Ended up really struggling to find a job in Brisbane, the only job I was offered was door to door sales which I really didn't want to do! So me and Steph (a girl I met in the hostel) flew up to Cairns and we are now working on a farm! I've decided I want to get my 2nd year visa and to do that you have to do 88 days farm work.
The farm is near a town called Mareeba which is about an hour and a half drive from Cairns. So we're pretty much in the middle of nowhere! It gets a bit boring being stuck at the farm all the time, as it's a $60 round trip in a taxi just to go into Mareeba! So we try to all go in together for a food shop and a few drinks in the pub about once a week. We're sharing a house with 6 other people who are all really nice. The house itself though is not so nice! You have to go outside to get to the shower and toilet, and they're full of cockroaches, bugs and spiders, yuck! And the sofas in the living room are old and horrible, so not comfy at all! Makes the hostels I've been staying in seem like luxury!
Our house.
Luxurious bathroom facilities...
Mine and Steph's bed bug infested room!
The work is really easy though. Picking and packing zucchinis (courgettes), limes and squash. Picking can hurt your back though, especially squash as you have to carry the buckets as well as being constantly bent over getting them off the plant! Zucchini picking is a bit easier as we have a harvester machine thingy that holds our buckets, and it has a radio so we can listen to music while we work :) Lime picking is the definitely my least favourite, even though it doesn't hurt your back. But all the branches of the trees are covered in thorns and the trees are surrounded by sometimes waist height weeds, also full of thorns! So you get really scratched even in trousers and long sleeves! Packing is pretty easy, but can get really boring and repetitive!
We start work at 7am most days. I've been working LOADS though, just finished my 3rd week and this is only the 2nd day off I've had since I got here! I'm thinking of the money though, and it's more days towards my 2nd year visa! I've done 19 days now so 69 more to go... lets hope I manage to stay here that long!
One thing you wouldn't expect to find on a farm though is a hot tub! Lester (the farmer's wife's dad) lives next door to us and has a hot tub which he let us use one evening! Did our aching backs a lot of good!! It was so weird though, being on a farm, in a hot tub, drinking wine! And Lester also made us a BBQ! So that was a good evening :)
Had a massive drama this week though. Me and Steph started getting horrible itchy bites, which we thought were fleas or something - turns out our room was infested with bed bugs! It was horrible, I had bites all over my arms, neck, shoulders and even on my face. It made me feel sick to think they'd been crawling on my face and biting me while I was asleep!
So as soon as we discovered the bugs we went to tell the farmer, who didn't know anything about bed bugs and tried to offer us a can of insect repellent! In the end the farmers wife googled it and told us they'd phone pest control the following day, and in the mean time we had to sleep on the horrible sofas, which turned out where also full of bed bugs, so we still got bitten! After 2 more nights of very little sleep on the sofas, we all had to leave the house for 48 hours for the place to be fumigated! So we packed up all our clothes and bedding to be washed and moved to our new home for the next few nights - a shed! The farmer and his wife supplied us with mattresses and airbeds, and me and Steph ended up on the only one with a hole in it, so ended up sleeping on the wooden floor! So 2 more nights of very little sleep!
Now finally we're back in the house and the bed bugs are gone, fingers crossed! I haven't been bitten again anyway :)
Anyway, haven't really got much else to report! Not sure when I'll next write on here, might not be for a while as farm work is not the most exciting thing to read about, might add a few more photos at some point! Bye for now :)
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