Bunderberg - Farming

Credit card: - £500

Au bank account: $400 (thanks to my mum sending me some muchly needed cash)

So bundaburg was the place I would be doing my farm work and hoping to get a bit of money.

The hostel was filthy, which I guess couldn't be helped. Even if you cleaned a house every day, if dozens of people, head to toe muddy and dirty passed through, it would be gross. The rooms weren't terrible, just standard. There were 2 kitchens, one outside and 1 inside. They had an empty outside pool and an entertainment room which had an Xbox and DVDs. The owner of the hostel had arranged 1 of the couches to be stilted higher than the other in front which made it really nice and homely when everyone decided to have a movie night. Everyone in this hostel was a lot more like a big family. They were all going through this shit awful work together and the laughs and drinks and the times in the park got them through the 3 months of slave labour, which is what it was. I'll explain:

Hostel cost a month $150

Average pay $150-$200 (anything after paying for accommodation would go towards food)

The work itself: ok so the deal was that you start off Picking either strawberries, tomatoes or cherry tomatoes for the first 2-4 weeks. The pay for this was absolutely terrible. On average it would take about 10-15 mins to fill a bucket of cherry tomatoes and each bucket was worth 50 cents. Hence, slave labour and its legal too. I called up a government helpline just to see if it was and some snotty woman on the phone un-impressed that i was even checking this over said yes but you have the opportunity to earn more than the farming hourly rate... HAR HAR FUCKING HAR, yes if im asian and robotic  (no racism intended but damn it killed me to see every Asian picking at lightening speed 5 buckets by the time id finished one) 

I would have loved to have seen that woman wake up at 4:30am for an hour and a half journey to be on a low seated, trike-like contraption with no pedals attached to a big tray and spending the entire day hunched over picking strawberries whilst using her feet to pivvot up the hill in scorching heat and having nothing to eat BUT strawberrys and getting just 25 cents a tray for them. Ok i know she was just the bearer of bad news but her impatient attitude sucked. Apparently you get faster at picking with practice and a lot of the asian supervisors were very nice in showing me how to pick faster and even helping me fill my cherry tomatoe bucket sometimes. I was just such a small and helpless girl who was struggling just so very much.... 😏This never happened however when I was picking strawberries. One of the supervisors had a go at me for taking a break to eat a banana and NOBODY tells me to stop eating (low blood sugar = angry angry angry disfunctional and very slow Beth. Plus I have a very large appetite, fast metabolism and I LOVE my food)

Regular tomatoe picking on the machines was the best because half the time you are seated on a vehicle that takes you forward and your grabbing tomatoes from the vines as it goes by and putting it on a machine in front of you that takes it up to the sorters above you. It's difficult to explain what this looked like (ill post a picture)

If you were picking larger things like pumpkins or something you would get paid hourly but guys were usually only picked to do that. 

Once the weeks of picking were up and depending on availability and who the managers like the sound of, they will then hire someone in the hostel to pack which is hourly paid work. Sam, lucky bugger, got this job on arrival so the rest of us were put to slavery. 

By the end of picking everybody's hands were black with dirt. It is the hardest thing to get out of your nails ever. One day I was told to use the green tomatoe juice to clean my hands which seemed bizarre but it really worked. Natures way of saying thanks I guess. well that cheered me up, I'm always really impressed by little things like that. Sarah, a girl in the hostel brought out some dark nail polish so we could hide the build up of muck in our nails that we couldn't remove. I was so greatful for this but she had to paint my nails, I felt like I was 7 years old again using my mums nail polish for the first time because I hadn't actually used nail polish since I was a child and the whole thing felt totally alien to me (such a tomboy)

It was lovely to meet Rannon who had nothing but good things to say about the hostel and her experience, the place had been her home for a few months and the people in it had been her family. I spoke to her about this crazy thing people talk about when they "change" when they travel and all this "finding yourself" bullshit . She told me that she had deffinately changed and had grown so much more confident socially, which I understood and that made sense to me. I still needed to meet someone that could explaining "finding oneself" to me though. The whole thing just sounds funny to me - oh yes! I remember the moment exactly, there I was this entire time, hiding under the duvet in a hostel in Myanmar! So glad I found myself!

When matt arrived I felt awful that I just deserted him. The others had joked before that he was really really pissed off with me, he was a bit mad but he's so easy going he was over it and it was nice to have him with me again so we could be shopping and cooking buddy's. me and matt got along really well and for our whole time in bunderberg we cooked and shopped together just like we did in hamilton. he was just as dippy as I was if not more dippy which was just crazy that that was even possible. He did things that made no logical sense and took the long way round when going about doing things. It made me smile because it made me feel normal. When I was with matt I wasn't the clumsiest dippiest person on the planet, he was. He even rattled on talking more than I did which I liked. I sat on my bed one day missing Craig going through my scrap book of our travels together and cringey silly pictures we'd taken as a piss take. Nobody can really see this scrap book, it's full of private jokes nobody would get but us and if anybody else WAS to see it they would see how weird I truly was and probably not want to know me again but matt ran off with it one time and I had no choice, well I did but he insisted I let him look through it. Apparently he was weird too so it was ok. well I couldn't disagree with that. Gemma joked that if I was letting matt go through that when nobody else could then it was a big deal so we were like proper BFFS now... 

the good thing about the hostel was free tomatoes and potatoes, the good thing about shopping with matt was that we managed to budget weekly shopping to $20 each and that meant a full lamb or chicken dinner with all the vegetables. As a snack we would often make chips too and use the oil from the free section. A lot of hostels have a compartment of food that the backpackers have left behind so anyone is able to take what they want, this usually included spices, salt, pepper, oil or cerieal, so eating on a budget was easily done and chips with salt and chili powder was actually tasty!  I usually cooked and matt did the dishes (when he remembered) and he  really appreciated the meal too. He was so chuft one time he ran up to me and hugged me in appreciation haha. A decent meal is hard to come by when your backpacking on a budget and matt was just as skint as I was.