Southbound we go

Daisy's got a new pair of shoes (snazzy new Bridgestones, that foxy lass) and she's itching to get on the road. I guess we are a little, too-- though country life has been swell, we are excited to get to the big city, where there aren't so many creepy critters!

We finally finished up the last of our work at Cherry Park (yes, I know I said that before, but there was more) yesterday... and in just a few days of weeding and putting mulch on cute little cherry tree saplings, we've totally destroyed our work clothes and gardening gloves, acquired ourselves achy and sunburnt backs, and had our nerves shattered by creatures hiding in the pine mulch. Anyone heard of the wolf spider? It's something that only existed in wildlife books for us till last week-- it's a giant, hairy spider that, if it bites you, is thought to sometimes cause necrosis-- translation: the spider injects digestive juices into the bite and your arm (or whatever was bitten) rots off painfully over time. Without a cure, no less. Ew! Wolfie's death came promptly a la the shovel, needless to say. Adrian also encountered a killer giant blue centipede, and thanks to his gloves it didn't get him. [WATCH OUR VIDEO HERE] We also uncovered a pile of lizard eggs, and one big bird egg, which we were hoping it didn't belong to a magpie-- those things are vicious! Let's just say we're pretty stoked to be finished the orchard work.

But it's not all doom and gloom... Stanthorpe's been good to us. Our boss took us all out for a fantastic night out on the town Friday night, we've found a pretty awesome pizza place in town, and we've relaxed lately by feeding the birds-- gorgeous king parrots and crimson rosellas flock outside our house-- and the cows, who are now so loyal they sleep by our cottage. We've even spotted the big lizard that lives in our roof, and we're expert firestarters, thanks to our wood stove.

Apparently it's a 24 hour drive to Melbourne (this country is so big!) so we'll do the trip over a few days. We haven't even seen a movie in ages, so we're very excited to check out Into The Wild (anyone seen it?) and have some good restaurant grub along the way. We're also planning to spend some time cruising around Sydney Harbour on the ferry-- it's hard to believe we've been in Oz for 10 months and haven't visited Sydney yet! And then it'll be off to Melbourne, for our third time, though this time hopefully to stay, to visit friends, get proper jobs, shop, eat, drink, and go to all the live concerts we can handle! (We just hope nobody notices our farmers' tans.) We're thinking of you in Ontario, all snowed in... one more week till "Chrissy", as they call it here!

We live in a house, a very small house in the country...

Sweet mercy- we're done fruitpicking!

Cherry season ended a bit earlier than planned due to the crazy amounts of rain we've been getting here lately (a real shocker, since Stanthorpe is a drought-stricken community where the town water supply is -or was- expected to run out in February 2008!) Saturday was our last day, a real scorching-hot, sunny, humid summer day. It was getting to be a real nightmare finding any ripe cherries on the trees that hadn't split from the recent rains. After a few hours of sweating, and dodging snails, spiders, and Korean tourists picking their own baskets of fruit, we all agreed that was it. Not an hour later, we were treating ourselves to McFlurries at the local McDonald's (or, "Macca's", as they call it as they call it here) the thunder, lightning, and biggest downpour began... and the storms here aren't like any Canadian summer storm. The lightning's brighter, the thunder louder, and for such a dry place, the rain just keeps on pouring. So good bye cherries!

We still had one week remaining to "do our time" for our second visa, but we'll plant blueberry seedlings at Cherry Park for a day or two to finish it off this week till we're back on the road (and despite our blog polling results, it's looking more and more like Melbourne's in the cards). Somehow along the way we really began to enjoy cherry picking (and especially the people we work for and with) and are pondering coming back next year after some travels...plus, we'll have to see what our boss, Graham, does to his house next year for Xmas-- we visited on Friday evening and he surprised us by being the local Clark Griswold!

We're also happy to have a little time off so we can enjoy our new home-- last weekend we moved to a tiny stone-and-timber cottage just across the state border from Stanthorpe in New South Wales. (We're actually living in another time zone, though no one goes by it here! Crazy.) The cottage belongs to the neighbour of our Cherry Park co-worker, Sandy, and she rents it out to backpackers while the cottage's owner is off on the coast studying naturopathy. And it's a steal, at $60 a week (our trailer was $200!). It's a little "basic", as Sandy describes it-- you've got to fire up the wood stove to create hot water for the shower, and we've got a dunny (that's Aussie for outhouse, ew!). But we figured, it's only for two weeks and then we'll be city slickers again, so what the hell!

