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Running out of melon-themed titles

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Monday, we were back at work. It was one of those days where I was more thankful than normal that we leave the hostel at 10.30am and not 5.30am as last Saturday night took a while to recover from. Our payslips over the past month have failed to cover our rent, yet alone food and beer money, but next week it’s meant to get busy. Friday night someone asked me if I wanted anything from the supermarket and I replied with “a payslip that gives me enough money to last the week,” and the owner of the hostel was stood right next to her. Whoops. There has definitely been a lot of bad timing like that over the past week.

Monday next week we have to pick up watermelons all day so that’s one new back ache to get to terms with, as well as waking up at 5.30am. We managed to work a 5.5 hour shift on Friday which has left the week with 43 work days left to go until I can leave; hopefully it’ll be around the mid-June mark.

It seems as though we aren’t allowed to have nice things or have fun here; once the alcohol ban was lifted, the free-but-not-supposed-to-be-free WiFi was replaced with $2/hour WiFi and no one can connect to. We think that someone accidentally dobbed us all in by complaining that their internet had stopped working when it wasn’t supposed to work anyway. We have gained one good thing: a cat. It turned up on Easter Sunday, no one knows where it came from but it must like all the attention and petting it receives.

Saturday was a retro fancy dress night at one of the bars we frequent. As we weren’t working on Sunday we scooped our watermelons out and made ourselves a nice little cocktail with our contraband stash of cheap wine (my status in what I should’ve been fined for must be at the $3000 mark and haven’t been fined a dollar.) It was a pretty good night out, though my memory is a bit patchy. During the night I bumped into one of my supervisors from work who lost her brother and had no phone battery so I took her back to the hostel to charge her phone so she could ring him. I’m assuming this morning she came back to the hostel because I woke up next to a Macca’s breakfast. There would be some pictures from the night but I’m using my phone data.

I’ve been having a bit of a research on places to visit in Asia, in particular the ones that I don’t know too much about; I want to be getting back in the swing of things and ending up travelling how I was last year. Everyone I’ve spoken to who’s been to South-East Asia has had an absolute blast there, so Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia and Burma are on the cards for next year. I’m also intending to visit China, South Korea and Taiwan, as well as perhaps a tour of India. Within the next month I should be booking flights for going to Tokyo – a direct return flight from Melbourne is £400 which really isn’t bad.  I really am lucky to be able to just ditch the life that everyone expects you to have as in sticking with a job, buying a house etc, and instead pissing around somewhere in the world, enjoying my 20s and just not giving a shit about half the stuff I’m supposed to.

88 Days a Slave: 78 Left

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The past week has had its ups and downs in this hostel. For me, it’s been good as I’m now only in constant minor pain and have had a pretty fun night out.

We had a day off work because it was more ‘too hot’ than it usually is to work and that night was so hot that I’d been sweating as though I had done a workout in my sleep. The was also a day where we had to farm barefoot (and hopefully not come across any brown snakes) as it had pissed it down and the field was a state.

Towards the end of the week I confessed to someone whilst bent down and covered head to toe in sweat, suncream, mud and mosquito spray that I’d rather be good at something like languages and not bending down to shove a couple of thousand plants in holes. Just with a couple more choice words thrown in.

A lot of people here are leaving, thinking about leaving or have left, which is a bit bittersweet. On one hand, I’m used to seeing the same faces every day but it’s moving me up the priority list for work.

Queensland – Farm Work

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After a 43 hour journey, mostly by bus (never again), I arrived in Queensland on Friday to start my farm work to extend my visa. Tomorrow I start work, no idea what I’m doing yet, but am quite excited to stop slacking off and to top my Australian bank account back up.

There’s Internet in this hostel that I don’t think is meant to be free (sorrynotsorry), but it seems like I can connect for a couple of hours or so until I get kicked off. This means I’ll be updating this blog a lot less over the next four months, at least. With all the shit that is gong on in the world, and the media’s constant reporting of politics, I’ll be glad to not be using the Internet much.

Fraser Island, the Whitsundays and Airlie Beach

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At the moment, I seem to have no battery or free wifi, so this is a short one unil I can update properly.
Over New Years, I was on the UNESCO heritage site, Fraser Island. It was a good trip, spent in lakes or fearing for our lives on off-road driving tracks.
I went to the Whitsundays and it went the complete opposite of how it was meant to. Quite like something out of the Inbetweeners TV show.
The weather in Queensland, ironically dubbed as the “Sunshine State” is horrendous and I am stuck in Airlie Beach until at least Tuesday.
Thinking about it, not that much goes wrong on my travels, but the past few days have gone spectacularly wrong.

Hobart

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Finally, I have left my job and Melbourne – there were a couple of days between leaving work and flying into Hobart which were spent packing and trying to re-organise my backpack. The last night was spent at a pub quiz, our team The Great Barrier Queef did shockingly bad but the team name made up for it.

