Hotter than a certain fiery place!

Spending just a half hour on the payphone, chatting with the family out on the sweltering street in mid-afternoon nearly killed me today.

'How hot could it really be?' I thought. 'I must just be a big wimp!' I was inspired to check the weather, and found out it was actually 38 degrees (but with 19% humidity, it felt like 40). It's weird we get the hottest temperatures yet when we're so close to Antarctica-- but hey, the unofficial Melbourne slogan is "Four seasons in one day". And since us Canucks like to talk about the weather so much, we've linked to our weather [see "Our Favourite Links" on the left panel] so all of our readers can (A) get jealous (B) sympathize, or (C) laugh at us poor souls. Enjoy! -D.

It's been nearly a year blogging... and it's been so much fun! Thanks for following our travels, and we hope you'll keep up with us in 2008. We'll be updating our links and posting more frequent blogs in the coming months. We'd love to hear any suggestions, and thanks heaps to everyone who's sent us comments. Happy New Year! xoxoxo from BigQuestionmarks

Home sweet home (again)

It was much easier than we thought possible-- we now have a Melbourne home! After checking out that first doorless dump, the place we moved into was that much more fantastic. We signed the lease right away, and moved in a day later. It's actually a renovated former refrigeration warehouse that's down a little lane off a main street, but it's quite nice inside- ceramic tiles, big kitchen, large furnished bedrooms with exposed brick (reminds Dayle of her bathroom in Cabbagetown!). It's a little pricey-- Toronto rents have NOTHING on Melbourne-- but it's in the heart of Carlton, which is the university/Italian neighbourhood, and just a five-minute walk north of the CBD = millions of cafes, shops, restaurants, gelato shops, and bars to hit. And the perks: free wireless internet, laundry, all bills paid, nice landlords who pop by with coupons for attractions and 2-for-1 ice cream... hell, we can't go wrong. We're committed for two months, and will probably stay more, so feel free to send us mail-- there's nothing better than snail mail in this electronic age. :)

OUR ADDRESS:
18 Powell Lane
Carlton, VIC 3053
Australia
(SEE OUR HOUSE ON A GOOGLE MAP)

We also have some cute kitties who roam around at night, waiting for belly-scratching, which is cool. Last night we went for a stroll and stumbled upon a park full of small, tamed possums that stumble around like they're wasted (we promise you a video soon). Our biggest problem is parking-- and we love Daisy way too much to give her up! We were almost able to get a street-parking permit from City Hall, but then we read the fine print and our car has to be registered in Victoria (and Daisy's a true-blue Queenslander). Since we live down a "lane"- kind of a cobblestoned alleyway- we can't park in there, it's illegal. And while the city street-parking permit is only $20 for the whole year, the cost of changing Daisy over to a Victoria van- safety check, roadworthy certificates, rego fees, changing insurance- just isn't worth it. I think we're going to have to rent a spot for her in a parking garage, and hope she doesn't hate us for neglecting her. On the bright side, we did buy a detailed manual on our trusty Toyota Hi-Ace, and now we actually know which spot to pour the radiator coolant into... tee hee!

Happy New Year all- hope you have an enjoyable one! They're calling for 44 degrees here, so we're going to have some drinks and watch fireworks from the St. Kilda beaches, and go for a midnight swim (or maybe a toe-dip, for those afraid of sharks). For a few hours there, we'll be in 2008 and Canada will be still in 2007- how strange! We'll let you know how the future looks...

...well actually, it kind of looks like this:

Behold the Future from BigQuestionMarks on Vimeo.

Merry Xmas from us!

Melbourne Xmas (11)
Originally uploaded by bigquestionmarks.

Merry Christmas and happy new year everyone! We've been soaking up the atmosphere of Melbourne for the past few days and loving it. Our first few days were a bit chilly, but it's definitely getting hotter (33 today, hotter than Cairns). We've even been taken by surprise by city sunburns, and we're now slathering on the sunscreen!

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas-- we did, weird as it was to have no snow, no Xmas cookies, and no family nearby. (Miss ya all!) We spent Xmas Eve with our surrogate French family-- us and five Frenchies parked ourselves al fresco at a long table at an Italian restaurant hidden down a small cobblestoned side street in Melbourne's CBD (in Australia they call downtown "the CBD", aka Central Business District). We sat around eating yummy Italian food and drinking wine for more than five hours (those French like their long dinners-- apparently so do we!). Christmas Day was extra lazy... lazing in a giant hotel bed, watching movies on TV like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (the live, Jim Carrey version, was actually pretty good!) and Babe ("That'll do, pig"). Then it was off to meet another international bunch for our good friend--and fellow pear-picker-- Andreas' last night in Melbourne. Andy's from East Germany (you may remember him from past blogs) and heaps of fun, and though we're super sad he's left us to explore South America, we're happy we managed to see him before he took off. With Andy, there were some lovely Italian ladies cooking the feast-- Anna and Marina-- and one Indian and one Malaysian girl to mix it up with a couple of Canucks. Good fun! Melbourne definitely has that international feel, much like Toronto did for us, so it's not hard to feel at home here. On Boxing Day, we dropped Andy off at the airport and then it was time to get onto apartment-hunting...our next true adventure, as it seems.