The cottage itself is about five times the size of the caravan we used to rent (we're moving up!), and it has a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, office, and a huge living room area complete with couch and super-old-school TV that gets no channels at all. It's nestled in a grove of red gums and spotted gums (huge eucalyptus trees), and we're right next to a paddock where seven cows greet us every morning (we've been tossing apples to the pregnant one, and we think she's warming up to us!). The house, we're told, is about 20 years old and entirely made of found pieces-- part of it is made from granite boulders, part raw-looking logs; there's fringed lamps and red velvet theatre curtains that must have been the ultimate garage sale score. And each window is totally different.... it's really cool.

But I know after our last blog, you're all wondering about the critters roaming nearby! Let's just say that I (Dayle) have TOTALLY kicked my fear of small spiders (I can stick my hand through a web without a squeal!) because the monsters who inhabited our dunny were unbelievable-- till we unleashed the power of Mortein, the aerosol spider killer, that is! Luckily, so far they've all been the non-threatening Huntsman type. (Lately we were reading in horror about the Wolf Spider- Aussie of course- that when it bites you it injects digestive juices so your arm slowly rots off over years and years. UGH!) But anyway, the Huntsman we found inside on the dunny wall the day we moved in was terrifying nonetheless, so big we stared in awe while he wiggled his mandibles and ate a piece of a grasshopper with its very large and hairy front leg. Ew! [WATCH OUR VIDEO HERE] A few days later, there were two Huntsmans in there-- one perched on the ceiling (it's a pretty low ceiling, too) that had me running out screaming, and another stretched out on the door. Adrian poked it with a broomstick to see what it would do, and after a few nudges it began running in circles at warp speed and we both dashed into the house screaming. (We were quite literally scared shitless!) The next morning, the ceiling spider was hanging in the same spot, but dangling from two legs in a strange acrobatic pose. I gave it a few sprays of spider death before realizing it was probably dead (or a really good actor) and tried to nudge it down with the broomstick. But it was still so scary, Adrian woke up to my screeches and was braver with the stick-- and when the spider dropped, the THUMP it made on the ground really resonated that these are no ordinary spiders... these are the Australian version of chipmunks!

The other creatures around here pale in comparison to the Huntsmans, but keep life interesting. Yesterday a fat little black lizard wandered in and hung out behind the open front door until I scared it off with the camera flash. We were late for work one day when we had to get a tree frog out of the van. Every day, we wake up to the cackles of kookaburras, king parrots, and crows, and sometimes come home to find a bunch of idiotic belly-up beetles who decided to die in our cups and mugs. And there are probably about 20 big charcoal-grey moths that live in the cabin, but we just leave them alone since they were here long before us (though there are times when we dislike them, like when we pull a curtain and one swoops out to freak us out).

And if the cottage is cool, our neighbours are even better. Though Sandy does enjoy 'freaking out the tourists' by lending us books like "Australia's Deadliest Creatures" and inviting us over to watch Wolf Creek (eek, have you watched that movie back home??), she and her family have treated us like family ourselves and had us over for beer and barbeque feasts, and yesterday they took us out to Undercliff Falls at a nearby national park, where we hiked down what was pretty much a sheer cliff to a gorgeous towering waterfall, where we swam around for hours and had a great time till the thunder began rumbling again. It's a pretty cool spot to be in-- though Liston (where we're staying) is a village now, apparently in the gold rush days (like 1870s) it had a population of 80,000. Sandy's partner Lionel's a big fossicking enthusiast and said it's not hard at all to find rocks full of gold and tin that the miners missed, today just laying on the ground in dried-up creek beds. And we still get excited just by seeing a kangaroo jump by!

PS. Come see the creepy critters hanging out around our country cottage, and more-- we've put up a pile of new photos on Flickr.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Based on True Events...

(Adrian) So there I was cooking up some burgers talking to a friend on the phone leaning against the doorway to the boudoir on Friday evening. "Yak, yak, this and that" and I casually glanced away from the meal when I noticed that the walls were shifting. At first I thought it was my eyes adjusting to the light, but it turns out it was a Huntsman spider about the size of a hand palm skittering about the wall.
(Dayle) I was flipping through a book on the other side of the kitchen, when Adrian told our friend on the phone abruptly "I'll call you back. Oh my God!" He told me, "DON'T come over here... DON'T!" Of course I had to find out what was on the other side of the wall... spider? rodent? snake? bunyip?
A: I got off the phone and stood stunned for a split second. "What the hell do I do? I didn't read about how to handle this situation in college!" Since Dayle would no doubt freak out i told here to move to the complete opposite of the trailer.
D: But curiosity got the better of me. I peered around the corner to see what Adrian was staring in terror at...
A: Dayle screamed like a banshee when she saw the spider, as I figured she would. My ears still hurt.
D: Shut up! You were freaking out too!
A: So anyway...
D: The spider started moving sideways along the wall, that was the scariest part. Not to mention it was huge, hairy, and kind of stepped like a Muppet character. We stuck a mirror around the corner and watched it... it was a little less scary.
A: The next problem was how to get rid of the beast. As Dayle screamed, it started inching toward the vented door that it must have come into from the pouring rain. But it wouldn't leave, no matter how much she screamed.
D: Finally, Adrian got a bucket, the fly swatter (the longest stick-like object we could find), and a newspaper. The plan was to cover the Huntsman with the bucket, cover the top with the newspaper, and release it back into the rainy outdoors. The fly swatter was in case it jumped-- as they apparently do!
A: After some mental preparation, I waited for the spider to get into the perfect trapping position. Then I slammed the bucket over it.
D: I think I was still shrieking.
A: I had to make sure it was in the bucket, so I peeked inside. The spider made a mad dash to escape... and that's when I dropped the bucket on top of it.
D: And then we had this large, icky carcass to deal with....

