360° um die welt

It took me about 24 hours to discover Byron's primitive party life. Actually, once I went to the clubs (I checked all of them) I felt that Byron is for Australia what Ibiza is for Europe... Except for the fact that Byron is trying to keep up the illusion of of being a hippie town.

One day I did a wildlife tour which was really amazing. We spotted two different kinds of pademelons, three kinds of flying foxes, a snake, kangaroos, koalas, wallabies, lots of different parrots, dolphins - all of them in their natural habitat.

That's where I met ppl that stayed in lennox head which is a village 25km south of Byron. They had an easy time to convince me to come to stay at their hostel.

A town full of backpackers..! Good athmosphere.

Anyway... 2morROw I GET DREADS :D

YEYEYEyeyEYEEEEYYyYy

Yeah... being a jillaroo (austrailian cowgirl) is quite fun... but only for tough ones! :D

Means we wrestled bull- calves and castrated them; spent a day improving pastures (digging out poisonous bushes); fencing - the barbed wire keeps ripping holes in the clothes; slaughtered and butchered a sheep (meat for the week); and of course heaps of horse-back riding.

all of our food was cooked on a camp-fire and tasted pretty good.



I enjoyed the best the cattle mustering. We rode over the hills and moved the cattle to a little paddock where we drafted and wrestled them. The horses went down the steepest hills I have ever seen without the slightest hesitation and we also made our horses swim in a billabong (waterhole).

All in all a very fun and exciting week. I met very nice ppl, too...

after cristmas I am gonna start working on a horse and cattle farm near canberra. Good pay and the family sounds very warm and friendly to me!

The last three days I spent by the sea - FINALLY! It was beautifully wavy and blue like the sky

The first day - rather afternoon - I met three Canadians on the campsite so we had a fire on the beach with a couple locals we met (despite the fire ban). Nice evening, but it started to rain in the night and I hadn't put up my tent (lazy me) because I was gonna sleep on the beach.
In the end I slept in the canadian's van. Nice and warm and cozy on a matress :D

The left the next day and I was invited to come. However I wanted to do some hiking and swimming and play the guitar ($100, I couldn't resist and I definitely do not regret) so I stayed.

Except for the sunburn I got and the lack of showers. the days were great:

I saw dolphins, heaps of crabs, fancy birds, little reptiles and plants i wouldn't dream of!


after the second day loads of kids arrived so i withdrew to a remoted campsite called tallow beach (without fresh water supply) where I spent very paeceful and quiet hours and felt kinda like tom hanks in "cast away"..

I took a couple pics but I first need to develop the film..

I am off for good now...
In Tamworth I'll do some training for jillaroos (australian cowgirls) and then work on a farm.

kuesschen
caro

But before the weather got better it first snowed and our hands froze when we picked in the mornings with minus 3 degrees. BRRRRrr! Not Oz like I expected..



tHE weather made us have less work than we wanted though. However, by now it warmed up to about 35 degreed during the day and after a week of little fruit and crippled trees we now started to pick the trees in blocks... means BIG cherries and lots of cherries and I guess today I made almost 200 dollars.
Cherry picking is good money...



Work isn't very hard. Only the hours are weired. If all goes well we can pick till 2 pm. We start pretty early, we get up at 5 am. Means: Our parties are always over pretty early... Quality over quantity.





The days we got off last week because the fruit wasnt ripe yet meant long days in the heat with not much to do. So about eleven ppl squished in Dave's van called Jezbelle and off we went to find a lake in the red desert 150 km away.



The lake wasn't as spectacular as we expected because it was half drained due to the heat and we had three wounded after half an hour of playing frisbee (rocKy beach) but we still enjoyed the trip a lot.



and i saw my second kangaroo (alive):



The people here are great. The weather would have definitely chased me away long ago if I didn't enjoy their company that much.



At least half of us play the guitar - and luckily Dennis brought one - so we work on a cherry picking song at teh moment...


Starts off like this:

Millions of cherries
cherries for me
Moving to the country
where I want to be....

... and goes on quite a bit.

The rest of the time we swim in a little pond on our farm just over the hill beside teh camping grounds wich is always awaiting for a refreshing dip.
go to Young, the next biggest town... but mostly we lie in the shade and talk talk talk cook and talk..





I feel like knowing the ppl here very well athough I just met them a week ago.

CHEERS\
caro

I arrived two days ago and hopped straight from the airplane into a bus going to Young.



This is the so-called capital for cherry picking and before I could start picking today I experienced quite unexpected situations:

1. In the bus I met 3 guys from Netherlands and one from Quebec, all of us heading for the cherries. When we arrived in Young we had to spend the night in the parkbecause it already was too late in the evening to organize a farm.

In this park there was a pond... and in the pond there was a CROCODILE!!! In the beginning we didn't believe our eyes but as it kept chasing the ducks around... Well, I guess we shouldn't have believed our eyes, eerybody kinda laughed at us and I now think that it was some kind of a lizard in the pond.

2.My first to days in the outback were frickin' cold! If someone had tokd me before I would have laughed in his face... But when we started picking this morning at 6 it was 4 degrees and i hadn't slept all night...

Now it warmed up a lot and i almost used an entire bottle of sunblocker already!