Back to the CBD

The new year has started well, but there's been big changes. Again. 

Our lovely house in Epping lost Annie and Brita in December, and this week we also said goodbye to Alex and Kai. They picked up a campervan and headed off into the wild for a 3 month adventure. So then there were 3.

And then there was 1, or 5, as 'backpacker' became real. (turns out you can't stay in one place for long, who knew?!) Will and Marcus are planning to stay in Sydney for longer, while I am leaving on Feb 1st, so they were looking into other accommodation - 3 people in a house that previously held 7 (plus 3 more German boys and 3 Malaysian women over New Year) was not going to work. After a scouting mission they came back having paid a deposit and with 5 days until they moved. A very nice long term hostel type house, minimum 3 months, so I'm out. 

Cue panic and freak out.

Wasn't ready to say goodbye to the boys yet. And even more, wasn't ready to find somewhere else to live. But I wasn't going to stay there by myself. AND our Landlord told us a family of 4 was going to move in on the same day they were moving out. So that would have been weird!! Started hunting in between very long days at work and finally found somewhere that looked decent back in the CBD - exactly where I was trying to stay away from!

So we packed up and cleared out. The hardest part was leaving my poor broken backpack. I brought it my first year of uni and love it so much. But the zip had broken and I couldn't actually use it anymore. RIP backpack =[

I'm going to miss our adopted cat, Billi, and the view from our indoor/outdoor patio area. We spent many great evenings out on the back deck talking, drinking and having a laugh.

I'm not going to miss the little (GIANT) friend Marcus found when moving his things!

While I didn't want to move back to the city, it is good to be nearer to where things are going on. Epping was a 40 minute train away, and once you are there you are surrounded by suburbia. Giant palatial mansions with nothing in between. But I now live a lot closer to work, so that saves time and train fares. And there's things going on everywhere. I am in Sydney for Sydney Festival, my work friends are nearby, there's places to wander and sit in the sunshine, and my hostel has a pool.

I now live in the YHA at Railway Square. And the coolest part about that is not the great included breakfast, or even the sun deck, but the fact my room is a converted train carriage!!! It's very well insulated so it's very quiet inside - except the humm of the much needed air con - but from the shower you can hear "The next train to arrive on Platform 1 goes to ..." 

I'm spending long, hot days working at Luna Park and coming home to make plans. In less than 2 weeks I will be meeting my beautiful momma in Melbourne, we will be picking up our campervan and driving the coastal road to Brisbane. Heading West first to drive the Great Ocean Road of course. There are so many beautiful places out there it is hard to figure out which are the most essential!

Christmas in the least Christmassy country

Christmas in Australia is just strange! There was no snow, no cold weather, no wooly scarves and hats and gloves. Instead there were short shorts (some massively too short!) and sunglasses. But I covered the walls with wrapping paper and played Christmas songs at deafening volume. We did lots of Christmas baking. Our first gingerbread house attempt turned into the dilapidated gingerbread barn, but the second came out pretty well and got smothered in icing and smarties. Will also made a raspberry meringue roulade for Christmas Dinner desert.

Although, Christmas dinner this year was nothing like normal. Forget nut roasts (or turkey!) and cranberry sauce, in fact forget the actual date; I am outnumbered by German and part Swedish housemates. So my Christmas dinner was on Christmas Eve! And as it was led by our resident Swede he cooked up a festive feast of meatballs (for the record Quorn mince does not roll into balls easily!!), potato gratin and vegetables. I fought to get a bit of Britain in there, and eventually he let me make some roast potatoes and parsnips and some gravy. We got some other friends over and had a delicious 2 course meal - we only have so many pans/hobs/oven space.

And then Secret Santa and Dumper-Truck-Driver-Santa delivered gifts. Dumper Truck Santa was dumping loads from a games warehouse and returned with Just Dance t-shirts, sunnies and mini boom boxes. 

Dump Truck Santa was also my Secret Santa, and I got a mini longboard! 

Christmas Day was spent in true Australian Backpacker fashion; On Bondi Beach!

 We caught up with other friends, and the rest of Australia it seemed. But there was still space to do a bit of acroyoga and lots of diving through the heaviest waves I've ever been in.

Bunny and I are having a GREAT time! He loves the beach, our house, and the coolest job in town. Luna Park is a lot of fun. I operate a ride called The Rotor, which is an old school ride, designed like a washing machine drum. The drum spins around and the centrifugal forces push people back against the wall and holds them in the air as the floor drops out. I also work in Coney Island, the 1930s Fun House with giant slides, spinning barrel tunnels, a mirror maze, a spinning floor, wonky walkways and moving walkways.