Epilogue: Dayle and Adrian got out of the incident without any physical injuries. The spider, however, was not so lucky. On the bright side, the old rule that if you kill a spider, it will rain did not apply. It had already been pouring rain for 24 hours by the time the soggy spider came in for shelter.

In other news... the rain detsroyed a lot of the cherries at the orchard we're working at, so we're not sure if we'll still be cherry pickers in a week. But the countdown to our second visas continues-- 3 weeks left, including this one! This weekend we got a new prime minister Down Under-- a guy named Kevin Rudd who seems a lot cooler than John Howard, who's been in power for the past 11 years or so and has annoyed his citizens by following George Bush into Iraq and not really giving a rat's ass about Kyoto, or the environment as a whole (among other things). We have hope for this country after all! And it's definitely interesting watching the whole thing as kind-of outsiders but from the inside.

What else? Oh! The spider story might not make any sense to everyone who didn't get the memo about our new "apartment". Yep, we got sick of camping/driving/eating/sleeping in the same tiny van, and splashed out to rent an on-site caravan in Stanthorpe while we're working here. Yes, we live in a trailer (we're in anticipation of all of your jokes). It's great! We have an oven-- we've been baking pies!-- we have a bedroom AND a kitchen area AND room to sit around in! We've unpacked our clothes for the first time in ages. And it's all decorated in fake wood. Classy.

After this, we're debating whether to settle in Brisbane or Melbourne for the next few months... Brizzie is close by, a nice city, plenty of work, and loads of fun stuff to do nearby, but we're not sure if it has that magical city mojo Melbourne does. And on the other hand, Melbourne's awesome, fun, gorgeous, and it's the good weather season, but really far away, and we're worried it'll be packed with travellers (hence: all good jobs gone). In the meantime, why don't you all give us a vote on where we should go next on our snazzy new blog poll. We'll close voting in a month... that should do it. Kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure. And in the meantime, check out our new favourite website, Hats of Meat. Bye!

A Tale of Two Cherry Farms

Hooray! The cherry-pickers are on a three-day weekend! But unfortunately their internal clocks can't be readjusted and they woke up at 6:30am this morning anyway. Yarrrrr.

The countdown is on, and we now have only three more weeks of harvest work in Stanthorpe until we're eligible for our second year work visas in Oz. Cherry picking hasn't been bad at all, in fact, we're pro-stars at it now and spent our week getting shuffled to wherever the work is at the time-- between our original farm (Beaver's) and our new orchard (Cherry Park), where we started two weeks ago.

The two farms are right across the highway from each other, and have their pros and cons. At first, we were overjoyed to start at Cherry Park, where we were promised 5 weeks of employment (all we need for the visa) and there are tons of cherry trees, a nice lunchroom, and a really nice family running it. There were a lot of us working there at first, but since they all sucked at cherry-picking, suddenly it's down to us and an Aussie hunting enthusiast, Dave. We get to cruise into the orchard in the farm ute (see "Autosluts" photo below) and aside from the odd spider, tree frog, and one big resident frill-necked lizard, we're left alone to do our picking (and snacking). Not bad!

But then, this week the folks at Cherry Park told us we're going to work a day and a half at Beaver's farm... OK, whatever, as long as we're getting paid. Beaver's trees are coated in pesticides and fungicides (our hands get SO dirty there, and we're afraid to eat the chemical-laden cherries), but the manager, Peter, is a cool guy who cracks us up and doesn't make us pick the cherries by colour or any of that business. AND there are no mouldy cherries or spiders waiting in the branches (the only survivor we met was a green caterpillar!). We have the run of the whole orchard as their only 2 workers-- a little spooky-- and can goof off as we please. Not to mention we get paid more there!