For those of you who have been to Melbourne before, you'll understand why we LOVE Fitzroy and hope to live there. It's artsy, bohemian, full of cool shops and bars, and just north of the CBD. But it's been a bit of a pain to be in the city with our van-- Adrian's become a brilliant parallel-parker and Dayle's been a super-awesome navigator--so we decided to move south to the beachy suburb of St. Kilda (where there's lots of parking) for a bit while we look for a more permanent place to live. We're in a hostel now-- hard to adjust the first night (how we LOVED our xmas hotel- Miami Hotel) but it's not a terrible place to sleep. Yesterday we went to the beach (not the greatest swimming beach, but hey, it's got sand) and had a nice breakfast out, and pretended we were tourists. Plenty of shopping and drinking temptations in St. Kilda-- it's a really cool neighbourhood, though we wish it was walking distance to downtown-- and we were highly entertained to encounter our first stray cats/prostitutes/drug dealers in ages. Good fun.

Last night we checked out our first apartment... errr, flat, I mean. Lovely sounding in the advertisement (as they always are): courtyard, washing machine, TV, fully furnished, short or long term stays OK. We got there and they forgot to mention: the kitchen stank and lacked a tap for hot water, the bedroom was sans curtains and had the air of a junkie palace, the bathroom was grunge central, there was a packet of rat poison sitting outside one bedroom door, and OH WAIT-- there wasn't a DOOR from the outside courtyard to the inside. It's unbelievable what people try to pass off as a "home". Daisy must have left some rubber on Fenwick Street-- we sped off as quickly as we could.

But, fingers crossed, we'll get out of bunk-bed life soon. For now, while the city is still asleep for the holidays, we'll take in as much beach and cappuccinos as we can (another great Aussie concept we've discovered: when a coffee's included in your breakfast, that means you can get an espresso, a cappuccino, whatever fancy coffee, etc). Soon enough, we'll be working and back to our normal city existences. And the jobs can't come fast enough, because Melbourne is full of exciting stuff to do and fantastic concerts to spend money on (and nooooooo Huntsman spiders, yippee)! Fingers crossed we can somehow get to Big Day Out to see Bjork and Rage Against the Machine at the end of January...

In the city that is about to sleep...

We did it, we reached Melbourne (and yarrrr, it's cold here)!
It was an ass-numbing four-and-a-bit days of driving, but Daisy wins again. From Stanthorpe, we rode the scenic New England Highway (think: mountains, rolling hills, flower-covered meadows, old country towns with gorgeous buildings) down through inland New South Wales for our first few days of driving-- and New South Wales is huge, though not as big as Queensland! We swerved around our first highway-crossing goanna (a big lizard-- he stretched across a whole lane-- and he made it across after all), and then passed another one, belly-up and not so successful a little later. We visited Tamworth, the "country music capital of Australia" so we could take photos with a giant golden guitar and buy tacky souvenirs. We've treated ourselves to some nice restaurant meals and a night at a huge old cinema in Newcastle (it's been ages for both movies and dining out). We watched "Into The Wild" finally-- two thumbs up, go see it if you haven't! (And don't worry, Moms and Dads, we're now going more "out of the wild" than into it, at least for the time being. But I guess we're rubber tramps!)

We finally dug our toes into the sands of the east coast in Newcastle, after being landlocked for a few months, yay! And we checked out Sydney in one whirlwind afternoon-- and sipped Coronas by the Opera House, which was every bit as impressive (maybe more) than we expected. The city itself is gorgeous- chock-full of old architecture and history (and living history-- we followed a guy dressed as a pirate through The Rocks district till we lost him). It's a nightmare to drive and navigate-- we circled the core and suburbs for 2 hours before we figured out where to park. Sydney's best discovered on foot, or on the super-futuristic monorails which we didn't get a chance to ride yet. As we left the city the next day, we were like "Damn, we kind of like Sydney, should we go live there instead?"

But we continued on-- this time along the long and boring 12-hour drive to Melbourne on the multi-lane Hume highway. The winds whipped up like crazy as we headed west (we don't know if it was just the mountains, or a storm) and Daisy was making almost no progress, so we finally stopped after a hellishly windy ride. We managed to stop in the sheep-shearing centre of Goulburn (a few hours west of Sydney) to climb up into the Big Merino, a funny, wrinkly-looking three-storey sheep with historical wool-industry displays inside (and his name is Rambo, said the lady in the gift shop).

From there, we crossed the border to Victoria and the road became even more boring. Luckily, it was a short three hours to Melbourne-- via Glenrowan, the little town where the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly and his gang met their final fate in a big shootout with police in 1880. And Ned's huge here, so we went to pay our tributes. We're going to check out the homemade armour (from ploughshares!) he wore in the legendary gunfight soon-- it's in a museum here in Melbourne.

Our plans to sleep at friends' houses didn't work out so well (everyone's between houses) but we scored ourselves a sweet hotel room in the Miami Hotel for $80 a night-- with free parking, a king sized bed, fridge, walk-in closet, and a swanky bathroom! It's sparkling white and pristine, and the carpet's really soft. But my eyes keep darting to the sprinkler system on the ceiling, which looks like a Huntsman spider from the corner of my vision. Slow but sure, we'll get out of bumpkin mode.

And Melbourne's wicked--this is the 3rd time here now (almost feels like home), but we'll see how it works out for jobs and apartments. Looks like the whole place might shut down till after new year's (it was a battle getting a dinner out last night!), so we might end up camping again for a while after all. but thanks to all you spider sympathizers and blog-readers, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to you all! (photos to come on Flickr soon, promise). xoxoxo, A&D

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 :)