving veggie garden, fruit trees, and 5 chihuahuas (farm chihuahuas, prone to getting covered in oil and dirt, who gave me an extremely loud, unfriendly welcome when I first arrived!), two Dexter cattle, two sheep, 12 ducks, 14 chooks and one grumpy miniature stallion (with serious 'short-man' syndrome) nestled away in the paddocks and on the dam behind their house, they couldn't help but be busy!
Every morning we would go out to feed the animals, release the ducks onto the dam and the chooks into the yard (standing well back as we opened the hut door to avoid being trampled by claws and webbed feet), and muck out the cattle and pony stable. There was also the task of carrying Dot, the blind (ex-battery) duck, from the hut to the dam, and back in again in the evening, as she couldn't quite make it there herself. Her mate Twinkletoes was also an ex-battery hen, which Victor and Patty had nursed back to help through water-therapy (holding her in the dam everyday to let her swim and strengthen her legs, weaked by being made overweight and kept in a tiny battery cage) - she still walked with a slight bow-leg.

Along with the usual planting, harvesting and spreading stable muck on the veggie beds (yum!), the other tasks I did couldn't really be classed as work - from gathering and helping to bottle kilograms and kilograms of rhubarb from the gardens; going with them to collect unsold bread from a Lilydale Bakers Delight to feed to their animals (the shops throw out as waste almost 100% of their stock everyday otherwise!); accompanying Victor to the nearby dairy to collect litres of fresh milk for cheesemaking, and taking part in cheese-making and art classes. Patty was an accomplished artist, and ran classes from home and in community centres in everything from cheese-making to painting to indian cookery, bottling and preserving. I got to take part in the camembert and ricotta-making class, though I didn't get to try the camembert as it takes about 5 months to mature! As Mormons (no, not the scary you-will-be-converted ones, thankfully! And they kept caffeinated tea and coffee in the house for visitors too, phew) they had Sundays off, but even then Patty was keen to get me to do a painting project, which while not my thing at all turned out to be fun. It was all quite full-on, and although once or twice I would have appreciated a little time to myself, they were really open and generous people; I learnt so much and know that I can always email them with any questions about self-sufficiency, about which they were intense and enthusiastic mines of information.

After those ten days, armed with recipes from Patty and having donated some of my trashed clothes to them for rags and mulching material, I returned to Melbourne for one night before flying to Alice Springs for my red centre tour.

Melbourne and beyond!

LizIsHere — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Melbourne was fun but I'm now off to WWOOF, near Lilydale outside Melbourne for ten days. So no completed Melbourne blog yet because I've run out of time! Trams, art galleries, the riverside, film, performance art, and lots of people in Day-At-The-Races wear sort of sums it up!

Off to the farm... :)

A long bus ride, and a chilly city at the end of it...

LizIsHere — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Well, the bus ride was decidely NOT fun. In fact it was horrifyingly apt for a Halloween-night trip. Full to capacity, meaning elbows in your face as you attempted to sleep, a stinky toilet, an almost complete lack of sleep and, oh yeah, being trapped on a bus for 12 hours, did not a good trip make. Though seeing the dawn over the countryside outside Melbourne was quite nice - as was catching a glimpse of the skyline of the city on the misty, far horizon.

Arriving, I couldn't check into the hostel for 2 hours (woe-is-me!) which only added to my zombified state, but after dumping my bags and grabbing a shower, I struck out in to the city. Wearing a hoodie. That was the first change from Sydney - down the thermometer, from 24C + to about 17C. Brrrr. (Yes, and I'm sure everyone back in actually freezing cold Britain is sympathising with me here).

My optimistic aims didn't get me too far that first day - a ride on the free, old-style City Circle tram;a wander round Federation Square, a city focal point that's stuffed with museums, where I sat and watched an energetic Londoner doing comedy-performance art...and then it all went a bit downhill when I got lost somewhere around the Greek/Chinese Quarters, collapsed for a little while in the sudden warm sunshine on the Treasury Gardens' lawns and then gave up and headed back to the hostel to lie around on various sofas until a sensible time (8pm, ahem) rolled around for me to be able to go to bed.

Syd-neeeeee

LizIsHere — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

We left Taree on the 7.30pm bus and arrived, bleary eyed and slightly disbelieving, in Sydney at past midnight. Luckily our first-night hostel was only a stumble across the street from the bus-station, and we manage to grab six hours sleep before packing up again and catching the tram across town to Glebe, the funky, studenty quarter where we'd spend the next four night (five for me!) at Glebe Village Backpackers.
Glebe does feel like a little village, full of little cafes, independent shops, bookshops, restaurants and pretty wrought-iron-balcony'd old houses. It's a breath of peace and greenery when we come back from the buzzing city centre.

guess where #2

guess where?

The past few days have been hot, and we've walked a lot! The first day's excursion - taking into the Opera House, harbour bridge, the historical Rocks area, Botanic Gardens and the grungy area of Kings Cross - was enough to wreck my feet in flipflops and cause me to pull a [something] in my foot, so I've spent the last three days limping about! Seeing the Opera House caused an actual 'ooh' intake of breath, and it's become more impressive through all the different ways we've seen it - up close, glimpsed through the bridge, from the Manly ferry. The bridge itself is imposing - i plan to walk across it tomorrow (foot permitting).

the harbour bridge

Blue Mountains

On our second day here we headed out on the 2 1/2 train ride to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains - so called because the haze of eucalyptus oil from the forests causes a unique blue haze in the air. It's... and this has been an overused word in this blog... but... stunning. Oh, and breathtaking. And... huge.. HUGE. From Echo Point the forests and cliffs spread out in a never-ending panorama, on and on to the horizon, with the rugged rock formation, The Three Sisters framing the view to the left. I could have gazed at it all day.

Blue Mountains

Instead, though, we opted to clamber down the 1000 stairs of the Giant Staircase and walk along Federation Pass, an approx. 2 hour forestwalk, which passed under the three sisters and ended up at the nauseatingly-named 'Scenic World', where we could catch the world's steepest railway (I was not keen on this, not at all) back up to the top of the cliffs.
The walk was cool, the air was fresh... the world's steepest railway was TERRIFYING. Steep means steep, and the fact that we were the only passengers heading back up didn't fill me with confidence. The words 'I am NEVER doing that again!' may have escaped my lips as we got off, slightly shakily, at the top.

world's steepest railway - action shot!