But Beaver/Peter's orchard only had so many trees (it's mostly apples, which get harvested in January), so it was back to Cherry Park. We felt kind of like baseball players being traded from team to team by our agents... really, we're pretty sure they're just trying to keep us busy so we don't skip town on our days off. We're bittersweet about being back at Cherry Park, as the schedule keeps changing and we honestly think the owner, Graham, has no idea what's happening out in the field (after having part-shares in the farm for years, he finally took it over this year). Part of us wants to make lots of money and part of us just wants to sit around and play lots of Tropico, while ticking off our visa weeks without working too much.

Not to mention our only co-worker, Dave, is a piece of work too-- if he's not talking about cherries (85% of the time, too much shop-talk!), it's about hunting. Don't get us wrong, he's a very nice guy, just a little hard to relate to. If he were a North American, he'd be from the heart of Texas. He drives a 4WD with his spare tire on the back decorated with a logo for "Longbow Hunters". He tells us proudly, "This is the only country in the world where you can knock on someone's door and they're totally cool with hunting on their property," (that's his weekend activity). He says he likes to shoot animals with a longbow "because it's more humane than with a gun". Hmmm. One day in the car ride to work-- yes, we carpool with him-- there was a little too much shooting talk and Dayle mentioned she was a vegetarian. Dave called her a "greenie" and tried to further justify his hunting by saying everything he shoots is "feral". (though in other parts of the world we think "feral" may refer to something else, in Australia, everything that's not a koala, crocodile, goanna, or emu-- anything native Australian-- is feral. Thus, it's OK to shoot apparently.) And Dave shoots feral pigs, deer, cats, boars, camels (well, he hopes to someday). Even kangaroos, though they're not feral, "There's just so bloody many of them," says Dave.

"Well, you know what else is feral in Oz??" Adrian thought, and quickly bit his tongue-- "White people!". Somehow we both think he'd find a way to justify that too.

When possums attack

Howdy, y'all! We're now back to livin' it up in the country (if you can call it that).
Brisbane was great and all, and we'll definitely be back, but for now it's time to hunker down and get the rest of our required six weeks of harvest work done for our second year's visa-- and hopefully we'll never have to pretend we're Paris and Nicole on The Simple Life again.

After Brisbane we decided to take Daisy for a camping night on the way to Stanthorpe. We visited an information centre and they pointed us to The Gorge campground, a strange prviately-run campground near Boonah, QLD. It was a little rugged, but recommended because it was by a creek-- and they really love to swim in anything here. One look at the black, murky water with vines overgrowing the sides and we were like "Forget it! Where's our pool?" But we parked next to it and it was a nice setting to eat cheese and crackers in.

Not long after we had started our snack, a friendly man with beer in hand came over to invite us over to the large cabin across the lane for his group's annual men-vs-women Trivial Pursuit faceoff and apple pie. How could we refuse? We were there for hours in a fierce battle with retired schoolteachers, posties, etc... until the men finally took it (though we were aces at sports, us girls just couldn't get the Arts & Literature questions!)

We get back to our van, which we had left open to get some air into (it was stiflingly hot) and immediately think "Eek, what kind of bugs are going to be sleeping with us tonight!?". Adrian gets in to investigate. Everything seems in place. I'm standing outside the van when I hear a rustling and a cat-sized figure just behind the driver's seat-- A POSSUM! Our first possum sighting (finally) though maybe not in the manner we were hoping. The damn thing wouldn't leave, and there was a baby one on the roof trying to sneak inside as well. With some help from our Trivial Pursuit mates and some fierce possum-shooing tactics, we finally got them back up the tree and surveyed the damage: they apparently had fancy tastes and only went for the French baguette we bought to accompany dinner. Yarrr! They tried to pay us back by scritch-scratching trails along the roof of the van for the rest of the night...

On Sunday we drove the rest of the way to Stanthorpe (the farm town in the mountain we ditched for HK a few weeks ago) and found a much better caravan park than our last-- at Top of the Town, we get a pool, nice patches of grass to park on, showers you DON'T have to put coins in to use (sheesh!), and microwaves and real ovens to use in the camp kitchen. AND we have phone reception (at our old "home", Blue Topaz, the phone bars dropped off randomly on the highway about a 1/2km before the park) AND it's walkable to town. We had just started our laundry and jobs came to us within about two hours after arriving-- and now we pick cherries for a farmer named Beaver. :)

We did our first day out it the orchard yesterday-- and without jinxing anything, it's probably our best harvest job yet-- we get a bit dirty and sticky by the end of the day, but there's no ladders, scratchy branches, or even a hovering supervisor to deal with. Not bad! Today we got rained out, so we even get to catch up on our errands and though it's kind of freezing, but life is pretty all right here. (Though we're thinking Brisbane hotel for Xmas!)

