Advertisement
Published: March 8th 2006
Home
My resting place for the past monthHellooooooo all,
Its been a month or so since my last one of these and its most certainly been a 'different' month for me!
I checked out of my hostel in Sydney and hopped on a train to a place called Albury which then connected with a bus to a minute town called Cobram where i was destined to do my fruit picking. The whole Journey took about nine and a half hours which wasnt too bad as i had a seat to myself on both the train and the coach i even treated myself to a gourmet spag bol meal. The train journey was a little boring as i swear i was going past the same tree and field every 15mins, and that was litterally all there was to see for the next 7 hours. The bus journey was good although i think the driver must have been an eskimo because the air conditioning was on full pelt and it was absolutely baltic on board!
As we edged nearer to Cobram, for about 15 inutes the only road signs i saw were for nursing homes, funeral directors and hospitals so i was a little bit worried exactly
Camp
part of the camp ive been staying in where i was heading. Plus you see more tractors driving around than cars because all the fuit orchards run along the roads so you see them everywhere.
When i got into Cobram 'town' i had the task of finding a taxi to get to the camp where i would be spending the next month. I wandered into a local pub to ask for a taxi number and they told me that they only have one taxi running on a weekday and that it goes between two towns which are about 20km apart. So as you can imagine i had a bit of a wait ahead of me.
The camp i have been staying in really is something else and definately nothing like ive ever stayed in before and ive lived as a slob at uni for 3 years. The words 'basic accomodation' on the website couldn't have been more true. My particular suite was breeze block walls about 10ft x 10ft with three beds in, grafiti all over the walls and dusty floors, with a blind that may aswell been made out of clingfilm because it didnt prevent even a microscopic ray of light from coming in. My
Picking
and you thought you'd never see me doing a hard days work in your lifetime! room also came with a complimentary ants nest just outside and a fan that either went at warp speed or no speed. There was a TV room with table tennis in which was quite good and also a volleyball net out on the grass, which was a lifesaver because if any of you have ever been to Oz and taken a moment to switch on the TV you would have realised in about 30 secs that aussie tv is not up to much!
Work starts at 7am but you were woken by what sounds exactly like an air raid siren at 5:45am for breakfast and at that time in the morning it is bloody scary...enough to make you wonder if you are actually under attack from the germans.
It took about a week and a half for me to get use to my new surroundings considering i'd come from Sydney where there was always stuff to do. In my first week i was one of about 3 backpackers at camp and the other blokes in camp had either just got out of prison and were doin fruit picking as part of a community service scheme, drunks, farm hoppers
Fruit Bin
This is how much fruit you have to pick to earn $35 (approx 2000 pieces!) or blokes that had booked some holiday off their normal jobs and gone pickin' to get away from their wife and kids for a month. Some of these blokes were alright to have a bit of a chin wag with as long as you were quite happy to insert a swear word into your sentences at about every third word then you could quite happily chat with them and they would listen to you. Also for about a week and a half whilst i was there not a single female was present, and some of these blokes had been there for a couple of months before me and not seen the female of the species the whole time. This made me increasingly aware of how much shower gel i was using in the showers, and if the time was to come where my only option was to resort to a bar of soap i think i would have stopped showering all together.
Also, a note to anyone else who wants to travel to Oz and do fruit picking to extend their visa, it is incredibly hard work and nothing can prepare you for it. Most of the days i
Transport to orchard
I swear ive seen this bus on Con Air was picking it was over 35 degrees which would grind my picking to a halt after lunch. However, if you can handle the heat then some serious money can be made in this job. There were blokes in Cobram that were picking over 10 bins of fruit a day and earning $2000 a week depending on what was being picked. My least favourite fruit to pick, but my favourite to eat was peaches. As you are probably aware peaches are quite soft and fluffy, this 'fluff' is all over the trees and drives you mental, it gets in all your places you get a bit sweaty whilst picking and itches like mad all day. When it gets hot, peach picking is kinda like goin to the gym wearing the t-shirt you just had your hair cut in! I also picked pears whilst i was there and they were a bit nicer to pick but a bit harder to get off the trees.