From the 'Scenic World' (urgh) complex, we caught the Explorer Bus onwards and walked to the Luera Cascades, a walk which passed viewpoints above the Bridal Falls - with white cockatoos soaring over the blue - and climbed up through the trees beside cliffs to the cascades themselves. The heavens opened just as we reached Leura town itself, so we headed back to Katoomba for epic hot chocolates and to catch the train back to Sydney.

On Thursday we checked out the supreme tackiness of Paddy's Markets, then Nik went to Bondi while I chilled out at the hostel nursing my foot, yay. In the evening we went down to Darling Harbour, a massively regenerated area of the city with expensive hotels and restaurants around the harbour, to watch the fireworks displays which have been put on every week this month (I'm not sure why, the info board didn't explain, but they were nice anyway - more the 'Ahhhh I'm watching fireworks over the harbour in Sydney' than for any other reason!)

Yesterday we caught the 'famous' ferry to Manly, a seaside town/suburb with a slightly English feel, pretty beaches and 'good surf', to give Nik his last dose of Aussie beach-time before flying back home today. The ferry ride was a definite highlight, with great views back to the city and Opera House/The Rocks.

It's famous.

It's a cool city, though I like Glebe and it's grungier neighbour, Newtown, far more than the city centre - it's a proper little neighbourhood, somewhere people actually live, and I'm so glad we stayed here rather than Kings Cross or nearer the centre. If I'd come to Sydney first and live/worked here I'd probably never have left to see all the other stuff!

Nik catches his flight back to Blighty today, so I'm back to travelling on my own for next month - starting with what I'm convinced will be a fun fun fun 12-hour bus ride to Melbourne tomorrow night!

Nik's last night in Sydney

Hosts the last

LizIsHere — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

From Grafton we moved on to Taree, another nowhere town on the backpacker map of the east cost, but the location from where our next host - based out in the countryside near the town of Wingham, got best pick us up. Our hosts, Mary and Roger, lived out in Mooral Creek valley on 100 acres, in their self-built home with some goats, extremely vocal geese, six beautiful white rare-breed chooks and some cattle. There was also sometimes a visiting platypus in their dam, but not on our visit, alas. They described their land as 'mostly for looking at', but they most definitely doers, not observers! They were keen to clear rampant weeds from their property, and regenerate the native forest which had once grown there, using only a few (self-) fenced paddocks for grazing their cattle. From South Africa originally, they had moved to Aus about twelve years ago and were now citizens, Mary working as a primary teacher, and Roger working as a machinery designer from home.

The setting of their house was stunning, about halfway up the slopes of the valley, their solar-biased house faced a breathtaking view of mountains and forest. They had a small veggie garden, which we would help extend, and orchard. They were fun people, very energetic and driven, quick with jokes and laughs, and with an extreme fondness for card games at morning tea and.... well, at any oppotunity! It was by no means a bad place to WWOOF, and as most of their WWOOFers are first timers, coming up from Sydney, they must think they've come to heaven with the beautiful scenery, tasty food, good company, comfortable, private accomodation and the free use of phone and internet! But it wasn't one of the most interesting places we've stayed - and some of the work was up there with the most exhaustingly physical we've done on this trip! During our time there the mattock and shovel became our close companions - for digging pipe-trenches, weeding the new no-dig (ha?!) garden, and digging a frankly gigantic (our fault, we took Mary's estimate of 75cm/75cm/75cm literally!) tree for a fruit tree, going through soil to shale to clay to rock in our quest for a good home for our fruit tree. I say 'our' - their orchard had a fruit tree planted by every one or each pair of their WWOOFers, and each was marked by a WWOOFer painted stone recording their names and the date of planting. "Our WWOOFer graveyard" Mary called it. We planted a quince, and Mary's promised us updates on it's progress.

Yes, we dug a big big hole

We also pulled out bagfuls and bagfuls of the dreaded fireweed, a rampant yellow-flowered weed, bashed thistles with (thankfully blunt) machetes, collected and shelled runner beans, and baked and baked and baked - South African 'crunchies', flapjacks, biscuits. It was a welcome relief to go inside to shell beans or bake when the sun, which seemed to have finally realised it's true role in life after a month's sabbatical, became too much.

shelling beans, oh yeah

Mary and Roger also took us out to the cinema one night, to watch Skin, a film about a black girl born to white parents in apartheid Africa. It was interesting to discuss it with people who lived there through that period, and the through the lifting of it, but I was full of more questions which could have possibly caused some tension, and since my journalistic hat wasn't on and I had to live with them for another week, I kept most of them to myself!

We had a nice time, but we were excited to leave, despite the peace of countryside, to get to Sydney... and to leave the mattock behind us!

creek safaris, pancakes and dingos

LizIsHere — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

We had a great time at Fairweather - since Hayden and Eleanor were the closest in age to us of any of the WWOOF hosts, we had a fair few things in common, and they were fun to be around. And, aside from the interesting (even with the cow poo it was good to be out in the forest!) work and having loads of our own space, the food was amazing too, particularly the make-your-own-pizza and bonfire night we had up at their cabin - secluded away up a forested hill from the rest of the farm - one night (Hayden managing to start the fire despite the persistent rain!), and Hayden's pancakes, or as Nik called them after consuming approximately twelve at one sitting, Death By Pancakes.

There was also a lot of land to explore - 450 ha of it - though we only saw a teeny fraction of it. One day after work, with the sun finally peeking through the clouds, Nik and I took the took the dogs on a creek safari - less of walk, more of a clamber, crawl, bash and climb through, round, and over bushes, trees, and rocks alongside the creek in the forest below the main cabin. We also went on a more organised bush-bashing expedition to clear a walking track along the main, wider creek, armed with secatuers, small axes, and a tempermental chainsaw. The day was warm, the creek was full (and COLD when I scrambled across it from rock-to-rock - the only casualty to the crossing was my absolute backpackers waterbottle which I'd had since mission beach, carried away by the creek), the scenery was pretty, and we also got a chance to hack at any undergrowth blocking the path, which mostly followed cattle trails. We were even lucky enough to find a carpet python, curled up circularly in rest on a sunny, grassy patch beside the water. As our last piece of official WWOOF 'work' at Fairweather, it was pretty hard to beat!

