A week like this

As I may have mentioned before, we went to Yeppoon to volunteer at an organic farm. We stayed a week and continued to Airlie Beach but let me first describe the week at the farm.

Well, when we finally made it to the farm we were show our own little self-contained cottage that reminded us from Finnish summer cottages. The bathroom was located downstairs and you had to go out to wild to access it. What a lucky thing that the family had a friendly dog who escorted us to bathroom in the night. Otherwise I guess I would have been too scared to go at all, what with all the taipans and other deadly dangerous snakes just waiting to attack their victims. The funny thing is, usually it's people taking dogs for a walk and pee, but in our lives even that went the other way around :)

We started working in the garden on Monday. They grow different kind of vegetables at the farm but not in the winter. Pumpkin planting was ongoing but that was done by our Italian fellow workawayers. See, everyone else is doing something productive but Anna and I are stuck with weeding. In the evening we got to visit Emu Park, it was windy and the sea was very restless but it was a nice place to go for a walk, followed by a cup of coffee in Yeppoon.

On Tuesday we continued weeding (what else?) and mulched the flowerbeds to prevent future weeds of covering the area. The work was actually funny and the meals were just 5 star. On Wednesday we received one more workawayer and continued gardening. Daily drama was provided by one of the neighbors who had decided to hang himself. He was found by the 16 years old son of our hostess. The young farmer seemed to be quite ok after the ordeal but his mother tried to drown the sorrows in a bucket of wine. To be honest I had suspected she might have a close relationship with alcohol and that kind of proved my point.

On Thursday we continued weeding some extremely prickly and annoying plants that are difficult to get rid of. The most successful way is to pull them out with roots. Fingers still hurt because we pulled them out without gardening gloves and a couple of times we thought that the process might, just might, be faster and more efficiently done by a machine. Plus I might never fully recover from seeing so many huge spiders. One of them was even climbing Anna's leg. Had it been my leg, I wouldn't have lived to pass the story. I mean, the spider was ENORMOUS.

In the evening we drove to Rockhampton, there was a local show. In the end we didn't see the show because we found it a bit too expensive. Admission was 15 dollars, so we saved 7 dollars, deciding to go for a drink instead. Finding a place that was open proved to be challenging. Everyone had a day off because of the show but luckily we found one place that served us our well earned beers.

Rockhampton, the beef capital

On Friday we still continued weeding and finished the field we were assigned. Bueno, but a pity that we didn't get to plant anything as on Saturday we started weeding yet another flower bed. Seriously, who needs that many flowers anyway? I don't want to see gardens ever again. Sunday was a part timer's day off but naturally it was raining. Our British workawayer told us she had seen a massive toad in front of our bathroom. Our hosts advised that in the future we should pour turpentine on the creature. Turns out their poison can kill an animal the size of a dog and paralyze people. The nature here is much wilder than back home in Europe. Had I seen the toad I would probably have lifted it out of the way. It's scary that you might do something dangerous because you don't understand that whatever you have learned about nature in Finland can't be applied in Australia.


In the afternoon we went for a walk in the beach and bought some snacks for our 6+ hours bus tour to Airlie Beach. We chose a night bus leaving 3:10 am so we had about 5 hours at the bus station to go through all the things we experienced in Yeppoon. Seriously, it was a nice week but at the same time quite tiring. Well, that's life for you. Suck it up.