Once i got used to the picking and my surroundings i actually quite enjoyed myself! A couple of weeks in, a few more backpackers arrived so i had a few more people to relate to and natter
The Orchard
My working place (these are peach trees) with which was much needed. There were a lot of European backpackers knocking about and prior to their arrival i never realised how many different styles of facial hair there were. A couple of English lads were amongst them and most of them had finished uni in the last year or two aswell so we all traded stories over a few beers.
The working week went from Sunday to Friday where we had a slightly earlier finish than normal. As we had Saturdays off it meant the whole camp would pile into town, grab a slab of VB bitter and get good and drunk around camp before heading into the only Cobram nightclub, which is above the local pub. A few good nights were too be had in there with the folk from Camp. A couple of times a load of us just stayed at camp on friday nights and drafted in a few slabs of beer and sat around the benches chatting and joking about which was well good fun.
Country life has also introduced me to quite a few more creepy crawlies that i wouldnt have seen in Sydney and hopefully not anywhere else for that
Camping on the Murray
Our campsite.....prob nicer than camp ap the fruit farm matter. My first discovery was a Huntsman spider, these critters are bloody huge and look pretty similar to tarantulas. Luckily these blokes are pretty harmless and they arent venomous at all, but still a bit of a shock to see one crawling out of your picking bag whilst its round your kneck and brought me my first brown pants moment of my travels so far. I also came across a couple of Redback spiders, which can be deadly (apparently only the females, but i wasnt willing to test their gender!), i started only seeing one in a jar that some of the English lads had caught (god us English are hard!), then i saw them in the toilets and also one in the phone booth whilst i was on the phone.....it jumped out from behind the phone and ate a little cockroachy type thing, that moment provided me with brown pants moment number two. After more frequent sitings i found myself doing full searches of my room before i went to bed and was shaking the hell out of my sleeping bag before i got in it. Other than spiders there were also some dragon flies always in the toilets
The Murray River
This is the beachy section we were swimming from at night and i can only describe them as light aircraft and should have been assigned a flight number before take off, also a moth that took residence in the TV room that looked like a product of Chernobyl.
The weekend before i left Cobram five of us decided to break free from camp and head down to the Murray River and camp down there for the night. We set up our tents and rigged up a few fishing rods to catch some dinner, popped open a few stubbies and sat by the river and fished till the sun set. Didnt actually catch any fish and didnt fancy any of the logs i'd hauled off the bottom, so it was a good think i bought a steak and baked potato in the supermarket an hour or so before. Now im no chef, but i think Gordan Ramsey would have been happy to serve what i cooked up that evening, my steak was absolutely fantastic.....perfection infact! The night was awesome, we got merry round a campfire and two of the lads could play guitar so we had a sing along and joked around till the sun came back up.
The Murray River at sunset
Imagine sitting infront of this with a fishing rod in one hand and a beer in the other. Pretty awesome! After a couple of hours kip, we strolled down the river a mile and to wake ourselves up went for a swim. The water was like a swimming pool and crystal clear. We blew up a li-lo and took it in turns to float down river it was so relaxing. but being the silly billy i am, i forgot to put some sun cream on till it was a little too late and got a bit burned. Now ive been burned many a time, and you would have thought i would have learned my lesson, but when you wake up the next day and have to carry your big old 15kg backback around, you most certainly feel the burn....and that is most definately lesson learned for me.
So after saying goodbye to everyone (which was quite sad as i'd met some sound people there) i made my way after breakfast and got a taxi to the bus station. Which means i am now writing from Melbourne...and it really is quite nice to be back in civilisation.
So...thats all from me till next time, ive got some tickets for the Commonwealth games so will keep u posted of how i get on in a couple of weeks.
Hope all is well and take care everyone,
Dunc
Advertisement
Tot: 0.207s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 11; qc: 48; dbt: 0.0569s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
Chewy
non-member comment
Wow
Well Buz sounds like you're having a great time out there....... And many unusual experiences LOL. Reading this has made me soooo jealous and now i have to go and sit in an English lesson with a class full of yr 7 boys!!!! Well keep me posted and have fun, Chewyxxxxx P.S I forgot to tell you. Im a lacrosse official on tour so getting paid mmmwwwwwwwahahahaha!