Oh yeah-- And if anyone wants to mail us, send away! We'll be staying at Top of the Town for a while-- here's our address:

10 High Street
Stanthorpe, QLD 4380
AUSTRALIA

Hooray for Hong Kong!

Hello everyone from sunny Brisbane, where we've returned to after our crazy 10-day whirl in Hong Kong! I guess we were a little too ambitious in planning to blog daily-- first our free "hotel" internet stopped working for days, and there was just too much to do to have time to write about it!

To our HK-born friends: we now understand why you love the place so much. And to everyone else, go visit! (We're going back the first chance we get). We saw tons in our time there: took in some legitimate culture at the massive art and history museums, oohed and ahead at the skyline from The Peak, cruised around Victoria Harbour in the Duk Ling junk boat for free (thanks to the tourist board), and got our photos taken in crazy Japanese photo booths (so much fun we did it 3x! we'll try to scan them for you at home). We ate as much authentic food as we could, but treated ourselves to frequent Starbucks frappuccinos too (hey, we had to make up for all our time in the boonies of Australia). Best coffee spot-- Pacific Coffee Company on the Avenue of the Stars, where you could sit and sip for hours and gaze at the lit-up skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island.

And then there was the shopping (Adrian rolls his eyes here, but he loved shopping as much as me)! Every day, a new neighbourhood to shop in. We cruised around Causeway Bay a bit, though it was too designer for our tastes. There seemed to be a Louis Vuitton on every corner-- all of them with had roped-off queue areas, sheesh! We stayed right by Granville Road, which was full (and I mean 6 storeys stacked) of trendy clothing shops, many with awesome sales (and one day we'll go back and get our hair cut at "Hair Potato"). My personal favourite was the market on Fa Yuen St in Mong Kok, where I got the best boots in the world.... they made me feel like a million bucks but also stopped my limping. One thing no none warns you about is the terrible foot-aches and blisters you get about two days into a HK trip. Yeowch! I broke a pair of shoes on the first day :( Oh yeah.... and there's H&M! (none yet in Oz, I don't think) We were in there about an hour when I thought, "Gee, I've sure taken quite a while in the changeroom. Oh, poor Adrian must be bored to tears".... well, guess who I found with an arm-shattering heap of clothes. It's hard to tell who's the biggest shopper out of us!

If we went back (when we go back!) we'll have to explore a bit more of the nature side of things-- we took a day trip out to Lantau Island to climb a boatload of stairs to see the big Buddha on a hill. It was gorgeous countryside, mountains and temples, and hard to believe it was still Hong Kong! It also happened to be a full-moon evening, and our bus back to the city passed a lively-looking jail, bulls locking horns and wrestling in the road, and then after all that, our bus broke down to a literal GRINDING halt on its way uphill--on a 45 degree angle--on a winding road... scariest thing ever. But, we made it out OK, quelled our worries in more shopping and ice cream, and really, it made us feel even more like yay, we're really in Asia!

On the flight back (thanks again Graeme for making sure we got out!), we stopped off in Taiwan and with our 7-hour layover, HAD to go visit the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101 (which may soon be dwarfed by the Burj Dubai. Honestly, from the ground, it didn't look THAT high, and then we got up to the observatory, and we were promptly corrected. And the elevator took just over 30 seconds to get from floors 5 to 89! (and felt nothing at all like the death-elevator we rode to our "hotel" room every day in HK)

Now that we're back in Oz, we've been sleeping a lot. The adjustment was pretty extreme-- from hellish smog and no birds to trees everywhere and big bites and camping. All we smelled was TREES (yay!) when we left the airport. But then we got depressed because Brisbane's not half as exciting as HK. Soon, it's back to work on some farm (ugh), but for now we're easing ourselves in gently with a little city livin' in Brizzie and some partying with our good Scottish buddy Stu (you may remember him from our pear-picking photos). Hey, Brisbane's not so bad, really... we've designated our new all-day breakfast hangout today, and the weather's pretty good. Maybe we'll be back here in a few weeks!
Thx for the comments and for reading. There's "heaps" of new photos online, if you're bored...
PS. Daisy was fine and happy to see us. Aside from a dent (that maybe was there in the first place) and some mouldy hummus in our fridge (oops), everything was all good and she forgave us for leaving :)

Yup we're in HONG KONG!

Yes, yes, the rumours are true, we're in Hong Kong. It's a long story so bear with us!
There we were on the pruning fields of Farmer Bob's slave emporium, working for some extra money and visa time. It wasn't the worst job in the world but for that second visa, it was kind of easy. Basically we just had to thin some fruits off the trees by picking off some of the smaller nectarines so the others can grow big and juicy.

