Craig & Sam Down Under

Hi Guys! Prepare yourselves for a long read – so much stuff has happened and Sam is back in the driving seat!

Since you last heard from us on the 17th December, I’ll start from there! It started out as a fairly normal working week on the 18th, I have been spraying herbicide on the weeds and Craig was spraying a pesticide on the trees to get rid of some caterpillars that were eating all the leaves! By Wednesday it was too windy to spray much and so I was helping Marie tie up the taller trees to the stakes so that they don’t bend over and then we had a lovely afternoon of weeding. It was a bit tough on the old back, especially the small area where my shorts come down a bit and my t-shirt rides up a bit and I’ve now got a lovely tan stripe. A couple of local guys who had been “working” up at the farm (a very lazy pair who tended to stand around smoking and watching the rest of us do some real work) were laid off and we were very pleased as it meant that we could work there for longer when really we expected to be the first to go when the amount of work there began to dwindle. We were also very excited to receive the parcels sent by Craig’s family, the photos really made our day and we spent most of the afternoon pawing, shaking, squeezing and sniffing all the parcels (and I had a bit of a sniffle over the Christmas cards too – thanks everybody, and Donna thanks for the pic of Alicia!).

The rest of the week was spent pruning the small branches off the young trees, this gave me lots of time to chat to Marie and even learn some German for myself (my favourite phrase so far is ‘Do the dishes… now!’). She’s a big animal lover and showed me a baby Kangaroo nest that she found out on one of the fields – she told me how an eagle had swooped down to try and take the joey and she had flapped around to frighten it away and ended up scaring the joey off into the bush. We hope it found its mother eventually. On Christmas Eve we had great fun in the supermarket planning our Christmas dinner and stocking up on treats for the 4 days off work. We split the cost of Christmas dinner with Sven and Marie and promised them a traditional Christmas dinner for the next day – it seems that the boys conveniently forgot about their plans to hunt a wild bush turkey, thank goodness.

On Christmas morning we were awoken by sunshine pouring in through the curtains on the van and had to get up pretty quickly as it gets like a sauna in there about an hour after the sun is up. We had bacon, egg and cheese butties with a nice cuppa for brekkie and then ploughed into the pressies! We were well chuffed with all the things people sent, especially the games that kept us entertained over the holiday! We started a monster game of Monopoly with Sven and Marie until it was time to start cooking dinner.

Our kindly neighbour John had let us borrow a small roasting oven that we plugged in to the camp kitchen to roast a chicken (unfortunately the turkeys were all too massive and too expensive so we had chicken instead!) and we had a plethora of veggies boiled, roasted, chopped, mashed and mulched as well as taters and gravy. We pulled Christmas crackers and party poppers and all wore the silly hats while we ate! For pud there was chocolate mudcake with custard and a slice of lemon cheesecake- in the same bowl, yummy!

So not quite a BBQ on the beach but still much fun and all the cooking and present opening stopped us from maudlin away Christmas day missing the family. We all had a few to drink and decided it would be a great idea if we all (Me, Craig, Sven and Marie) go to Alice Springs and to see Ayers Rock together when we’ve finished working and so now we are constantly planning and re-planning our next adventure!

Boxing day saw a massive van clear out – it’s amazing how much crap we’ve collected now we have a bit of space to store it in, I’ve no idea how we’ll ever put everything back into our backpacks! We made space for our new toys and games and so began a massive Monopoly/Pub Quiz/Boggle/Connect 4 Tournament – cracking! Back to work for 3 days on Wednesday and it was a fairly quiet week, two of the bosses off on holiday and we just carried on pruning. Craig bought a carton of beers for all the workers (it’s a friday afternoon ritual that someone buys a carton each week and we decided it was our turn) and we managed to blag some wood from the farm to help finish off our roof rack (we need the space for all the crap! – just kidding, it’s really so we can carry cans of water and fuel when we go to Alice Springs).