Dingo puppy with farm dog, Brandy

But one of the best and most unexpected happenings at the farm occurred on our second to last night, when I, walking up to the main cabin in the darkness guided by torchlight, spotted a strange-looking dog playing with Brandy. It turned out to be a dingo puppy! A dingo! The same animal that they wouldn't even let us get out of the tourbus near on Fraser Island! One of Hayden's friends had rescued two of them from a hollow log when he and his kids had found their mum dead on a bushwalk, they'd been raised domesticated; though they retained all the dingo mannerisms (including no bark - the muscovy duck of the dog world!), they were as happy curled up on John's lap as out hunting bandicoots in the forest. It was amazing to see - particularly to watch Brandy play with the two puppies, while Jasper stood by, eyeing them suspiciously. These are the kind of things we'd never have got to see without going WWOOFing.

Snakes, too close for comfort!

LizIsHere — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Our work varied over the day, starting generally around 9am. It involved a fair amount of weeding and mulching, but generally in different gardens or areas around the farm, which kept it fairly interesting. We also planted out herbs and tumeric, filling and planting seedtrays, feeding the pigs, and, joy of joys, heading out into the forest to collect cow poo for fertliser! We'd pile into the ute and bumpy along the steep and often muddy and rocky tracks up to an area Hayden had decided would be rich pickings. Then, a wheelbarrow to each pair and a shovel apiece, we'd shovel and shovel until both the back of the ute and trailer attached were full. Then, usually, someone would have joy of riding back to the farm in the back of the ute, balancing on the pile of poo (and often with a dog lying luxuriously in the softness next to them)! One day, after days of rains, we had an exciting poo-quest when the ute starting rolling backwards down the hill, out of control! Luckily Hayden managed to prevent us ending up embedded in a tree, but that particular route to the poo was ruled out after that.

In addition to poo missions and planting, there were also SNAKES. Many of them. Our first day of work was pretty hot and sunny, and Hayden discovered two giant red-bellied black snakes under a pile of tin at the end of one of the gardens. These he, erm, encouraged away, with the help of the whippersnipper... they writhed off across the grass, towards the dam wall we had to cross every day to our cabin! I ventured to ask whether snakes were active at night, but luckily got an answer in the negative. Hayden also had to kill a snake which wouldn't leave the garden, because it would pose too much of a risk to everyone working in there.
But our best/most exciting/terrifying (take your pick) snake encounter happened after work. Nik and I had just taken our generator-powered showers at the bunkhouse, and he'd left before me to head back to cabin. As I came down the slope towards the dam he was standing there on the dam wall, waving slightly at me. Not understanding I approached close, only to spot what he was transfixed by - two blacksnakes (the ones from earlier) coiled round each other in a hynoptic mating dance (we only found this out later after descrbing it to Hayden - we half-thought they were fighting). It was amazing but creepy... and I crept around them, giving them a very wide berth, to join Nik at a safe distance on the dam wall. We watched them for a while - then suddenly they uncoiled and shot with that surprising speed snakes have in a direction that looked worryingly like 'towards us'. I, being the level-headed and calm person that I am, promptly broke away to run across the dam wall to our cabin - only to be pulled up short by the sight of ANOTHER blacksnake, right in front of me - less than a metre away! Luckily for me it jerked in fear as I pulled up in horror, and shot off away from me, into the dam. I'd nearly stepped on a red-bellied blacksnake, and the other snakes hadn't even come towards us in the end! ...The adrenaline kept pumping for a while after that, I'll say.

And then Hayden, after being told excitedly by us that at least two of the snakes had gone for a swim (yes, they swim) in the dam, promptly stripped to his swimmers and dived in for his planned afternoon swim. "The ripples I cause'll scare them off" ... Aussies.

Fairweather... or not.

LizIsHere — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

We left Nimbin, spent a few rather time-killing-esque days back in Byron (rain, rain, fish and chips on the beach, some beach-chilling when the sun finally deigned to appear), then caught the bus to the 'dump' of Grafton to meet our second-to-last host. She was not what we expected - a Scottish girl in her mid-twenties, her accent baffled us for a long while until i finally ventured to ask what her connected was with the hosts listed in the book. Turns out that this was Eleanor - 'the WWOOFer who never left'! She had come on to WWOOF (her first ever host) at Fairweather Farm with owner Hayden after spending a month or so travelling between Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney on a 3month backpacking trip to Oz. She got to Fairweather, met Hayden, they got together, she applied for her first year working visa, then her second... Then they got engaged, so she applied for the partnership visa, and since that first planned 3 month trip she's never really left (except for a 6 week trip back to Scotland to pick up clothes... and, presumably, explain herself to her parents - that had to be an interesting phonecall home!). As she herself put it: "It's funny how things work out."

the fairweather farm crew

Definitely. I bet she never saw herself living in a wood cabin with her future husband on his 450hectare property when she left home with her backpack a few years back! Fairweather Farm (not so fair-weather, judging by the near-constant rain we had during our ten-day visit!) was a pretty amazing place to visit, let alone live. Mostly forested, with creeks and wild bush, kangaroos and numerous birdlife, snakes (I know for a rather-to-close-for-comfort fact that there were snakes, read on...), and many oddly shaped and hued mushrooms, the farm's business, run almost single-handedly by Hayden and Eleanor, is growing veggies and herbs for sale to restaurants, box schemes, pubs etc. Bought by Hayden - previously a town-boy - about 7 years ago, he transformed the large paddock (very large!) where the three dams, large vege/herb gardens, bunkhouse, 'main cabin' and our private eco-cabin are now situated from nothing, and built up his business by simply learning by doing and probably learning from making mistakes, too. It was all wonderfully laid-back (apart from pickin' and packin' days before a big order had to be delivered, normally a Tuesday), none of the hard-nosed commercial drive I'd expected from a commercial property. Plus, the area was beautiful, and remote.

Fairweather is reached from the mainroad outside Nymboida via 7km of bumpy logging tracks through the state forest - four-wheel driving conditions handled admirably by Eleanor in her decidely 2WD car. It's a long way from, well, anywhere. You have to really, really want that bar of chocolate to simply 'nip to shops' when you live there.

our cabin

We were staying in a private cedar-wood eco cabin, quite secluded away from the other buildings, in between the three dams - we had to walk aross one of the dam walls to reach it, and at night the walk would be a deafening one as hundreds of frogs set up an astoundingly loud cacophony of different croaks from the waters edge. The one-room cabin with adjoining compost toilet had it's own kitchenette, so we could fix our own breakfasts to eat out on the verandah. It was absolutely the best place we've stayed on the trip - the views, the peace (well, apart from frogs and occasional visits from the farm dogs, red kelpies Brandy and Jasper).