Anywhos, here's how this crazy adventure began (so make sure your sitting down, because it's so amazing and crazy you'll fall over or cry blood):
Friday, TGIF, we finished work and we're heading back from the farm when I noticed we needed to fill up old Daisy (the van), the problem was we were kinda low on money (one of the pitfalls of traveling for 2 months straight), so we made our way to the ATM. The logic being that one of us had more, thus the gas buyer.
As I (Adrian) was waiting behind Dayle, admiring the sleepy little town of Stanthorpe, was shaken when Dayle began to screech with joy. I thought something had gone horribly wrong but was corrected by Dayle when she announced that our tax returns had gone through-- making us $4000.00 richer!

Back at the caravan park we were celebrating with a beer as the night was preparing to drop to its usual 3 degrees (at this time it was our 4th day in Stanthorpe, and our 3rd day of 'work'), when one of us came up with the brilliant idea - "Who needs this crap, what if we used our return plane ticket to go to HONG KONG!?"
Some back story: our return tickets to Canada (which had a stop over in Hong Kong) were scheduled to leave on October 20th at 11:30am, it was already Oct 19th at 6pm.
Hell why not?! Quick like a bunny we packed up all our stuff, the whole time wondering if this was the stupidest thing ever. (We didn't even have time to quit our jobs.....er, and still haven't gotten around to it) Some quick phone calls and a lot of help from the most awesome guy ever - THANKS GRAEME!!! - We had our return tickets figured out and were driving like mad in the dead of night the two and a half hours to Brisbane International Airport (and we made it with time to spare).

Now here we are, in Kowloon, Hong Kong sleeping in a closet of a room with a coffin sized bathroom attached. Our window looks out to a moldy, dank elevator shaft, but we have free internet! We love it!
It's busy, crowded, a little smelly but beautiful. Hong Kong is very cool. Not 3 days ago we were freezing our butts off in a bumpkin town in rural Australia and now we're taking on the big city.
We're doing lots, and trying to take in as much as we can. Yesterday we took the tram to the 'Peak' of HK and had a bird's eye view of the city's skyscrapers, and somehow spent the night drinking with Triad members, paralegals and cops - whom all burst into random karaoke between 'Liars dice' games and shots of whiskey! Today we're recovering by going to someplace quiet, probably at a museum or two, and maybe even Starbucks.
We've mastered the brilliant subway system, and already have a free junk boat trip scheduled for Thursday.
We'll post tomorrow or tonight of our adventures thus far, but for the meantime we're okay, we're just in Hong Kong looking for congee breakfast.

-love D&A

Adventures in Capricornia

After striking it rich on the gemfields (ha ha) we started heading east towards the coast again—excited because we had found out our tomato-packing friend from Echuca (well, she’s from Germany really) Bianca had found herself a nice job and a very nice park ranger in the tiny town of Dingo, Queensland. We hadn’t seen her since April and were planning to meet as she drove northwards and we headed south… though both of our trips took way longer than planned (such a huge country!) so hence the unexpected meeting in Dingo.

We stayed for a few days at Ranger John’s house on Taunton National Park, just north of the Capricorn Highway, feeling oh-so-lucky that we got to hang out in a park closed to the public! Taunton used to be farmland, until the farmer read a magazine article about a species of wallaby (the bridled nail-tail wallaby) that was pretty much extinct—the same kind of wallaby terrorizing his property that he was shooting for dog food. As the story goes, he called up the magazine, and Queensland Parks and Wildlife (QPWS), who didn’t believe him—apparently this type of news often results in local kooks making claims and such. It wasn’t until the farmer plopped a dead nail-tail on a QPWS desk that they believed him... and now it’s all history and Taunton now houses the biggest wild population of the adorable little nail-tail (about 90 of them, I think it was). We were taken out on a spotlighting adventure one night and got to see the little creatures in action—they have a sort of fingernail on their tail and they hop with their arms flailing around at their sides. Not sure why they’re so special, but they sure were cute.

And besides all of the wallaby-spotting, we had a great time relaxing and catching up (and doing some spotlighting of our own—with the biggest cane toads ever!). Australia’s a huge place, which makes it even cooler when you run into an old mate somewhere along the way!

We got a taste of the cowboy life over the weekend in Rockhampton (or Rocky, as the locals call it). Bianca had lived in town for a while and told us there was a weekly rodeo. Yeehaw! When we got to the Great Western Hotel, we found out there was no rodeo, just a band that night, but it sure was a hoot seeing the clientele dolled up in their best cowboy-plaid shirts and Wranglers. Country music videos played all night on the big-screen TV next to a pair of bullhorns, and we watched some hoons street-racing their utes—too cool! Not to mention Rocky calls itself the “beef capital of Australia”.

