Blueberry Picking

I headed north from Sydney, along the Pacific Highway up the East Coast. I stayed in Port Maquerie for a few days with a great friend from uni, Toya. She is a doctor in the ER and now works out here because the conditions are so much better then in England. She has a beautiful apartment less than a minutes walk from the harbour that she shares with 2 other doctors. Toya and her friends indulged me in a life of luxury, with my own room and big double bed, a jet ferry ride where we saw dolphins up close,  movies on tap (including the new Bond film which was mostly emotionless and bland), copious amounts of tea and incredible bunches, and Toya's delicious pak choi soup!

And then I travelled onwards to Coffs Harbour. Staying at the Hoey Moey on the beach,  I walked straight into a job on day 1 as a blueberry picker at Ravinder and Davinder's farm in Bonville. It's a pretty simple job - you pick the berries off the bush and put them in your bucket, and then you do the same thing again and again and again, and if there's time you do it again! It is hot, backbreaking work in serious heat. It is generally +30° and is usually 32-34 by 8 or 9 am. I start at 6am and go until 2 or 3:30 in the afternoon. Today it got up to 38°C which was pretty horrendous, but we have had days up in the 40s. Sometimes you can get a good line of bushes where all of the fruit hangs in bunches on the outside; then you can do 10 or 11 buckets - once I even got 15, but usually all the berries like to hide right in the middle so you have to stick your whole upper body into the bush. You get scratched and cut and I've lost count of the amount of splinters I have.

A word to the wise! ALWAYS WASH YOUR FRUIT!! We like to sweat all over it!

Things I Have Learned As A Blueberry Picker
1) It is hard work!!
2) It pays REALLY badly!!
3) The best moment ever is when you go to pick one berry,  move the leaves and see there is a whole bunch of big juicy ones!
4) The worst is when you bend down and the top layer of berries fall out of your bucket.
5) Correction, the worst is when a full bucket randomly decides to tip itself over.
6) Berries often hang in pairs, and after a while it does start to feel like you are just pulling multiple tree testicals...

7) There's a lot of time to actually listen to the lyrics in your music. Some songs really mean completely different things that you always thought. And some are really profound. 'The wisdom's in the trees not the glass windows' is rather apt when you have your face in a tree!

8) French rap is very bizarre.

9) Almost as bizarre as German musicals.

10) Blueberry wars are the best way to get through the day.

11) Blueberry juice stains skin for a long time.

12) The best thing to do to cool off after work is dive straight into the ocean.

Today was pretty cool. On the journey home, our boss and bus driver stopped off to buy us a 48 crate of beer! Beer on the beach before diving head first into the waves - not such a bad way to live.