Perth - Melbourne

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Its hard to put a date on the most recent of passages across what is most certainly the most beautiful place I have ever been. But it has been our longest passage of all. After Monkey Mia , our dear friend Jenny departed from our company to return home to France to tend to some pressing matters at home, it was becoming riotously clear to us that in fact we were running out of cash at a rate of naughts no sailor could dream to reach. So after a very upsetting consequential farewell to Jenny at Perth airport. We headed forth wiping the dew from our eyes and began our trip to Melbourne. Now I really cannot impress enough on to the readers of this rather sad little blog (writing this is rather akin to dancing on your own in a empty club) that to complete this distance we would have to travel the breadth of Australia. Which (as the journey has been complete for some months now) in total approximately 4000 Km’s.

It was Quite the Journey, hard, boring and incredibly stressful. The cause of many a fight between Nico and I in fact – as you would expect with two very tired people constantly cramped into a tiny space with nothing but ech others faces to look at by the dim lights. The sad thing is that in our great haste we didn’t have many chances in which we could stop to enjoy the journey. Every kangaroo we saw had been disemboweled by the hood of some anonymous car, the only koala I was close enough to see had suffered a similar fate – in fact the only animal I’ve seen alive, out of the groups you will commonly see emblazoned on bright yellow backgrounds to frame their sweet black silhouette, have been emus, and wombats (quite possibly the cutest thing I’ve ever seen plodding across the road). Aside from this exclusively and mostly dead little club we have seen literally hundreds of bizarre and quite amazing insects, birds, and various other animate things I’m at a loss to name the genus of.

After driving through western and southern Australia, seeing only dead marsupials and sleeping very badly, we finally reached the beautiful entrance to Victoria. Once we perforated the border I felt like weight had been lifted. However we were not out of the proverbial woods yet. As we encroached on Melbourne with all its amusing, and unique architecture in our dirty shabby looking van. Nico decided to call on an old friend of his from working at his old salon in London, Zoe. Once we arrived we had a warm and happy welcome. We stayed for a few days and began to scour the net for jobs with energy comparable to a small nuclear explosion.

Just two days in we found just the thing. Boggy Creek vineyard was advertising on Gumtree for workers to re wire, train, prune and de- sucker their vines. We leaped on the phone and dialed immediately to a lukewarm welcome of ‘waiting for others to reply, get back to you soon” .After which we put this out of our mind and continued the search. The next day we had received another call from the vineyard – a resounding yes. We had been walking in Dandenong National park just in the mountains surrounding Melbourne when we received the call so we returned to the van and made celebratory Mi goreng noodles and said our goodbyes to the Melbourne I had yet to discover and Nico had to return to (thought best to revisit with cash to get to grips with its eminent coolness).

So we set off in our van for Wangaratta (3.5 hours north of Melbourne) to begin our lives again as Vine workers. Hopefully one in a long list of agricultural jobs to come as the seasons begin to align and the fruits come into fruition one by one dripping along the Australian coastline spreading and expanding just like our possibilities.

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