The land of Oz

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I’ve been in Australia for almost four months now so it’s about time I got round to writing a blog about it!
I spent my last night in Thailand in a pretty up market guesthouse just off Ko San Road. I decided to treat myself as it was my last night in Asia and I was feeling pretty sorry for myself .I had a chest infection that I’d convinced myself was the beginnings of bird flu - which given the amount of poultry I had seen/stepped over/slept beside/sat next to on buses in Laos wouldn’t have surprised me. So anyway, I confused the Thai’s as much as I had the Cambodians by ordering glass after glass of hot lemon juice and honey and slept an obscene amount before making a few last minute purchases and heading off to the airport. My flight was via Singapore airport where I had an hour or two before my connection to Brisbane. I was very impressed to find that Singapore Airport has free internet access, so impressed in fact I almost missed my flight. Close call!! 8 hours later I was standing in Brisbane airport hypnotized by the luggage carousal going around around and around. It seems my luggage had found something fun to do too at Singapore Airport and had decided to catch a later flight. I was actually pretty happy - it meant I didn’t have to lug my bag through Brisbane in the midday sun to my hostel as Singapore Airlines would drop it to my hostel door the next day. I say WAS happy…. After a couple hours kip, I had a shower, put back on my dirty sat on a plane for 12 hours clothes and headed down to the bar. I met a nice Israeli bloke and we decided to head down to the valley to find a nice bar for a nice drink. It was a nice night and everything was, well, nice. We got out the hostel and walked about 10 metres down the road before some kids drove past and egged us. Nice. (My chances of recovering from bird flu were now non existent.) So there I was - had been in Australia for less than 12 hours, my luggage was lost and my only clean clothes had just been egged. What could I do?? - I got drunk. In fact I got drunk almost every night for the next 10 days. I think it was the shock of coming from Asia where $2 or $3 would get you a nice hotel room with a private bathroom, fridge and TV or a nice bungalow on the beach with your own hammock to Australia where I was paying $26 dollars a night to sleep in a crappy bunk bed in a room with 6 other people coming and going all night long, blokes farting in their sleep and drunk couples providing free porn at 3AM. I couldn’t settle in - I just didn’t like it - I made friends with a couple of people at the hostel but only through drunken escapades. It was all just a blur of oversexed kids straight out of school behaving like they’d never been out in public without their parents before. After the millionth wet Tshirt competition I saw (all of which ended with girls getting off with each other to win a biscuit or something equally crap) I decided I had to get away from the hostel before I went crazy. I moved into an apartment near the hostel where I shared a house with 2 Scottish girls and a room with a Canadian bloke called Curtis. I started the serious job hunting, I walked the streets for days handing my resume into every bar/restraint/coffee shop/public toilet going. Nothing. Everyone I spoke to was having the same trouble so what could I do? - I got drunk. This time though it worked out for the best as I met an Aussie bloke called Scott and decided to move up to the Sunshine Coast to a place called Mooloolaba. As soon as I stepped off the train I felt so much better - I’m not saying Brisbane is a bad city, it’s really pretty and has a good night life. It was just a bit full on for me after Asia and I couldn’t handle overcrowded overpriced youth hostels anymore. The Sunny Coast is beautiful, loads of beaches and not so much traffic, more like the Australia I had been dreaming of. After a couple of nights in Mooloolaba’s quiet hostel I made friends with an English girl Kim who is a permanent Australian resident and moved into her apartment in Maroochydore . Getting a job was just as hard here, though I was much happier and I was saving money on rent, food and drink. I worked as couple of days in a café before realizing the manager was just using me to cover someone’s sick days and had no intention of paying me as it was a ‘trial’ period. Eventually he gave in and payed me for the 20 odd hours I’d worked. Next I got work on a local farm planting Strawberries - that was pretty good actually (as you can see from the pictures it was pretty messy) the only problem was the work wasn’t regular. I was only getting about 10 - 15 hours a week if that. So I began looking in the local paper for work, the Sunshine coast isn’t a big backpacker area so there aren’t too many suitable jobs about. I tried telesales and door to door sales which don’t pay you unless you make a sale - pretty soul destroying! Eventually I found an advert looking for Cotton Pickers - all accommodation and food provided. Sounded perfect so along with a Scottish guy I’d met in Brisbane I headed to Toowoomba for the job. We stopped over for a night in Brisbane on the way where we met up with friends of Arvid’s - Scott and Carina who we’d also got jobs for. Later that night we were drinking in the bar and met a Canadian girl called Jen who was depressed because she’d been job hunting all day with no luck. One phone call later and she was on the bus to Toowoomba the next day with us. Looking back - this is where we should have started to worry. The bloke was just handing out jobs to anyone asking. But no…. the next day we were merrily sitting on the 2.5 hour journey from Brisbane to Toowoomba. It’s not too far from Brisbane so if it sucked we could always just jump on a bus home…. Or so we thought. That night we met up with our boss and a couple of coworkers in the pub. He explained to us that the next morning we would leave at 5AM and drive 5 hours inland to Nindagully, dump our stuff and get to work, we would be working between 10 - 15 hours a day and there were no toilets. I needed the money bad so