There were 2 other WWOOFers there when we arrived, Austrians Patrick and Max, who were staying in the bunkhouse. The property also had 6 fairly new young pigs, some goats who kept themsleves to themselves, the dogs, and the odd couple - the goose and the Muscovy duck, Daphne, who had a wonky leg from being attacked by a goanna.

the beloved muscovy, daff

Community # 2

LizIsHere — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

After leaving Jude, who dropped us back in Lismore when she went to work, we caught the local ‘school bus’ (strangely almost devoid of children) through rolling green countryside to Nimbin. Nimbin is ‘the centre of alternative lifestyle in Australia‘, or ‘full of pot-smoking hippies’ - depending on who you ask. It’s certainly far more in the cliched hippie mold than Byron Bay, but this is tempered by the fact that it’s a tourist-orientated place, with most shops on the brightly-painted and mural’d Nimbin Village mainstreet exploiting in some way the area’s fame as site for the 1976 Aquarius Festival, and the fact that weed is almost, almost, de facto legal in the area (though locals complain long and loudly in the local rags of heavy-handed over-policing in the village). The smoke from the often-openly smoked grass hangs in the air, particularly outside some of the cafes. Every shop on the mainstreet is brightly painted, mostly in a rainbow-theme, but shops such as The Apothercary, BringABong, Jaz’s Joynt Café, the Rainbow Café and The Hemp Embassy, which is both a retail outlet for hemp products and campaign headquarters for the marijuana legalisation campaign which organises the ’Mardi Grass’ festival every May. It’s bright, busy and noisy, with the cacophony of buskers outside Nimbin Hall and the muttered sales-pitches of the few slightly scummy-looking dealers who loiter on the street, accosting anyone who looks like a tourist - and there are a fair few.
We only spent about ten minutes in Nimbin before our next host, Satya, a massage therapist who lives on Tuntable Falls Community , arrived to pick us up in her, surprise,surprise, kombi van. Since there were only two ‘legal’ seats, Nik lay across the mattress in the back for the drive out of town to Tuntable. Our route to her house in Tuntable took us past the hub of 2000 acres community (most of the land purchased by hippies left in the area by the Aquarius Festival in the late 70s), where there was a large community hall, shop, and pre-and-primary schools. Tuntable is set in a forested valley, with most of the properties reached on the slopes via dirt tracks - with the track to Satya’s being one of the most potholes and bumpiest! Before the final leg up the steep slope to her property, hidden in trees in ‘Pixies Valley‘, we had to swap from her 2WD van to a 4WD Subaru - with the final drive up the steep slope requiring much acceleration, wheel-wrenching and gear manipulation, but we made it.

Satya’s house, built 36years ago by her and her ex-husband with little or no building knowledge, and no way of transporting materials up the slopes and through the vegetation except by foot - is on three levels of separate small buildings. The main and most-recently built one was reached by going past the stand-alone purple-painted compost toilet and up a wooden staircase to the verandah, looking out over the opposite thickly-forested slop. This housed the large kitchen-cum-dining room-cum-office. Through the back door of this building and up a little rocky slope was our cave room - her son’s old room - a small, dark little room, with most of one wall incorporating part of a gigantic boulder which also formed part of it’s support on the hillside. Hard to describe, but I have a picture somewhere! Anyway, it was perfect to sleep in due to lack of sunlight, and the view through the window was simply trees. The final building, the oldest one, was reached up a steep wooden staircase, now Satya’s bedroom but once the tiny house where she, her husband and daughter once lived before the other buildings where constructed.

the blue-cave-room

It was an amazing house - the verandah being the best part. The view was all trees and sky, the only noises birdsong, the rustle of bush turkeys and the hums of bees and flies; at night its crickets, the unbelievably loud and continuous croak of frogs and the odd owl. In the morning’s a local kookaburra, trained by Satya’s son, would often come and perch on the edge of the verandah to be fed tidbits of cheese. A basically harmless snake was residing on the roof while we there, while others of perhaps more or less venom darted away in front of us as we walked about the gardens. Pademelons (wallaby-type creatures, who were so numerous that I was quite disappointed the one day that I didn‘t see at least one) hop and bush turkeys strut through the extensive, rambling gardens, including a veggie garden reach by passing through a gap in a towering clump of bamboo. The solar-heated shower and bath was situated through here too, in another 36-year-old hand-constructed building - while it was slightly like showering in a garden shed, the views through the windows were unbeatable. The intimacy with nature was incredible, the silence, which wasn’t silence at all, but a more soothing noise than the city hubbub, the utter peace of being able to sit on the verandah and stare across in greenery, was fantastic. We could see why Satya was such a peaceful, low-key person (we had been worried, because of the Nimbin thing and our experience in Kin Kin that she’d be a little too wacky for us) - she was by far the least intense host we’ve had; silences didn’t feel awkward, and we felt very free and unrushed. To be honest we didn’t seem to get round to much work, either!

tamed kookaburra

Our first night Satya was going to an art opening for the Spring Exhibition at the hall back in Nimbin where a few of her daughter’s pieces were being exhibited, and we were invited along. One thing I didn’t expect to be doing - in Nimbin of all places - was to be wandering around a small art exhibition with everything from screenprints and etchings to carving and weaving, clutching a glass of wine on a Friday night.

Then again I didn’t expect to spent my Saturday first at a country show and then at a weaving festival! Satya again seemed less-than-concerned about our WWOOFing hours, and instead too us back to Nimbin in the faithful van - me in the back this time - to the Nimbin Show, a quaintly small country show with a frankly unsettling folk group, best cake/scone/jam and largest/most obscenely shaped vegetable competitions, dressage events, an exhibition of alpacas and - of course - a dog and duck show. It diverted our attention for about an hour, but after that we explored the erm, one main street of Nimbin a little more, stepping into the eccentric Nimbin Museum (where a kombivan still resides where it crashed - in the front wall), with random history tidbits and lots of pro-marijuana literature. Then we went along to school grounds to meet Satya at the miniscule - three tipis, one chai tent, about twenty women and their assorted barefoot children - Weave’n’Mend festival. It was slightly surreal, but also very cool - it was a tiny little festival, a glorified weaving circle, offering workshops for $5, but it definitely counts as Festival Number 1 of 2010 for me. We didn’t venture to weave anything, but sitting in the cushions in the chai tent watching the women work was interesting enough. This is Nimbin, the cool, independent, alternative side, rather than the ratty dealers on the mainstreet and the backpackers who flock to the area to get high in relative legal safety. And there’s no way we’d ever have seen it if we hadn’t been Woofing (or, more precisely, if we hadn’t been WWOOFing with Satya).
Sunday was a designated day off for WWOOFers, according to Satya, but since we weren’t exactly overworked we helped unload some building supplies from her friend’s van - supplies to repalce the room on her bedroom, the main project for which we there, but which wouldn’t end up getting underway until Wednesday. Then we went on an exploratory walk (where we ran into several stocky black lizards known as ‘land mullets‘, which had just come out of hibernation), checking out the Tuntable hub and reading notices on the communal board which revealed some of the problems and debates happening in the community, one being that residents don’t own their own homes, only the materials they’re made of. Residents pay rates, which they can halve by foing work in the community, from sorting mail to train clearing; only ratepayers in the black can vote, at the monthly ‘tribal meetings’, and there is a voluntary board each year which holds it’s own meetings and oversees the running of the place, approve new residents etc. There are no political or religious requirements for being a member of Tuntable, but an alternative/greenie bent definitely helps.

