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Published: December 16th 2010
Third Time Lucky!
After reaching the top of Mount Wellington for the third time I got the perfect viewAt Hobart airport I decided that I didn't want to leave Australia without a 2nd year visa. On arrival back in Melbourne I caught up with people, had some nights out, had a BBQ and a day at the beach before confirming some work strawberry picking in Tasmania and insanely flying back only 5 days after leaving.
I flew back into Hobart early in the morning following a very late night in Melbourne. On landing I went straight back to my previous hostel Narrara Backpackers and the always fantastic owner Moe informed me that my Spanish friend Javier had just left to get the bus to go up Mount Wellington. I had the worlds quickest shower and headed for the nearest bus stop. He was pretty surprised to see me climb on board!
We repeated the trek that I had done my first time going up Wellington, except third time lucky principles meant that the view at the top was clear and spectacular this time. Javier is a very sound guy, very honest and friendly. His birthday had been last time I was in Tassie which I went out for and I had spent a couple of hours one
evening helping him with words he didn't understand in an English language book. He pointed randomly at a map to see where he fortune may lie and ended up in Tasmania as a result, best of luck to him :-)
Also on this return to Hobart, caught up with my friends from Hull and Mieke from Holland, we had a decent night in a very English pub. Next morning myself and an English mate from Nottingham, James who had also come over from Melbourne for the strawberries, left for Cygnet in South Tasmania.
It was infested with mice, seriously seriously infested. One morning James went for a shower and found a mouse in the pocket of his shorts. They ate everything that was left out and sometimes things that weren't. One woke me one night by running over my arm. I'm not quite sure when I became accepting of such things. Definitely a concern.
We were between a tiny town, Cygnet and a slightly less tiny town Huonville, on top of Cradoc Hill. On arriving everyone pitied us for doing strawberry picking and told us we wouldn't last long. Plenty of good reasons for this! We awoke
Cygnet Accommodation
Rats in rooms, socks, bags, food, crawling over you a night, in day..... before sunrise to be taken to the strawberry fields at sunrise, South Tasmania is pretty damn cold at this time. The first day on arriving at the field, everyone clambered slowly out of the mini-bus and without uttering a word, slowly walked towards to supervisor/prison guard. The atmosphere felt like how I'd a imagine a prison labour camp to be. Almost no-one spoke, it was cold and damp, and 2 vans with guards patrolled the place to check on peoples work. On top of that, the pay is possibly comparible to slave labour. The final part of the agony of it all was in fact the agony of it all.
Suffice to say after a week of strawberries the spine was on it's way out and the pain was getting bad so I was working less and less hours each day. James left, he had enough after a week and went back to Hobart in search of work. I stayed and spent my time with a mixture of Europeans and a guy from South Korea. We played table tennis, smoked a fair bit (long days to kill) and fished. We did whatever we could to pass the slow slow
Rat Infested But...
... it did have fantastic Tassie countryside views country time. A lot of goon was consumed.
I had paid the lazy woman who ran the ice infested falling down hostel $30 on arrival to find me work. This is something she does for everyone, although as numerous arguments and fallouts proved - she doesn't do much job finding. None-the-less, after a mass exodus from the hostel due to her being an arse, it meant there was some spaces going on grape picking (which someone else had found, not her).
This work was much more pleasant, a fair hourly rate and decent breaks with the option to taste some of the wine at the end. It also had the advantage of not being completely spine destroying, the place even looked pretty:
Doing a proper hard days work like the grapes felt like a really strange holiday from the strawberries. After two days we had unfortunately picked everything so back to the pain I went.
As we were in the middle of nowhere, there was virtually no public transport. This meant to get anywhere at all including back from work everyday, to go fishing and to go shopping we had to hitch hike. Fortunately people in
Slave Labour Strawberry Fields
Where dreams die and spines are broken Tasmania are pretty decent and most people in the locality seemed to appreciate the the situation so getting a lift was never too difficult and I met plenty of pretty interesting people along the way.
During my final week there I had the pleasure of going apple picking at a farm who's cherries and apples have been sent all the way to Harrod's in London for sale. This involved picking a colossal crate of fruit for $30, but thanks to the size of the apples, this way fair. It was the best of the 3 fruits I picked, possibly because the apples were very tasty, possibly because of the awesome front bag I got to wear.
I also learnt something whilst picking apples, that they can get sunburnt!
Who knew??! This probably isn't a problem in the UK...
After almost three weeks I decided to move on and decided to go wwoofing instead (Worldwide Workers on Organic Farming). This is another way to earn a second year visa. I confirmed a place at a farm in East Victoria and so said goodbye to yet another group of friends and flew back off to Melbourne once more....
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