On New Year’s Eve we went into town again and this time Sven and Marie took over the shopping for our New Year party, so we had a bbq with steaks and salad as well as some potatoes cooked in the embers of our camp fire (it’s a regular thing now for us to sit around the camp fire in the evenings with a few beers, chatting to Sven and Marie). The first lot of potatoes ended up cremated but the second batch were very nice! We also had some of Craig’s favourite ‘beer onions’ with the steaks and toasted marshmallows on sticks for afters! Unfortunately since we’re so used to waking up when the sun comes up at around 5am each day and then going to sleep at about 8.30pm each night it was pretty difficult trying to stay awake for the big twelve o’clock count down! In fact Craig, Marie and Jeff (who invited himself along to the festivities) all fell asleep in their chairs and had to be woken up at about quarter to twelve. Needless to say it was a fairly quiet celebration and we were all in bed 15 minutes into 2006. Happy New Year!

We went back to work on Tuesday and were disappointed to hear that Sven and Marie might only be able to work until the end of the week. They’ve been having some problems with their van overheating and were relying on working until the end of Jan to pay for repairs. We began to think of ways to get the van fixed pronto so that we could all go to another Mango farm belonging to the same company up in Katherine (in the Northern Territory not far from Alice Springs) where our boss said they had work planting trees for three weeks for all four of us. Then on Wednesday our boss broke the news that there might only be one or two more days work left for us all- we’re just too damned fast and efficient! So as Craig and I really wanted to visit Port Douglas, the Daintree and Cape Tribulation further up the East Coast before we leave for Alice Springs we decided to cut our losses that day and do the trip over Thursday-Saturday while Sven and Marie sort out their van. We took Sven into Mareeba, about a half hour drive from here on Wednesday afternoon to take the radiator from his van into a repair shop to see about getting it cleaned. Even though we rang ahead and they said they were open until 4.30pm, at 4.05pm it was already closed. We were very frustrated by the wasted journey and offered to drop it off the next morning on our way out to Port Douglas, Sven would just have to trust us not to agree to too high a price. The next day we turned up at the garage only to be told that it was closed down and we would have to take the radiator to Cairns. This wasn’t a problem as we had planned to stop off in Cairns anyway to buy a two-way radio and the jerry cans for fuel and water that we want for our trip to Alice. So with much ado we eventually got the radiator dropped off and arranged to pick it up again on our way back on Saturday.

Next stop was Port Douglas, a town I had been longing to visit ever since I had sat eagerly researching Oz on the internet back at home. The further up the coast we went the hotter and more humid it became, the coastal highway had som gorgeous views and we weren’t disappointed by the landscape, it was utterly beautiful. The town of Port Douglas itself was just like any other coastal town however, the shops and restaurants and pubs were very samey and a little bit pricey for our budget! We sat for 15 minutes on the beach and were lucky to see a couple of dolphins playing out at sea. They jumped once and Craig spotted them…he nudged me to look and they jumped again… we grabbed the camera and they buggered off. Typical! The caravan park we stayed on was a bit grim, there were signs everywhere with the parks rules and regulations, a 40 point list of ‘you must not’s’ all thoughtfully finished off with “…or you will be escorted off the premises. The Management.” It was $25 for one night – shocking compared to the $65 per week we pay back in Dimbulah. We found ourselves ironically longing for the comfort and familiarity of what has been our home for 2 months! Since it’s my birthday next week we decided to go out and have a nice meal for a treat and so on to the “Star of Siam’ we descended. Not quite the meat and spinach balti with fried rice and poppadums type of establishment I was hoping for, Indian restaurants are a bit scarce out here, but it was a very nice Thai place and the food was gorgeous, well worth the money. After that we went to a little pub where there was a guitarist and a singer playing. They were a bit sombre (putting it politely) and Craig was the only person to clap after each song for a good half an hour, and this only because he felt a sense of loyalty to the guitarist who was actually quite good but just couldn’t sing. Eventually a few people joined in the clapping, I sat sniggering behind my beer at his Stevie Wonder head movements hehehe and we left when they stopped to take a break.

The next morning we got up very early to make our way to Cape Tribulation. On the way we passed through a town called Mossman and briefly visited Mossman gorge where there was a gorgeous section of the river twinkling and sparkling in the sunshine as it passed through heaps and heaps of smooth and shiny rocks in the river bed. We had to get on a small ferry to cross the Daintree river which cost us $16 (return), was no more than a slab of concrete on a pulley wire and lasted less than two minutes. All the same we took loads of photos and hoped to see some crocodiles but they must have been busy munching tourists elsewhere that day. In the Daintree Rainforest we stopped for a couple of hours at a Discovery Centre where they have a boardwalk both at ground level and in the canopies of the trees going through a section of the rainforest where they give you information about all the flora and fauna as you go around.
In the middle is a canopy tower where each level explains more about the variations in the forest the higher you go and looked freakishly like the area where Ant & Dec stand on ‘I’m a Celebrity…’ and one of the walkways is called the ‘Bush Tucker Trail’.