The only beef we had with Rocky was on Friday night, when we camped at a caravan park next to the wide Fitzroy River that cuts through town. Pretty and scenic, we ate dinner outside after applying plenty of bug repellant (as we do every night, being campers in a hot country). When we got back from our cowboy bar, we went to bed only to be woken up about a zillion times by sandflies (or “midgies”) eating us alive. In fact, I don’t think we got any sleep at all—we were killing them in our dreams and while awake. Maybe they were small enough to come in between the holes of our screen windows? They were inside and outside the van—and we’ve never had midgies like these ones, not even when we lived way up in the tropics. We finally got out of bed at 5am and headed to the showers… then sat around swatting bugs till 7am, when the office opened and we could argue for our money back for the following night (last time we ever pay in advance!). The guy at the desk was unsympathetic and claimed to be “open” about the presence of sandflies, and that we should just use bug spray and we’d be fine. (The amount of reapplying we had done I’m sure wasn’t healthy, anyway) We told him, “Dude, we’ve lived in the tropics, we’ve handled these before. They’ve never been THIS bad!” and the jackass said he had to keep a cancellation fee of a few dollars… insult to injury (not to mention there was a creeper in the girls’ bathroom and dive-bombing nesting birds on the pathways). We zoomed off and went to the nicer-sounding Southside Holiday Village to get some sleep! And the rest of our weekend in Rocky was much better… except for poor Adrian, who slept for day due to a cold.

Now we’re heading south—time to do some farmwork and get some cash and our weeks done for our visa extension (we had a great lead on a macadamia farm near Rocky, but troubles with “head office” has us and the farmer unsure). The only work on offer in our area was tomato-picking, and our strong aversion to anything tomato-related has us heading to the south end of Queensland in a flash, it seems. We’re going to do a little whale-watching (we’re in Hervey Bay) first before the farm fun begins, and maybe this time next week we’ll be working in a vineyard…

Go Fossick Yourself

We caught gem fever this week and headed west from Emerald to the funny little towns of Sapphire and Rubyvale for some fossicking. After hearing about this place from another backpacker, we had to visit. Visions of meeting old, white-bearded prospector types with picks slung over their shoulders at the pub, and of stumbling over a giant gemstone on a dried-up riverbed filled our imaginations. We’d heard cows ran free here, people were a little nutty, and the ground looked like a war zone. A crazy place! And it was all true (except for maybe the striking it rich part).

Our first night we stayed at a rest area on the way into Sapphire, under a giant orange full moon. A miner type (or so we guessed) burned a huge bonfire next to his shantytown trailer and tin-shed house across the street. It was all a little creepy (and we were getting eaten alive by mosquitoes) so we headed inside the van early that night. We were jarred awake by loud mooing sometime in the wee hours of the morning—Adrian looked outside and there were cows hanging out by the bathroom block (weird!). We went back to sleep and not long after, the mooing woke us up again—this time Dayle popped her head out and the cows were grazing and scratching themselves right next to Daisy! It felt like a bad tabloid story—When Cows Attack! Not a very good sleep that night.

We moved onto a fenced caravan park the next day (yay, no cows!) and ended up in the pool all afternoon—who can fossick when there’s a swimming pool! Tame rainbow lorikeets jumped around our campsite and ate bread out of our hands (so cute). We visited the Rubyvale pub in hopes of drinking with old prospectors, but the clientele weren’t as dusty and disheveled as we’d hoped. (It looked like a pretty normal country pub).

The next day we finally visited a fossicking park—where for $7 a bucket, you get a bucket of “sapphire wash”, fossicking tools, and a lesson on how to sieve and wash the dirt and find sapphires. It was so much fun we hit two different fossicking parks, never really hitting the jackpot but we now have little baggies of sparkly jewels! We learned that sapphires come in more than just blue—green, yellow, maybe more colours than that, and they’re the hardest stone next to only diamonds. The Sapphire Gemfields were never commercially mined, but we’re told they’re the world’s largest sapphire fields (created by volcanoes ages ago). People buy mining claims and live on them for a while, some serious and some dig for a hobby. We were told that there are many rich miners around who just don’t look it… and there’s still plenty to be found, especially yellow and green sapphires, which used to be tossed away and are now more valuable than ever. We took a mine tour and our guide (probably the mine owner) told us that if you find human bones under the ground, you don’t tell anyone, because the authorities will shut down your mine to investigate. He told us the Rubyvale pub had been blown up twice over disputes, and that claim-hopping is worse than stealing your neighbour’s wife. A serious business this gem-mining is!

