Victoria

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Well we have been here for near on 3 months now so I think it is about time we updated you all on what we have been doing and how everything has been going.
After we had finished our 3 weeks in WA (Western Australia) we headed to the ever so warm and sunny Melbourne in Victoria to seek fame and fortune while taking in the sporting capital of Australia and all it had to offer.
Melbourne supplied us with a very cultural feeling with its many museums, well-kept parks and picturesque side street cafes.
Melbourne’s Olympic park is every sports fans dream (needless to say Kevin was in his element) with several stadiums all within a stone’s throw from each other not to mention the national sports museum.
Somehow Melbourne seemed to balance its cultured side and its love of all things active with a certain flare that many British cities could learn from (London 2012 and Lord Coe we are expecting)
After a few sleep disrupted days in our first Hostel which was located in CBD (Central Business District) we headed out to one of Melbourne’s many suburbs St Kilda.
St Kilda has a very Bohemian feel to it with an anomalous individual on every corner exhausting all avenues of entertainment to persuade you to part with your dollar.
St Kilda has a large array of bars and restaurants to keep both fine dinners and party revellers coming back for more including the Tram restaurant that we kept seeing chug on by our hostel.
While St Kilda is famed for its vibrant nightlife and kooky residents it also has a very relaxed day time vibe to it that can only be likened to a lazy Sunday In the park with friends and a picnic.
During our time in Melbourne et al we searched for jobs to fund the remainder of our travels and who knows maybe even find a new career path in the process. Our search was proving to be quite the uphill struggle as there was a high number of travellers compared to the low number of jobs available which in simple terms meant we needed to look at alternative sources of work which brought us to the Harvest Trail website which gave us a new wealth of opportunity to get work.
After toiling through the list of numbers supplied to us by the website we decided that the best course of action would be to ring them direct for more of an up to date list of jobs and ones that would suit us perfectly.
After a lengthy conversation with one of the Harvest Trail representatives we were given the number of a Zucchini farm in Strathmerton (Victoria) but warned that the work would be very physical and you would be required to be bent over for large periods of time as part of the job (No jokes required) So Lex got on the phone to Julie for directions and we were off to the farm which would be our residence for the next 4 and a half weeks.
Once at the farm the greeting from the fellow workers was frosty to say the least. We felt for the first few days that perhaps we had made a huge mistake coming to the farm and our concerns were not helped when Kevin came to a halt on day 3 due to pain in the hamstring causing him to take an unscheduled day off (people had been sacked for less).
After the first week had come to an end we had slowly wormed our way into the hearts of the fellow workers with Lex’s obsessive cleaning disorder and Kevin’s pure randomness. During one of many goon (box of wine) filled evenings we questioned why the cold shoulder was given to us on our arrival and it would seem they never make friends with the new guys because more often than not they are sacked, but since we have lasted past the week we were now safe to befriend and enjoy a glass or two of goon with.
Over the next 3 weeks we would share some fun stories from our life back home and attempt to learn foreign languages (most notably Kev’s failure to grasp even the basics of Swedish). All of this was very much to ensure moral was high in the team and fend of insanity from having no contact with the outside world.
We made some great friends at the farm and one’s we will endeavour to keep in touch with when we return to the UK so it was a sad time when the season came to an end early and we all had to head our separate ways.
Back to Melbourne we headed for a couple of nights interrupted sleep at one of the many hostels around St Kilda before we would head to see Joey in Bega.

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