One Woman, One Backpack

This week started with weeding; the same as Sunday. The owner of the hostel volunteered me to ride shotgun and navigate the journey, my directions being along the lines of “it’s left here or the next one… its the next one… oh shit slow down it’s this one… it’s the next roundabout SHIT IT’S THIS ONE.” This time I did not have the previous nights antics to blame for it being such a horrendous shift, nor had I woken up in my work clothes just in case I’d be running late during the morning. We were crawling through the field picking weeds for five and a half hours which was soul destroying.

Tuesday was back to packing melons. It’s an easy job – the guys have it easier than the girls who put melons in a box. Wednesday and Saturday were the same. What happens is melons get brought into the packing shed on this conveyor belt which weighs, then drops them at a certain point down a ramp where we stand to pack them. Depending on how big they are depends on how many per box. I’m back working tomorrow and after that will be 48 days left to go, having worked 40. It feels great to be in the 40s as it’s nearing the halfway point, and then I’lll be counting down the work days until I leave this hostel and never come back here again.

Last night was the regular hostel piss-up; I’m getting bored of visiting the same three places every Saturday. As we still have a drinking ban because we sneak alcohol in the hostel, we poured beer into tinted bottles and played a couple of drinking games indoors where there is no CCTV we completely followed the rules regarding this.

During the week I’ve had a bit of a Harry Potter marathon – it’ll be completed today with a Domino’s during the last movie. After having worked on farms for a couple of months I know what to do if someone gets bitten by a snake (well I hope I do) and I was watching the second movie. I just wanted to shout at the screen when Harry was sodding around after getting bitten.

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve started to notice that it is autumn. By autumn, I mean around the 30 degree mark – it is still hotter than the middle of the summer in the UK, but it no longer feels as though we are living in the depths of hell, though I’m still waiting for it to be t-shirt weather and not vest weather. The Northern Queensland autumn is making a UK heatwave look cute. I’ve also lately had new roommates – apart from the two of us who arrived during the first week, the seven others in the room are new. It’s like being in bloody Germany at the moment – five out of the nine of us are German, and there’s usually a German or two visiting the room.

I was going to go to Bali after farming, but at the moment the cheap flights are at inconvenient times – Townsville doesn’t seem to be the best place to fly to Bali. If I were to land at say 3pm in Bali, it’d be a $500 flight with a layover. Instead, I’m looking at doing a tour around the red centre and then try Bali another time.