After this we drove on to Cape Tribulation which although very beautiful does not deserve to be described as a town as there are only four buildings and the ‘supermarket’ is no bigger than a ‘Spar’ shop. The camping dround seemed to be a bit of a posh ‘resort in the tropical rainforest’ type place and so after a brief visit to the beach where you can see the Reef and the Rainforest side by side (the only place in the world where you can see two protected World Heritage sites together) and took some photos we decided to make our way back to Cairns for the radiator and then ‘home’ to Dimbulah where the rent for the week was already paid and much much cheaper!

When we arrived back Sven and Marie had to replace the newly cleaned radiator and try a combination of things on their van to see if the problem was rectified. This was a long and complex process which involved Sven ignoring the advice of several people who know what they’re talkign about and just taking stuff apart anyway. While this was going on, Craig and I had another tidy out of our van and were just about to cook some tea (Craig was on his way to wash his hands to start chopping the veggies) when Craig found a little teeny puppy lying on the concrete underneath the washing line on the caraven park, right by our van! He went over and gave the little fella a fuss and a tickle and asked a couple of people nearby if he belonged to them. It turned out he’d been at the caravan park all day, someone found him this morning sleeping in one of the gents shower cubicles. Eveybody had just ignored him all day and the poor little bugger was starving and so hot. We gave him a couple of slices of sandwich chicken and he wolfed it down so fast we were worried about giving him too much in case he got sick. Over the next couple of hours we gave him more food and water and played with him lots. The general feeling amongst the residents on the caravan park was that he had been dumped by someone passing through town, an unwanted Christmas present from a family who couldn’t cope with him, this had happened before with a cat who has now been adopted by John. Marie made him a funky little harness and a lead out of some rope and we clipped it to our van for the night as it was getting dark and gave him an old towel to sleep on. The next day we went to the shop and checked the notice board for posters to see if he was lost but there was nothing and no-one local seems to know anything about him. We bought some puppy food and dog chews for him and gave him a de-flea bath. He’d got an ear full of ticks which we painstakingly removed using the flea-killing soap on a cotton bud to kill them before we pulled them out. He’s a very happy little pup, reasonably healthy looking and he’s a very clever pup who knows not to poop where he eats -he whimpers if he’s tied on the rope to be let off to go a few feet away from the van to do his business and always comes back. Craig takes him for a ‘walk’ around the caravan park, we don’t need a lead, he happily scampers a few paces behind Craig, ‘hunting’ his ankles. We’ve all been entertaining the idea of making him into a travelling dog and then bringing him home with us later this year but he doesn’t cope well in the heat and we think it’s only fair that he should have a nice home with air conditioning and a loving family to keep and feed him so next week we think it’s off to the pound for little NUPWE (No Useful Purpose What-so-Ever).

In the meantime our mate Jeff from the farm has been rallying around his farmer mates and managed to find work for us, Sven and Marie on one farm and Craig and I next door for at least one week (more sodding Mango trees!), so for now the money is still coming in and as soon as the German guys have their van fixed and enough funds we’ll be off to Alice Springs!

I think that’s all for the excitement now, Craig has just informed me that he’s got the 2-way and the new radio-cassette player all sorted and installed in the van, Maxine’s (lady who owns the caravan park) husband has been giving him a hand and has lent us some tools and the roof rack is also ship-shape and ready to rock. As great as it is to go travelling and we’re very excited about our next trip, we both feel that the best thing so far about being in Australia has been living and working here. The people are so colossally friendly and helpful and genuine, we’ve never known such kindness and it’s amazing. The weather is beautiful, the countryside is your office and we’ve made some great friends.

I hope 2006 brings many more amazing adventures and wonderful people, both for us and for all you guys at home. We love and miss you very much, and are looking forward to seeing you later this year.

I want to pay a little tribute here to those people who are no longer here to see the New Year in with us but I’m not sure what to say except, we know you’re watching over us as we travel, so thank you.

Sam & Craig

PS Craig’s email address is not working at the moment so please send his emails to Sam’s address at ahtnamas84@aol.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 8th, 2006 at 4:03 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.