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