Our first real work came four days after we arrived, with the painting of the concrete roofing sheets for Satya’s new roof. This took us the best part of a day and a half, with 5 sheets all needing two coats on both sides. Paint Paint Paint. Then the rain started - a downpour with clouds and thunder rolling into the valley and lighting flashing intermittently. Not great for roof-replacing and sure enough the builder cancelled, but the next day we still managed the not exactly easy task of wrestling the concrete sheets and roof struts up the steep, slippery slope from the shed to Satya’s bedroom. Then as a reward we all packed up a picnic and went down to the creek to sit on the rocks in the sunshine with out feet in the water. This is the life!

The day of the roof replacement was a long, hectic one, but we were hardly complaining since we'd barely worked the rest of the week! The builder came and we were at his disposal, dragging the concrete sheets about, passing them up to him (a tricky job) on the roof, banging in nails, and carrying/dragging wooden struts up the slippery slope. Nik and Satya both got up on the roof to help bang in sheets, but to be honest it looked kind of crowded and... well, I think it's obvious that I would have somehow managed to fall off, isn't it? It was all finished in one day, impressively - just in time for the rain to recommence with a vengeance the following day.

During our time with Satya we also hiked up into the forest on the slopes of Tuntable valley to the annual forest camp, where volunteers from the community help clear trails etc., in return for the rates-work levy. There were a few people actually camped up there, and after a leechy walk (for nik anyway, who collected one of the way up and a grand total of 3 on the way down!), we arrived in their camp to sit under their tarp-sheltered cooking area, drink tea, and check out the mobile sawmill and millers at work down one of the tracks. We had expected to help in some way, either by wielding machetes or helping drag logs about, but for some reason we didn't, and no one seemed to care too much! Satya also took us to the Murwillumbah Unity Festival, a more modern, music-orientated event than Nimbin's, but still small with only one outdoor stage and a makeshift dance tent inside a cattle shelter! It rained (as it should, at festivals, as every Brit knows) most of the day, but this didn't stop a lot of barefoot dancing in the mud (not us, I'm afraid, we left that to the ageing and not-so ageing hippier types) and wandering from chai tent to foodstall. It was unexpectedly fun - and we also got to experience the long-tressed western-tribal songstress Deya Dova in full performance mode. She headlined, and drew a mixed crowd of teeange guys (for obvious reasons), ageing hippies, and the unlabelled - all equally enthralled by her. It wasn't really my cup of tea, but an experience none the less!

the forestry camp

We left Satya's after ten days, dropping in on the Community Tribal Meeting she was attending on our way into Nimbin. That too was an experience - we could see how things could get done pretty slowly on the community! Then a quick cup of chai with Satya at the Nimbin Cafe, and we were back on the bus heading to Byron and beyond...

Nimbin. Tut

hello!

LizIsHere — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

We're in Sydney now! Hence the proliferation of opera House pics :). So I'm a little behind in blogs... all shall be updated this week while I'm back in the land of easy internet access!

The first community....

LizIsHere — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

We crammed our stuff into Jude's already over-flowing car, and drove the thirty minutes or so out of Lismore, past Mullumbimby to Kijiri Community, a small place of 120 acres with just six properties, nestled deep in a secluded valley at the bottom of a winding unsealed road. When the rain came in - as it did with a vengeance during our second week - the whole sky was shrouded in mist and it felt like the outside world had disappeared.

Jude was friendly, and although a little 'airy-fairy' about some stuff, was very straightforward about telling us about what she wanted us to do, when she wanted to be left alone, and how we should make ourselves at home because she already had one child (almost 3-year-old Sam), and didn't need two more! The result of this was that we became pretty comfortable in her large, old Queenslander home (moved from Lismore on the back of truck... they do that in this country! Like the house but no the location? Solution: move the house); sorting ourselves cups of tea etc. whenever we felt like it.
Our own residence was in a comfy caravan across the grass clearing from the main house; under cover, with it's own covered decking area, it was perfect for sitting outisde in the morning or evening, with cups of tea, listening to the birdsong (including the ever-present whip-birds, with their distinctive male-female call and response) and spotting the adorable plump wallabies which grazed near by, and the stalking bushturkeys with their bright yellow-and-red ruffs. The windows of the caravan were surrounded by trees, so we woke up faced with greenery and green-tinged light every morning.
Jude shared her piece of land with Russel, who live in a studio across the clearing, and Steve and Petra, who live in an old bus in a clearing reached through the trees. She also had chooks, who peck about free-range during the day, and two horses who belonged to her neighbours grazing in the paddock next to her house. Across the large clearing from the house was a fire-area, where we sat a few times to eat dinner or drink chai in the evenings. When the sky was clear you could see thousand of stars scattered across the segment of sky trapped between the walls of the valley; it was really a beautiful and peaceful place.