just went with it… the next morning we drove to Nindagully where we stayed in the only pub (which happens to be the oldest pub in Queensland) for a couple of nights. Here we met up with some of the ‘interesting’ people we’d be working with. One eventful night we noticed that BJ had been in the shower for the last three hours, he’d always been a strange chap so we were a bit worried. I mean he did have flowing locks of wany mousy brown hair and a long handlebar moustache but surely it didn’t take that much grooming to achieve his ‘look’. After banging on the door for AGES and getting no response we looked under the door - all we could see was a pair of trousers on the floor. The owners had gone out for the night leaving our boss (stumpy) in charge - as you do. So we went to get his permission to kick the door down (because as I already said this is the oldest pub in Queensland) however stumpy was in his usual post work drunken state and was on one of his 24 hour long stories where he was impossible to talk to, so next in charge Dave said go for it. We kicked the door down and found BJ’s clothes and nothing else…. Wherever he’d gone he’d gone naked. We looked up and saw a gap between the wall and the roof, looking over we saw it led into the owners property - there was a footprint and dent on the washing machine so it turns out BJ had broken into the owners property naked (I said he was a strange chap) Now this pub is in the middle of NOWHERE - there are no houses or anything around just bush and the pub is tiny so it didn’t take long to figure out that BJ was out in the bush naked. Some of the other blokes we worked with went on a hunt for him with one guy Adam (more about him later…..!!) assuring us that when he found him he was dead. Carina and I were obviously a bit freaked out - the bedroom doors didn’t lock and there was a naked freak out in the bush. I haven’t seen wolf creek but that night I got told the whole story (which didn’t help matters) Anyway by 2AM we couldn’t find him, the owners were back and very pissed off so we headed to bed. At 6AM we got our wakeup call - we’d be driving a further 8 hours inland to a new site. BJ was back and wearing clothes. He didn’t get fired, this is the kind of job where you can break into someone’s house naked and then just turn up for work the next day. We started the long drive to woop woop I took over from Adam when we crossed the New South Wales border. He didn’t want to drive in NSW due to the fact he had no licence and was wanted for attempted murder, that’s why he’d moved to Queensland he explained. So back to cotton picking - the days were long (we had to pick from when the dew dried in morning till the dew set in at night) up to 17 hours a day. We stayed in a house with no furniture and rats and slept on air beds on the floor. It wasn’t a dream job shall we say. I was lucky enough though to land the job of driving into town every morning and night to pick up the food and most nights Carina got to come with me - seeing as the nearest town is a 45 minute drive away we got paid for 3 hours worth of driving a day. This was the best part of the job because we saw Wallaby’s, Kangaroo’s and Emus every night and the sunsets were the most beautiful I’ve ever seen and after the sun had gone down the sky looked amazing with thousands and thousands of stars. One night driving out to get the food I managed to drive straight over a 6 foot King brown snake - the 3rd most deadly snake in Australia (it lived). Anyway to cut a long story short we moved to another farm which was not so much in the middle of nowhere and stayed in a trailer with 5 people Carina and I got ‘sick’ one day and spent a day in the spa nursing our cut’s, bruises and hideous strap marks. Adam got fired for threatening our boss with a stanely knife to his throat. Eventually we couldn’t take being spoken to like sh*t anymore and being yelled at for taking too many toilet breaks (this was after my 3rd in a 12 hour shift). I went off my head like never before and we stormed out. Our caring boss dropped us at the bus stopped 3 hours early for the epic bus journey back to Brisbane. I was just glad it was over! After a few nights in Brisbane recovering and readjusting to life in civilization I headed ‘home’ to the Sunny Coast.
With the money I’d earned Scott and I hired a camper van and headed on a road trip down to Surfers Paradise and Byron Bay stopping off on the Gold Coast. It was great - I finally felt like I was seeing Australia (after traveling so much in the last few months I was finding it hard to adjust to staying in one place for so long) When we got back I managed to get a job in a kitchen washing dishes which is working out pretty good. It was my birthday last week and my flatmate Kim took me down to Dreamworld on the Gold coast where we went to a big brother eviction, which rocked! In a week and half my parents and sister are coming over and we’re driving down to Melbourne which I’m very excited about! So basically after four months I’m loving Australia - finally have a job and a good place to live and can’t wait to hit the road and see Sydney and Melbourne. Tonight I’m off to my local pub to watch State of Origin match (Queensland v NSW) which apparently is the equivalent of Scotland v England. I’m going for Queensland. Will write again after the PIRIE family road trip!! El xxxx

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Photos

Strawberry planting.
I wish I could say it was a tan.....

Mobile phone RIP
I dropped my phone in here and didn't notice till I'd pressed 22 tonnes of cotton on top of it!!!

my office at cotton picking
my job was to roll this thing back and forth over the cotton all day.....

Comments

[Anne in Baku]

What a great experience!!!!!!!
Hi there Laura, (and family) I wish I could have seen you all when you first got together iin Australia. Bet not a dry eye. (including dad). Mum and dad are so proud and it has been their one goal to get over to be with you, well done!!!!!!!!!!!!! Will speak about your blog all week and make it the topic of conversation at the picnic on Saturday. Have fun. Love to all from Baku!!!!!!!!