On Thursday I flew to Hobart and had to get a taxi with a couple of guys staying up the road to me as the airport bus was full. Thursday evening I did nothing, then Friday morning I went to the top of Mt.Wellington. The views from the top were awesome although it was so windy at the top that I think that if you took a small dog on a lead it’d turn into a kite. After, I went to MONA, having heard great things about it. The gallery lived up to the reputation of being weird and wonderful – it took a good couple of hours to get around the place. It’s one of the best galleries that I’ve been to, and if time permitted I would’ve visited the brewery there too.

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On Friday I went out for most of the day with some people in the hostel for literally a piss up in a brewery (or five). It was a good day out, with a stop for some pho in the middle to re-line my stomach.

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There was the option in one place to go for some chocolate stout, which I remember from a beer festival in Budapest on my second time there; it wasn’t quite the same but still bloody good. There was also quite a nice English beer named Brexit. In one of the last bars we were given beer jam, so naturally I tried it on a croissant for breakfast on Saturday morning. Not quite a hangover cure, but still good.

Saturday, I went to Salamanca Market – I was expecting more like a farmers market, but it was more like a flea market, not one that I was a fan of either. After, I headed to Cascade Brewery which took around 40 minutes to walk door to door, then went on their tour. It was pretty good for $25, with four tasting drinks at the end. By now, I think that I’ve been to enough breweries to last a few days, and since on Sunday I had a trip to Wineglass Bay, I came back to the hostel to put my feet up.

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Today, it’s warm but raining so I had a look round some shops and went to read my book with a coffee. Tomorrow, I’m leaving Hobart to go up north and hopefully heading to Cradle Mountain during the week.

Melbourne: Week Eight

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I had a three day weekend which made a nice change – I decided to go to the food market in South Melbourne and found some amazing produce so I’ve had a fair few nice dinners. I also went to the National Gallery of Victoria which seems pretty good, but I think I’ll be returning on a day when I wake up with a half decent attention span.

During the week I did the same as usual: a lot of chilling and a couple of nights I went out for drinks. Over a few days a lot of the familiar faces in the hostel left so there’s a lot of new people who I probably should try and get chatting to, which should make the next week or so interesting. Hopefully there will be no nutcases.

This week I have another three day weekend so I’m hoping for the usual – a few drinks, maybe a piss up and some chilling.

Melbourne: Week five

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This week has been pretty full on with work: almost 70 hours over seven days. I’ve done 80 in five before, but after being off for most of the year it has been more difficult to do these hours than I remember. The highlight of my week has been giving myself a half-centimeter long splinter whilst putting chicken on a wooden skewer, the most genuine “f– me sideways” escaped my mouth. It was so impressive that I had someone witness me pull it out of my hand.

During the week I haven’t really done a lot, I tend to sit in chatting to people in the hostel during my evenings. Currently, I’m sharing a room with literally the craziest person I’ve ever met, to the point of asking reception what day he’s moving out so I can count down. It’s been quite frustrating to tolerate but when I have the conversations about hostel crazies it will be gold.

Tomorrow I am expecting to spend most of the day in bed, then I’m working Tuesday to Friday,  with the weekend off.

On the road again

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Tomorrow I am setting off again after three and a half weeks at home. I spent half of today in London, staying in a hostel on the other side of the road my studio flat was when I lived here. I went to Borough Market, got shouted at by some crazies, ate in my favourite Mexican restaurant and some last-minute stuff.

In the morning I’m heading to the Denmark, then I’ll be stopping off for a few nights in Asia before staying in Melbourne for a bit. I have nothing booked apart from flights, a couple of concerts, the first two hostels and another for a week in Australia. Over two years ago when I moved to London I had decided a year in Australia would be on the cards and I’m so excited that it’s happening now

What’s next:

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This time next month I shall be unemployed and somewhere in Spain, without a return ticket, and I cannot wait. I was planning to go to Australia in September this year and was thinking of going on a 2-3 week trip going from the north to the south of Italy before I go. It wasn’t too long before this turned into a Spain/Italy trip, then it got a little out of hand and now I’m intending on spending at least four months in Europe. I know that I’ll go through a lot of Spain and then fly into Italy, and despite having a route planned, I will probably end up deciding where I go the day before.

After this, I’m planning to get a Working Holiday Visa and go to Australia. I will probably have to top the bank back up before doing the Melbourne-Cairns route, luckily, as a chef I can probably/hopefully find a job easily. After this, I am thinking about a visit to New Zealand, but that’s a bit too far in the future to start plannng.

At the moment it seems as though I have a never ending list of things to do/sort out/phone up about. When I planned the Europe trip in June it seemed so far away, and now I know it won’t be long until I’m away.