Our work, howver, was not quite so peaceful! Since Jude and her husband both worked part-time as a counsellor and a pyschologist, respectively, one of her main aims when getting WWOOOFers and helpxchange-rs was to have help looking after Sam (not that we were told this on application, which grated a little bit to start off with!). So we took alternate days, one of us looking after Sam, playing with and entertaining him, and the other doing whatever chores or work Jude had lined up for us. We started late, which was nice, around 9am at the earliest, but it was a full-on day after that, particularly for whoever was looking after Sam, who was fairly 'easy' to look after but, like an 2 year old, noisy and full of energy. The key seemed to be to get a firm grasp of all the Cars movie characters, Thomas the Tank Engine trains, and Dora the Explorer Songs (not hard once we'd watched the same show segment about twnety times... we're still singing them now!). Neither of us are exactly used to children, but we did ok, I think - the fact that Sam would latch onto us (Nik more than me!), eager to play, the minute we came in for breakfast was some indication!
Our work was mostly house-related chores - cleaning the kitchen and bathroom, clearing cobwebs, putting cardboard on the veggie garden, helping Jude sort out her bedroom for when her friend came to stay, clearing out under the house. Though it was a bit stressful at times, mainly because of the normal chaos of the house and the energy required to look after Sam, it was fun, and Jude was so nice and happy to have us there that it was a good experience overall. One night she and her husband even went out for a meal at a restaurant five minutes away, leaving us to mind Sam for an hour. We were pretty terrified, but the level of trust they demonstrated in us was amazing. (though Jude left the phone number of her neighbour in case we couldn't deal with nappy-changing... luckily it didn't come up).

We went off to Byron for a few days holiday early on in our WWOOFing with Jude, but when we came back it was full-on again. Towards the end of our week her friend came to stay - brining with her not one, but two children - a 3 yeard old and an 8 year old. Needless to say, the house didn't get any calmer or less chaotic - the sound of two children crying in tandem while the older one tried to tell us endless stories over the din was quite something. At that point we were very happy to be leaving in just two days!

on the community, (#1)

LizIsHere — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A long and roundabout journey brought us to our new wwoof hosts in a new state, on Kijiri community near Mullumbimby in New South Wales. A 3hr bus ride to Byron Bay, a four hour wait in Byron (soaking in the local colour: deadheaded dudes in tie-dye, acid-casualties and dog-on-a-string types, amongst all the other 'Normal' people who live there too), then another bus, ironically away from Mullum, to Lismore, where our host Jude, accompanied by her super-cute 2 1/2 year old son Sam, picked us up.

internet ran out... to be cont'd, as always...

to the city!

LizIsHere — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

After the peace, greenery and rustic feel of KinKin Souls, Brisbane was a jolt, though not necessarily a completely negative one! We arrived on greyhound (ahh, faithful greyhound, I won't miss it at all when I'm home!), caught a quick-train ride across the city and arrived in the alternative-and-slightly-seedy area of Forititude Valley. Although organisational commitments got in the way (as they often do) of our first day of metropolitan (well, Brisbane's hardly London... or even Liverpool, but still) freedom, but on our second day we explored more, stumbling across an international farmers market on the riverside, and checking out the Queensland art gallery on SouthBank, which had some great modern art and an exhibition by Aboriginal Artist Jim Rootsey. In the afternoon we had a picnic on the riverside, near Brisbane's artificial beach area. It sounds pretty naff, but actually was really pretty, with the real palms, sunshine, and lots of grass around the water and sand on the riverside. We also explored the West End, a studenty place crammed with cafes, bars, ethnic grocers and thrift shops. There we found the Three Monkeys cafe, something of a legend in Brisbane, a softly-lit maze of a place, the kind of place to spend hours in, where we got milkshakes, chai and cake (clearly we had a sugar-deficit after KinKin!) and sat in the garden for a while.
That night we went out for a meal at Tibetan/Nepalese restaurant, The Tibetan Kitchen on Brunswick St in Forititude Valley, a packed, noisy, BYO place with beautiful decorations and even better food!

We didn't do anything too crazy in Brisbane; plans to go out were slightly stumped by Nik not having any 'proper' shoes (they're big on 'proper' shoes here), and it being mid-week. Still it was good to be back in a city for a while, in the buzz and the noise and with so many options of things to do. Our few days there went past very fast, and then we found ourselves back on the greyhound on our way to the hippie-mecca of Byron Bay.

to the city!

LizIsHere — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

We left Kin Kin on the 6th September. We weren't particularly sad to leave - we felt we'd got all could out of our stay there, and while we'd learnt a lot and would miss the beauty of the surroundings, we'd spent enough time there being stressed out, tired or itching to shriek 'That's INSANE!' to be happy to leave!

Our destination, one that couldn't be more different to Kin Kin, was Brisbane, capital of Queensland, for a city fix before we travelled onwards to the area around Byron Bay to WWOOF again.

Kin Kin cont'd

LizIsHere — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Permaculture, sweet potato, spiders and greens

LizIsHere — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

my 3kg sweet potato find

After an exciting lift to the Fraser Island busstop with the hostel worker Genevieve (she forgot to close the boot and Nik's bagtook a brief flying lesson in the driveway), we caught the bus to Cooroy, to be picked up by our new wwoof hosts, from a permaculture property in KinKin. We spent the five hours between the bus arrival and being picked-up in... guess where! A park!

When our host Zaia arrived, driving a kombi-van complete with scrap-yard salvaged bits inside, and curtains, our first surprise was that she was combining the trip to Cooroy to fetch us with picking up her son. It turned out that she had two kids, aged 10 and 15, which was a surprise and a little disconcerting as we were trying to avoid wwoof hosts with children, for various reasons.

After driving (the style best described as kamikaze... we nearly veered off the road at one point!) the half an hour or so from Cooroy, we arrived at the property located down an unselaed road, just outside the village of Kin Kin, in a secluded and beautiful valley. Our accomodation was a caravan close to the house, containing bed, table, chest of drawers and HUGE hairy tarantula-type spider, described by our host as a 'visitor'. Thankfully Nik encouoraged it out of the door using his uke or I think I'd have attempted to sleepin the kombivan instead!

We met Zaia's partner Tom, a permaculture teacher, when we went into the house for dinner (soup-with-meat-in-it for Nik and the others, and, in a comedy vegetarian-cliche moment, a pile of salad leaves from the garden for me), and found out some more about how wwoofing at the property worked. Due to both the couple's desire to live as self-sufficiently as possible, and for income-reasons, Wwoofers were expected to feed themselves entirely from the garden for their dinner and lunch, as far as was possible, with use of spices, butter etc from the kitchen. This was a) another surprise, as nothing had been mentioned in the wwoof book or our email communications and b) a concern, as neither one of us are great cooks! We ended up eating a lot of root veggies (sweet potato, yakon, taro), chokos and an absolute ton of various 'greens' from the garden. While it was pretty ace to be able to go out to the garden and gather the means to make a meal, food/meals became a bit of an issue, particularly in our first week, as the lack of carbs and iron/protein took their toll slightly.

