First things first: thanks everyone for all of the very wonderful birthday greetings! I received many lovely messages and a very amusing e-card from Vicki! I would have said so sooner but we have now moved on from the world of picking tomatoes to planting them (via a week of lemon picking but I will fill you in on that a bit later). Gone are the 4 hour work days and sweltering heat as we are currently in the midst of waiting out a cyclone off the northeastern coast of Queensland. We are in the target area though we live about 50 km from the coast so hopefully we will just have a few more rainy days with a touch of wind :) We have been evacuated from our campsite (our tent doesn't keep the rain out too well let alone falling branches) and are staying at the very accomodating motel Panda. We even got our first day off in 10 days on account of the storm so it really hasn't been too bad thus far.
Anyhow, on to the money making! We received the good news last week that spaces had opened up picking lemons and that we were to start the following morning - good bye tomatoes forever (or so we thought). That was great news as some friends from the campsite had been making good money doing this by filling as many meter x meter x meter (couldn't figure out how to make a "cubed" sign there) bins of lemons a day at $100/bin. Dan and I managed a hefty 2 and a half per day so would take home $250 dollars (and a few scratches from the thorny trees). After a fulfilling 5 days doing that we learned of a new job planting that would require us to stay on for a minimum of 6 weeks. After about a 10 second deliberation we decided to go for it as that would give us ample money to do a trip to Fraser Island and hopefully some snorkelling in the Great Barrier Reef which would be a very welcome break after the rigors of picking/snipping/planting. The only catch was that we found this news out at around 9pm amidst a bit of a celebration that the weekend had arrived and we had to be at the place by 515 the next morning.... oh boy.
When planting we work in teams of 3 with one man driving the tractor and 2 lovely ladies sitting on these little seats behind planting the tomatoes in rows. Now Queensland is rather sexist as they balk at the idea of a girl driving the tractor or a guy planting but I put it down to the fact that anyone can drive a tractor in a straight line but it takes a lot of precision and technique to get the plants in just so :) I plant with a lovely Korean girl named Eun Ju who speaks about as much English as I do Korean so we tend to run out of things to talk about after a while but the days go by quickly in spite of the repetetive nature of the job. Yesterday morning in the beginning stages of the wind and rain of the cyclone things were a little tough but fortunately we were allowed to leave at 10 and today have the day off to catch up on some things!
We are really enjoying our stay in Australia so far as it seems very much like a home away from home and the people here are extraordinarily friendly. We haven't been taking as many photos as we would like but we will try and get some up in the next week or so of our campsite, the town of Childers and some of our friends here as well. To tide you over for now I have included shots of me at the beach, one of the many "beware of the roo" signs, Dan and the dreaded cowboy hat and the cyclone watch program on the tv!! Hope everyone is doing well and thanks for reading! Lots of love, Ash and Dan
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