 I was working on New Year's Eve, until 2am. It was over 18s only, and most of them got very drunk so it was a really funny night, even if they didn't listen to any of the safety information. I told them, they didn't listen, not my fault if they die! Grown ups have far more fun than the kids do, maybe because they don't get chance to be silly every day.

I got to see the insane fireworks display off the Sydney Harbour Bridge. People que-d for hours to get a spot on the waterfront to watch them from. My housemates went the the botanical gardens at 11am to find a 6hour long que to get in!! And people were camping overnight. But I just stopped working at 11:55pm, hopped upstairs to the balcony and got paid to watch the display. Bonus!

And the freakiest part of the night by far was meeting up with Matt Woodfield, a guy I went to high school in Market Bosworth with. And even stranger, his girlfriend, who he met while travelling, is a girl I was friends with at uni in Plymouth!! And because that wasn't enough, on my train home I sat opposite Rich Ball, another guy I was at High School with! He'd also been at Luna Park, but completely separately from Matt! It's a small world out there!!

What's been going on..

I have decorated our house for Christmas! Hello kitchen roll Christmas Wreath! We also have the top of a Christmas tree that is propped up on a chair in the bay window, so I'd say we're in full festive spirit.

When you don't have TV or internet, you have to make do with what you can find. So we've had some very interesting evening entertainment...

We have an oven!! It's very old and very rubbish and is either insanely hot or cold, but it is an oven none the less. So I made cookies =] We have a slight obsession with cookies and cream ice cream (as in we eat half a tub every night, not even bothering with bowls) and hot, freshly baked cookies makes it so much better!! It also makes the house smell much better than the usual boy smell!

A gardener came and cut back our garden. It was an overgrown jungle that we were afraid to set foot in for fear of snakes and spiders. Now we can see it is huge, with different levels, a big washing line, a patio area and even a herb garden and vegetable beds. We also discovered this 'little' fellow.

I've been doing more acro yoga, this time on a very crowded Bondi Beach. Yep, even in December the sky is this colour and even the breeze is hot.

 And the best part...
After a ridiculously long interview process and auditions, I have a job at Luna Park, the iconic theme park down on the water at Sydney Harbour. It's an incredible place to be, looking out on the harbour bridge and the opera house, with boats sailing past. I am a rides operator, so it's my job to check the rides first thing, ensure guests are strapped in properly, start and stop the rides.

The park was first opened in the 1930s, and it has retained all of it's classic charm. All the original artwork and a lot of the rides remain. While it has been done up and reopened after a massive fire burnt the place down in the 70s, it's still very old school.

Today was my second day and I had a man fall down a 40ft slide while attempting to get into his mat. And then, I managed to break an entire ride ! My supervisor who was checking I knew what I was doing asked me to turn it off. I did. But then we couldn't turn it back on. Oops.

Epic in Epping

It's all change again!


I quit my blueberry picking job. It was hard work that I stupidly started doing in the hottest part of the year. But mostly I quit because it was a pay-to-work situation. I was paid $7.50 per bucket of blueberries, then I had to pay $26 rent per night, and $5 each day for the bus to the farm and back. With tax, I was just about floating, but I definitely wasn't saving anything for the big adventures I want to have. So I decided to leave Coff's Harbour and head back to the friends I'd left in Sydney.


I went back to Bayside Conference Centre for a few nights, until WE GOT EVICTED! It turns out our landlady did not get government authorisation for us to live there, and a 'lovely' neighbour over the road decided the best use of his time was to photograph people coming and going and forward it to the council.


So I was very nearly homeless. But I was saved. By a beautiful house in Epping. It's a suburb about 40minutes out of Sydney, with good public transport links and a shopping plaza with an incredible food court about 10 minutes walk away. It is a 3 bedroom house - though we turned the 2nd lounge into another bedroom) with a big garden, and I share it with 2 English guys, Marcus and Will (though he is half Swedish so doesn't completely count as English), 2 German guys and 2 German girls.


Our landlady at Bayside is a property agent for this place and she said we could take anything from the Conference Centre. Will very helpfully drives a dumper truck, so we loaded his van with beds, sofas, chairs, back packs and kitchen equipment and made our way to our new home. Over here if people don't want something they leave it outside on the street for people to take if they want it. We got a table, some speakers and a great corner sofa that had been only slightly mauled by a dog. For the first night we had no electricity so we were walking around with head torches, a bit like camping in your own home.


It's a very nice neighbourhood with big houses, and I'm not sure what they thought about 7 young people using a dumper truck to move in with some slightly bizarre office furniture, a semi-destroyed sofa (now patched up with duct tape), lots of back packs and a spear gun*.

* Will's job requires him to pick up things from construction sites and private businesses and homes. He's always picking up interesting things, chairs, stereo system, and the latest acquisition is a spear-fishing spear gun.

