Tree Bagging innit

It's now New Years Eve. The hostel is quiet except for a few Brits and our Korean friends. Everyone else deserted us for Magnetic Island for a beach party, it's a shame that it has been raining all day.

Christmas day was a bit of a bust no one wanted to celebrate; together anyway.

I have a new job on the banana farm which consists of me riding a converted tractor that has a cherry picker on it. I have to use this vehicle to bag the fruit whilst it is on the tree to protect it from the sun, insects and other nasties.

It's still raining at 19.40 and the weather man informs us that it will stay this way for the next 72 hours! Bring it on!

Prawns and beers

Doing three months time in an outback town called Cardwell. The deal is that one can score a second year visa by working for 88 days on a farm, ranch or road station.

The story so far has seen me work on a Paw paw farm climbing up and down a 6ft ladder for 8 hours a day. Times the number of trees by number of rows and it's roughly 1000 accents and descents are made on said ladder a day.

I did one day on a Pumpkin farm. Kicking out the 5ft high grass to locate said pumpkin and squatting down to collect. 81 tonnes was collected in 3 weeks to give you an idea of the amount we were picking (5 tonnes a day).

I also worked as a farm hand, cleaning and organising a sorting shed then going onto plant 4,500 banana roots in three hours.

It's dam hard work when you consider it doesn't rain even though it's rainy season and the temperature doesn't fall much below 35 degrees. Needless to say I'm sleeping well every night!