The garden was great: the word 'abundance' comes up a lot in discussion of permaculture(which is 'permanent agriculture'; everything interlinked and multipurpose - from the chooks scratchign at weeds, providing manure and supplying eggs, to cuttings and weeds being placed round plants as mulch in a method called 'chop and drop' - with nothing wasted or leaving the property. Plants are grown in intermixed beds, with lettuce alongside strawberries alongside herbs. The garden grew everything from lettuces to basil to choko vines, dandelion plants (the leaves of which they ate), medicinal herbs, taro, sweet potatos, strawberries, turnips, radishes, brocolli and mint, with fruit trees interspersed between - mandarines, bananas, mangos, and Tom was trying out new plants all the time. There were three chook pens, with two sets of chooks running free in the paddocks everyday; three goats, two cows (one of their cows would be killed for meat each year) and one market-bought calf (and a 'surprise' calf that was born unexpectedly during our stay), and three dogs. The toilet was an outdoor composting one, situated in a little moveable shed, to be re-located when the pit below it came too full. However we were encouraged to do #1's anywhere in the garden that we felt comfortable! The shower too was outdoors, inside a rather raggedy tent, and solar-heated, with controls that had to be operated by another person outside, as Tom was trying to construct a stone-built bathroom/laundry building but kept being distracted by his seemingly endless amount of tasks and projects. One day they hope to get bees, and to milk their cows and goats to make cheese.

the compost loo!

Our day began at 6.45-7am with a 'Coo-ee' call from the house to breakfast; a cooked meal with eggs and normally some kind of greens or potato-dish. It was pretty hard to stomach such a heavy meal some mornings, but we sort of got used it towards the end of our time there. Then one of us would wash up, and work would begin. In our first week we built a corrugated-tin fence around on of the four chook-pens, whick took a ridiculously long time. As well as this we weeded up many clumps of invasive nut-grass. We also spent a period of time most mornings harvesting from the garden; filling up the salad bowl with the variety of leaves and herbs; collecting strawberries and tomatos, and, in my case, hunting out and digging up red and purple sweet potatoes (including a giant 3kg monster!) which grew voraciously over the swales (water-retaining ditches constructed on contours to collect and distribute rainwater). Then lunch, which we either cooked or helped out with preparing, was at around 1pm, with washing-up afterwards. Work was done and the day was free after lunch.

to be cont'd :-)

Fraser Island

LizIsHere — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

fraser island

I got up at the ungodly hour of 6.15 am to get ready for my pick-up for my Fraser Island Explorer tour. A fair few people had told me that it was better to do an overnight trip to the largest sand island in the world, but my bank balance told me otherwise and I was happy enough to get to see the place at all.

Info time: Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world, and is home to the only rainforest growing on sand in the world, too. It was logged extensively up to 1991 when it was made a world heritage sight, and is home to what are thought to be purest dingos (wild dogs) in australia. I was hopeful on seeing one, but on a daytour it seemed unlikely.

All the foot passengers, mostly from different tour groups, piled on the pedestrian and 4x4 ferry for the 30min ride across the water to Fraser Island (which lies off the QLD cost, accessed from Hervey Bay and Rainbow Beach ferry terminals) at about 8am. The first ace wildlife spot of the day was a large sea turtle in the water next to the boat. At the island we got onto our allocated 4x4 buses (all the tracks on the island are sand only so it's a 4X4 only zone). First we drove along one of the island's many bumpy sandtracks to Central Station, the site of a former logging camp, passing dry scrub merging into lush rainforest on the way.
At Central Station we took a rainforest walk along the banks of Wanggoolba Creek, which was astoundingly clear - so much so that you barely see the water moving. Apparently Fraser teams with snakes, but we saw none on the walk. From Central Station we drove on a little way south to 75 mile beach, a designated highway with an 80kmp/h speed limit. 4X4's driven by tour guides and backpackers speed along it regular intervals. It's a bit weird to see so much traffic on a beach, and perhaps it's a bit odd to do so, but any thoughts on the morals etc. of this were fortunately/unfortunately dispelled, as the minute we drove onto the beach we spotted a dingo! The naturally skinny, slightly alsatian-looking dogs (see photo) have been encourage to rely aggressively on tourists for food who insisted on feeding them tidbits, and they have attacked people in the past; an 8 yr old girl was even killed by one some years ago. Thus there is a complete ban on any feeding or even interaction with dingoes on fraser island - with a fine, prison sentence, and deportation facing any overseas visitor who does so. So, we were kept on the bus until our driver had driven far enough away from the dingo to let us out in safety.
The dingo would have been enough of a highlight for me to end the tour then, but a breakdown on the beach (allowing some impromtu sunbathing), a visit to other the coloured pinnnacles of sand, and to the Maheno shipwreck were still on the agenda. Then we drove to Eli Creek, which, while being a beautiful, tropical-plant-fringed creek flowing out of rainforest onto the beach and into the sea, was a bit of a circus with 4x4 buses, 4x4's, and even motorcross bikes parked around it or driving through the beach-mouth of it. This was a theme of Fraser Island, at least the bits you see on a daytour - it's almost like it's a 4x4 adventure playground, rather than a heritage site, which is sad, and a fact that is bitterly lamented by many local QLD'rs.

On the way back down the beach to visit the picturesque turquoise-blue expanse of the inland, rainforest-fringed Lake Mckenzie, our wildlife extravaganza was completed when we saw three humpback whales elaping and cavorting off-shore. Amazing; we were so lucky to be driving past at the right time to see them. It had felt like an incredibly touristy day, and the sight of Eli Creek, in particular, being so crowded with alien-looking motor-vehicles encroaching on the lushness of nature was jarring, but it was the unplanned sites, the dingo and the whales, which were most spectacular, made more so when observedagainst the natural beauty of Fraser.

a dingo on fraser island

The final phase at Vintner's

LizIsHere — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

sunset at the vineyard

On our first day back we had an early start to visit the nearby Apple Tree Creek market, a very country affair, with plants, homemade crafts, some frankly disgusting fudge, chooks, farm implements and one or two hippy-esque stalls.
During the next week we did a variety of tasks: from planting strawberries in the the new veggie garden raised beds, to removing old christmas lights around the swimming pool on an extremely wobbly ladder; painting windowsills in the cafe toilets, assembling ikea-style shelving units for the shop, leaf-blowing, herding the frequently escaping geese, and general garden stuff. In between we managed, of course, to spent much time lying in the hammock or on the lawns, eat cake, consume ice-creams in the vineyard as the sun set, and cook a bit (me, mainly - I made scones, muffins and a pretty decent spaghetti bake; who knows, maybe I'll actually be able to cook a bit by the time I come home!).
Marianne and I also made a trip into the old country charming town of Childers to get our haircut. I expected, from the general vibe of the town (bar the two or three hippy stores that seem to present in unexpected places all over QLD), that the salon would be a blue-rinse and rollers sort of place, but it turned out to be as funky as anywhere you'd find in Brisbane and Sydney, although much, much cheaper. Perfect! Nik and I explored the town a little more afterwards, including visiting the art gallery which housed the photographic and mural memorial to the 15 travellers killed in the 2000 Palace Backpackers blaze.