We sifted through one more bucket after the mine tour and actually found something worth cutting—but our dilemma was what we’d do with it after it was all faceted and pretty, since the jewelry itself is kind of ugly here. We had an invitation to go “real” fossicking—with pick and shovel out in the fields—from a really sketchy-looking dude who came by with his girlfriend to say hello (and the girlfriend was bubbling with joy, convinced she had a giant green sapphire in her hand—which we took one look at and were pretty positive it was a broken chunk of a green beer bottle). We dodged the offer… figuring if we found anything cool, old “Joe” (or whatever his name was) would steal our riches and push us down the nearest mine shaft.
We tore ourselves away from the crazy world of the gemfields finally after four days (we’d planned to stay a day or two) and Adrian is still making fun of Dayle’s “gem fever” even now.

** You may have seen our gem fever photos already—they were up on Flickr long before this blog— maybe they make more sense now! And thanks for your comments everybody... we miss you :)

To anyone who’s ever dreamed of hiking 20km…

Stop! Take off your boots, and turn back right now. Give your head a shake (get those silly thoughts out) and get back on the couch. The number “20” looks deceptively small on paper, but it’s hella far once you’re out there actually doing it.

That’s how it all began for us—our Lonely Planet book was raving about this place called Carnarvon Gorge National Park (which we still can’t properly pronounce in Australian—something like “Cah-NAHH-Von”… we always end up sounding more like Bostonians when we try to say it as the locals do). The Gorge was said to be filled with ancient Aboriginal rock paintings, nooks and crevices, and beautiful scenery and wildlife. And, tired of doing nature walks in our flip-flops, we splurged and bought some hiking boots. After gearing up in Emerald, the city closest to the park (about 2 hours north), Daisy hit the road and we were zooming into the Outback.

The sun began to set when we were still a ways from the park—we saw our first emu (a baby one) walking really strangely through tall grass, and passed a roadside campfire with silhouettes of cowboys sitting around it (so cliché!). Poor Adrian had to drive a winding, pitch-black 40 km road to the park—20km of it gravel and all of it unfenced cattle road, playing “Dodge’em” with kangaroos. Yikes! But we made it by about 7:30—learning later we melted our highbeams—and got ready for our huge hike the next day.

We were told to start early, and to head straight to the end of the trail (9.7km) into Carnarvon Gorge, then check out all the side trails and sights on the way back. No worries, we thought, and set off at 10am with a few water bottles, cheese sandwiches, and full of energy. After a goanna (a huge lizard) scared the crap out of us right at the trailhead, we were off.

The trail followed Carnarvon Creek, crisscrossing it 22 times. We hopped from rock to rock, snapping photos of cliffs and kangaroos grazing in the bushes, feeling very much like something out of a tourist brochure. Around 8km or so, we started to get tired, and trudged to the end quite ready and excited for a picnic. The gorge had become progressively narrower along the way and we ate lunch by a rock pool under a sandstone outcrop, with a sneaky crow-type bird that kept skittering over whenever we let go of our sandwiches.

And then it was time to head back. Our feet screamed in protest as we made them follow familiar scenery in the other direction. But there’s still so much to see, we told them, and drowned their shrieks out with our chatter (about anything other than the long walk ahead). We saw some amazing things along the way, which just extended our distance another 5km or so—Boowinda Gorge, a side gorge that blew ice-cold air and was narrow enough to almost touch both walls simultaneously; Cathedral Cave, a huge white sandstone cave with walls covered in ancient paintings of hands, weapons and tools; Ward’s Canyon, a steep walk up to a palm-fringed waterfall and red-bottomed creek; the Art Gallery, another rock wall covered in carvings and paintings. With each trip off the main path, we hobbled a little more, picking up the pace as families with skipping six-year-olds hiked past us (how were those rugrats hiking this far??). With water bottles getting empty we were soon almost the only people left on the path—and it was another race with the sunset as it approached 6pm. We counted down the numbered creek crossings and even stopped caring about cute kangaroo photo ops along the way. The flies were circling us like they knew we were about to keel over, and the vultures were probably nearby as well. We were pretty close to collapsing on the pathway when we spotted—eureka!—the ranger station at the base of the trail. We’ve never been so happy to see Daisy in our lives…

It took us a few hours of laying around like vegetables, it took the rest of our energy just to stand to hit the showers. Our feet ached for about two or three days afterwards, and our toenails felt as though they would snap off at any moment. We’re recovered now (a week later) but remind us to retire our boots the next time we start talking crazy about 20km hikes again!