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.

Sydney

Sydney is an interesting city. In ways it is very similar to London, or any other big city, with masses of people, endless streets and sprawling suburbs. There are lots of beautiful areas; the Botanic Gardens, Circular Quay, Darling Harbour, The Rocks. And then there are the streets with the same shops and eateries repeated every 500meters. Hungry Jacks, Lorna Jane, Pie Face, JB HiFi, 7/11. There is shopping centre after shopping centre, no less than 8 on the street I lived on - although to be fair it is quite a long street. And with everything built in blocks, with long straight roads crossing long straight roads, it's far too easy to walk in the wrong direction! I have wasted many hours walking the wrong way on the right street!

I spent a long time searching for work in the city, getting stressed looking for somewhere to live and some way to pay for the expensive cost of living in Sydney. I was getting tired and grouchy with living out of my backpack in a noisy hostel where every night was disturbed by some rowdy roommate or other stumbling in at silly oclock. 

I felt trapped.

Until eventually I realised I didn't have to stay. Yes, my friends were staying, but that didn't mean I had to. As much as I liked being with them, this was my trip, and it was up to me to make the most of it. I didn't come to Australia to live in a city and work in an office just like I did back in England. 

It was time to move on. 

So I started making plans as we moved into a suburb of Sydney called Drummoyne. I worked for a wine festival, Vino Paradiso, in The Rocks, a hip area down by the water that is full with cool bars, restaurants and local markets. And I spent my days doing all the tours and trips that were included in my 2 week introduction to Australia package. I visited Hunter Valley and the Blue Mountains. I had a day surfing at Umima beach in Woy Woy. That was a beginner surf day, and because I knew what I was doing, I spent the whole day on the water with my own personal coach. I also went to Tarronga Zoo, and Sydney Aquarium where they have 2 of only 5 dugongs who live in captivity. I'm usually against creatures in cages, especially when they are as big as dugongs, but these 2 have been rescued from the wild and after release attempts it was deemed they would not survive alone. So I indulged in their beauty, and even got a high 5 from Wuru.

The problem was, I fell in love with life in Drummoyne. We lived in Bayside, an old conference centre, that was gradually being converted into accomodation. The rooms still had an office desk and filing cabinets to store our things. The media room had a big tv at the end of the huge board room table. It was a quiet, homely place, and felt a lot like living in halls at uni. I was sharing a room with Cara, David and Marcus from our original 6, and there were a lot of other couples and individuals. People would be working but we would hang out in the kitchen in the evenings, cooking and eating and drinking together.

I started acroyoga with Will, an English guy and intrepid traveller. He learnt the techique in Bali, or Indonesia, or somewhere else in South East Asia, and we built on what he knew with youtube videos and a lot of practice and falling. 

Acroyoga involves 1 person lying on their back and using their hands and feet to manipulate another person into positions in the air. It's an incredible work out and really works your flexibility and core strength. I loved it. And I loved life in our strange little conference centre.

But I had made plans and needed to follow them through. So I caught my bus up to Port Macquerie and met up with my wonderful friend Toya from uni. She is working out here as a doctor in the Emergency Department, and has a beautiful appartment that looks out over the water. We went on a jet boat ride, saw dolphins from the water, climbed a mountain, visited a koala hospital, had many delicious brunches with her friends, and Toya cooked me her famous Thai Soup That she once made me in Plymouth - it was so good!!

Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains are definitely up there in my most beautiful places list. I spent a day exploring them, but could have stayed for much longer!

On the way I stopped at Feathervale Wildlife Park and made some new friends. Kangeroos and wallabys roam freely, and they're curious little things. Especially if you have an icecream cone filled with food!

The Blue Mountains is a huge region of cliffs, waterfalls and endless eucalyptus forests. The oils in the eucalyptus leaves diffuse into the air which creates an ethereal blue haze across the sky.

One of the most popular landmarks is the Three Sisters. Its a huge rock formation with an Aboriginal legend. The story says that many years ago a magical witch doctor named Tyowan lived in the mountains. He had 3 daughters, Meehni, Wimlah and Gunnedoo, and he would leave them on the cliff when he went down into the valley to hunt. One day they were frightened by a giant centipede (because that happens) and one of the sisters threw a stone to scare it away. The stone fell down the cliff side and awoke the Bunyip, a monster who lived in the bottom of the valley. The Bunyip raced up to the sisters, but Tyowan turned them into rocks to protect them. The Bunyip then turned his anger on Tyowan and chased him throughout the mountains. At a dead end Tyowan turned himself into a lyre bird to hide in the cracks of the cliff face. But in the process he dropped his magic wand. To this day the lyre bird roams the mountains searching for the lost wand, unable to turn himself or his daughters back to their human form.