We also went on a hike! Ed's cattle farmer and ex-schoolteacher friend Warren had floated the idea of a hike up Mount Woowoonga, a small mountain about 30 km away from Childers, with us before we went to Blue Gum Grove, and we had agreed. Little did we know what awaited. Maybe our first warning should have been that Warren was an extremely fit and experienced hiker - only last year he completed the by all accounts 'fairly tough' 93 km, 8 day Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea. (Part of his training programme, incidentally, had been to climb Woowoonga four times per day with a 13 kg rucksack.)
Our second warning should have come the day before the planned hike, when Warren turned up with a selection of walking poles for us to select from. "More for going down than going up", he explained. Clearly this was going to be a steep one.

On the day we set of with water, hats and our walking poles, and arrived in the small, deserted carpark at the foot of Woowoonga, the peak of which had loomed at us slightly ominously for most of the latter part of the drive. The first 800 m or so of the path was a fairly steady but gently climb, with our sticks feeling more like impediments than anything else. On the way we passed over markings on the ground which Warren identified on the return journey as the scrapings of the large goanna lizards (relations of the Komodo dragon) which live in the region.

At the 800m point was a nice bench - a clear encouragement to have a wee sit down before the path began to climb steeply - and a nice contrast to the sign next to it: "Stop! Are You Prepared? This track is for experienced bushwalkers only."
It also warned of a 'continous steep climb' for the rest of the 1km of the track. It definitely wasn't wrong there! I made a valiant effort to enjoy the intermitten views through the breaks in the trees as I panted, sweated, stumbled and lurched my way up the steep, rough and at times narrow path, but my face was distinctly tomato-like and at points I was quite convinced I was going to throw up. I suppose that's what six months of a backpacker diet and exercise regieme does for you!
But, finally, after ascending a part so steep that my concern was less about how I'd get up it (being only metres from the summit), but how we'd get down without falling flat on our faces/sliding into oblivion - the Summit!

Warren atop mount Woowoonga

A quick scramble over some rocks to the 'edge' of the mountain and then we were greeted with an overwhelming view. Above, blue sky, and below and into the distance, trees, endless, endless layers and shades of trees, repeating onwards so far as to form a green haze at the horizon. It was definitely worth the climb, that's for sure! And it only took a cereal bar and some water for us to agree to follow Warren along an out-of-bounds (but helpfully marked by 'no hiking' signs) track along the ridge to the next peak, where a communications station was situated. This hike was cooler; a scramble down the steep other side of Woowoogna, and then we plunged into damp, greener forest; diving round trees, scrambling over vines, catching skin and clothing on twigs, walking face-first through cobwebs (Nik managed to almost walk face-first in a Golden Orb weaver's web, but luckily the giant spider was elsewhere at the time). We even got 'a little lost' at one point, as Warren happily admitted.
It was much, much easier than the mountain-climb track; just the right side of tiring as we climbed the opposite slope and emerged in the communications-station clearing, filled with pylons and aerials, sticking it to the man as usual as we passed, unheeding, the 'no entry' signs on the way in.

On the way back along the no-hiking hiking track, we were lucky enough to spot a goanna itself, sunning itself on the track in front of us. It stayed stockstill, in an I-don't-move-you-can't-see-me manner - long enough for me to snap a photo or two - but scarpered when we moved too close. And as we made our gingerly way, sliding and once or twice falling on our bums, down the steep Woowoonga Mountain track, we spotted an Eastern Brown snake (the most deadly snake, based on the number of fatal bites, in Aussie) slithering away into the undergrowth. (It's comforting that everytime we've seen a deadly snake they've been slithering away from us). Still, in typical Aussie fashion we stood around in the same spot with Warren discussing anti-venoms and snake-catching for a good five minutes, while the snake, as far as we knew, lingered in the undergrowth just metres away (or made a swift exit as far from us a possible, more than likely - but who knows?).

Back at the carpark, ever-so-slightly tired (that the 1.8km track took us 3 hours, return, gives you some idea of the steepness of it), Warren (who, it may be becoming obvious, is a pretty ace and generous guy, as well as a great teacher) showed us some bushcraft skills - from making a chair out of a flour sack and some logs, to weaving rope out of raffia, and making a bush-compass. On the way back he even abruptly pulled over the ute to pull leaves from trees on the edge of the road to show us - the soap tree leaf, which when crushed and rubbed between the hands in water provided the Aborigines (and early settlers) with a frothing soap, and the aptly named sandpaper tree leaf, used to sand and perfect wooden tools and weaponry.

We left Vintner's on the day of the Aussie election, to catch the Greyhound to Hervey Bay, gateway to Fraser Island. It was hard to go - Marianne and Ed had been such fantastic hosts, and we'd even taken to referring to 'going home' when we were heading back to the farm from Childers or Bundy, such was the welcome they gave us. But it was a happy goodbye, with many thankyous and genuine promises to stay in touch. I think our time there will be one of our most prized Aussie memories.

Marianne in the cellardoor

a little holiday within a holiday...

LizIsHere — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

After two weeks at Vintner's we were clearly sick of it- who wouldn't be in a lovely place with friendly people, interesting work, cute animals, and beautiful views? So we decided to go on a little three-night WWOOF holiday to another host, an hour north in Bundaberg. Well, I say 'decide', but this was yet another one of those things that had occurred after the numerous wwoof-cancellations, re-organisations and general hair-pulling-inducing stress that had occurred during our pre-Vintner's time. So, anyway, we were going, and we also got to give Ed and Marianne a break from house-guests, since Elodie and Sebastian had left a few days before. This was of course denied on our return by Marianne, who said that the house had been 'too quiet' in our abscence. She must have been missing my frequent tripping over of rugs and dropping of cultlery.

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.