Still peaches and plums, but also prunes, apples, water pipes and a guitar!! Exciting couple of weeks...

Sorry that we have not updated for a while but as you know we are staying on this farm and there is not much exciting things happening here :P.

Thunder storm!!

We have been doing the same jobs as we last wrote about, picking plums and peaches, but as their season is starting to be over, we have been working with other stuff too. We picked the last of the prunes, which was a very frustrating job since it was slow and there was not a lot of good fruit left. We got paid per boxes we picked and did not earn a lot… Also this job was really physical and you had to crawl around on the ground with your knees, and really, it was not worth the money at all!! Fortunately we got some better projects after that; for example putting up water pipes in the trees and putting bate in the trees against fruit flies. These jobs are quite easy and doesn’t involve rotten and disgusting fruits so we have been happy doing them. Another big project we have had is to pick apples, from both planted and wild trees. Especially picking apples from the wild trees has been a challenge since the ground around the wild apple trees is pretty rough and many times you have to cut your way through to get all the apples.

!!!PRUNES!!!

Normal day at work ;)

Our favourite place on the farm - NOT! Prunes, prunes, prunes...

Otherwise we have spent time watching movies (quite weird ones since there is not a lot to choose from, the last two nights we have watched old movies with Tom Cruise starring; Risky Business and Interview with the Vampire, we wouldn’t really recommend either of them…), reading books and walking around in the area. We were really lucky and happy (especially Katja!) as we found out the farm owner’s wife has a guitar she doesn’t use that much anymore, and now we are practicing playing it to be professionals before we leave :P.

One of our many walks =)

Happy with the guitar!

Still cooking gourmet food;) filled capsicums!

We also went playing tennis last week with Greg and today he took us to a nearby mountain/national park where we did quite a tough 2 hour bushwalk up the mountain! This bushwalk was a lot more untouched (we did not meet anyone else during the walk) than the one we did at the Blue Mountains and the terrain was a lot rougher. The nature was so beautiful and the scenery amazing. The highest look out point didn’t have any fences and you had to be quite careful up there not to fall down! It was really cool though. We heard that wallabies or big lizard could be spotted in the national park but unfortunately we did not see any =(. BUT we got to see a big eagle just 5 meters away from us and on the way to the mountain we saw big and sooo cute alpacas. We heard that it’s common here to keep a couple of alpacas in a sheep or goat herd because they scare away wolfs or other animals that might attack the sheep.

View from the first look-out point

Sunbthing lizards=)

Second look-out point

Eagle spotted!

Magical =)

Mount Weddin, that we conquered ;)

So, even though there is not much happening here we quite enjoy this and are happy to stay for another two weeks =). It feels good to be out in the nature and live an “easy” life. Also it´s nice that we can cook and bake anything we want and we really have time for it. We even got to bake an apple pie now from Gregs wild apples and it was really really good! Next week we are going to start wwoofing and our next project will probably be painting a house!

With a lot of love to our families and all our friends,

Saara & Katja <3

Peaches, plums, peaches, plums, plums, more peaches….

On Friday 2nd of March we woke up at 4 in the morning, left Balmain, took a taxi to Flemington markets, and hopped on a truck at 5.30 in the morning and drove to an ecological fruit farm in Young. The night before we wanted to experience the nightlife in Sydney once more, and went out to a latin bar to dance salsa ;). We ended up with sleeping around 1 hour which we kind of regretted the next day, but we survived =). It was kind of cool to travel in a truck, neither of us had done that before. It was raining almost the whole way and we even got to see some of the New South Wales floods, we heard in the radio that ¼ of NSW (same size as France!) was under water.

Truck-girl

We met the farm owner, Greg, and the two other girls who were working on the farm, in Young, and drove to the farm. So, here we have been staying since last Friday. In the beginning there were two other girls here, Ingerid (from Norway) and Friederike (from Germany). Ingrid has already left and Friederike just left today. Now it’s just going to be the two of us and we wonder how crazy we gonna go??! =D The workers (=backpackers) have their own house here so now we have a house of our own! The house is ok, just kind of dirty and very badly isolated.  And the worst part is the worms that appear in the evenings if it´s raining!!! We also have a mouse here as our “house pet”, but it keeps us up in the night and has ripped open some plastic bags with trash, so Greg is probably going to kill it. Otherwise it´s ok here, we have warm water, a washing machine, a good kitchen, a tv (that doesn’t work but it has a dvd player and some dvd’s so its ok)…

Our house :)

Chilling in our living room

Friederike driving a quat (wasn't so easy!)

The work we have been doing is picking peaches and plums, sorting them for selling, and cutting them for drying. One part of the job is to pick rotten fruits from the ground, and that is our favourite thing (NOT!). The first days it was raining heavily and it was really cold, we had to wear almost all of our clothes and rain jackets from Greg. Turns out we don’t really have good clothes for working because they can get really dirty and destroyed. Fortunately some other backpackers have left some old working cloths behind. The weather changes much; one second it can rain heavily and the next it can be hot and sunny. We had to buy straw hats for sun protection and it combined with all our other interesting clothing combination we look like “landepaukkun”. =D

Landepaukku ;D

At work ;)

Which one to choose?

Today we saw a kangaroo! Turns out they live just behind our house and we haven’t been aware of this until now!! We have heard that they can be dangerous when they get scared so now we are afraid of getting hit by kangaroos. We have also seen an opossum that lives in Greg’s shed, and we suspect there is one running on our roof every morning waking us up as well. Something that also wake us up in the mornings are the birds. Some of them sound like robots, some like cats and some like apes, weird!  Something that you should be afraid of when you pick fruits are the wasps! Katja already got stung by one and it hurt her like hell :S.

Shed-opossum

A gigantic spider in our house :S

There is not much to do here, so we have to be creative. Every day we have been cooking gourmet food such as tortilla español, fried rice, really good baked pasta, filled capsicums, a delicious plum pie (of course made of the plums we have picked) and soooo good banana pancakes :P. Also we have been watching movies and exploring the area a little bit. We can’t leave the farm if we don’t get a ride from Greg so basically can’t get anywhere. If the weather gets better Greg takes us to play tennis, wohoo!

"Bää"

We found horses for Saara =)

Our road "Good Friday Gully"

Preparing the plum pie!

THE plumpie..aaaawe..some!

Our plan is to stay here for a month; we will be working for money for two weeks and then probably switch to wwoofing, which means volunteer work including free food and accommodation. The internet connection is not so good here so don’t worry if you don’t hear from us for a while =). 

Hoping we don’t get crazy here!

With lots of love

Katja & Saara