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April 5th - 12th. Two Dams Organic Farm, Donnybrook.
- WWOOF, bark, mind that tractor etc...
WWOOFing then. I should probably explain. It stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms and the gist would be that in exchange for 4-6 hours work 6 days a week you recieve a place to stay plus meals. The less contractual side is that you get to see bits of the country off limit to the ticklist tourist, learn a touch about farming and rural happenings plus, shock horror, typically meet some people from Australia as opposed to the hostel nationality mishmash. I was becoming jaded with the whole hostel scene so I was looking forward to it as a nice change of pace...plus for the first time in 2 months I was to have a room to myself...its the simple things in life you crave...
It was a brief 30 minutes hop inland (this is also being the first time in 2 months that I've left the coast) to Donnybrook, home of millions upon billions of apples, though sadly I was a day too late for the apple festival. Mark met me at the bus stop and drove me the 8KM out of town to Two Dams, the organic farm he runs with his wife, Pam. There were also two other WWOOFers on the property, Alison and Amena. I arrived in time for lunch (the food deserves, and gets, its own paragraph further down) and after that retreated to my room, the blue room, that underlay the house. It was a bit of a shock to the system to have a whole room to myself again, even if it was only going to be for a single week. It was a decent size, I certainly stayed 10 months in a smaller one the last year of university, and I even unpacked my bag into the draws - the pure insanity! I must confess feeling at a loss of what to do at the start, its a bit uncomfortable hitting such a new situation head on and it takes a while to become accustomed to it. I think this is predominantly to do with getting to know what is expected/accepted interaction wise with the hosts and just generally settling in a bit. Thankfully this turned out to be a quick process and within a couple of days I felt completely at ease.
The working day started at 7AM with people being in the house for breakfast aroundabout 6.30. This was a fair chunk later than I'd been getting up for grape picking so, once the initial 'arg do I have to' of leaving the comfort of the bed had passed, this didn't prove too challenging. We'd work till 9AM, then head inside for morning tea. Once this was done, roughly 9.30, we'd head back out and keep at it untill lunch which was typically 12.30 One day we headed back out for an hour to finish what we'd been doing but most of the time this signalled the end of the day. I'd then chill out more or less by myself, apart from two days when we went places, reading, listening to music, playing uke and perhaps having a little sleep untill the sun started to go down around 6PM, when I'd head inside, nibble on cheese and biscuits, have a beer or a glass of wine and eat an hour later. Once everything was cleaned up we milled around inside watching TV over yet another cup of tea for a while before I retired to my room to usually crawl into bed around 10/11. And repeat.
OK so that's the boring, clinical routine aspect out of the way, now lets get down to the details.
The work varied from day to day but chiefly involved picking (tomatoes, apples, silverbeat etc), sorting according to size, weighing and packaging, tasks you're no doubt salivating to hear the minute details about. I'll leave such revelations untill I get home, I've got to hold something back after all! Slightly more interesting - we pulled up some irrigation linesand reeled them in using a device called a spinning jenny. It span. Enough said. Although the work was physical and messy it wasn't too much of a struggle, although my brain appears to simply not be wired to comprehend knots, and flew by at such a pace that I would always be surprised when the shout to stop came. A-ha, I've thought of a moderately interesting job I did! However some background is required first...
On the farm they had an ATV (All Terrain Vehicle, kind like...description fails me here...comes about up to my chest...4 wheels...erm...just google it) and at the end of the first dat I learnt how to ride it. This wasn't overly difficult, though there were the expected number of beginer errors made over the week. About the most taxing part of the learning process was the twenty minute health and safety training video, I was tempted to make a copy to help me sleep at night. Once we were done Mark then nodded at his tractor and said 'want to try on that then.' Well I've never so much as driven a car but when in Rome...OK, the word 'tractor' has probably put a misleading image in your head, 'mini tractor' would be more accurate, it came up to my neck. But it remains a tractor and I did drive it, which will give me a fun answer to any 'what experience do you have?' style questions on my eventual first driving lesson. It was more difficult than the ATV, there was this strange contraption called a gearstick for one thing, but I reckon I was getting the hang of it by the end...or at the very least recognising my mistakes quicker!
The earlier alluded to 'moderately interesting job' involved using the mini tractor to approach metal poles and thrust them up out of the ground. The trickey part of this (for me!) was that the whole song and dance bar turning around at the end of each row went down in reverse...which occasionally led to some head scratching and backtracking getting correctly lined up to each pole! And, oh yeah, isn't that a fair drop and a dam a few metres over there?! Thankfully I didn't have to practise my swimming and the only thing in pain were the poles. Ha, if you'd asked me what I thought I'd be doing in a weeks time the previous one I doubt anything tractor related would have come fast to mind!
Food. There was more than I've become accustomed to over the last two months...and not all of it was pasta too! Breakfast was a fend for yourself affair and was cereal and tea. Morning tea swung back and forth between cupcakes and a small sort of pancake thing. And tea, obviously. Lunch was what they'd call light, a toasted sandwich, some soup, nothing overly heavy. Saying that it was more than I'd had all day at some points! The evening meal tested the capacity of my shrunken stomach with Pam constantly urging me on to eat 'just a little bit more.' It could be challenging...but its the type of challenge I like! There'd be tea after that too...and occasionally one in the mid-afternoon too. This place did nothing for my tea dependency issues! Most of the veg was from the farm so tasted amazing, thinking about it so did everything I ate whilst there...it was a step up from the previous Sundays dodgey fast food chicken fiasco at any rate!
One day early on I took advantage of an offer of a ride to Donnybrook whilst the dog (an enthusiastic big black thing called Arthur) was at the vet for his ears. I'd like to now include a halfway decent description of the place but alas I must confess I spent almost the entire hour and a bit we were there on the phone so saw little beyond the IGA carpark where I waited to be picked up. The signal up at the farm was erratic, calls kept cutting out after 20/30 seconds, and so I feel somewhat justified in abusing the better signal in town instead of having a look around, I mean its not as if people coped before mobile phones or that looking around is part of the reason I'm here or anything.
Another day we headed on a longer, more exotic, mission. To Bunbury, my favourite place in the world. On route we swung by Gnomeland. The legend goes thus - many moons ago somebody placed a Gnome on a roundabout. Some time later someone else added another to keep him company. The someone added another, and another, and another. Pretty soon the roundabout was at bursting point and the Gnomes had to make the treacherous journey across the road and into the forest clearing on the other side to have decent room to continue their expansion. Many years came and went and the word of a haven, a paradise for gnomes spread across the land and people would come from far and wide to leave their gnomes to a life of joy. Often each member of a family would fashion a gnome each and leave them in groups, an almost scary ammount would write poems about them, finding far more half-rhyms with gnome than is strictly healthy. When I arrived the gnomes had filled several clearings (thinking I'd reached the end I clambered upwards only to look down on another as far as the eye can see oasis of 'em) and were spilling out of the enterance back towards the road. It's hard to adequately describe it, its a pity I didn't have my camera on me but even if I had I wouldn't have been able to capture the absurb scale of the scene, there must have been 10 000s of the things, perhaps more. Like driving the mini tractor I couldn't have forseen this happening...and yet the memory will always be with me...
Bunbury was Bunbury, I'd only been there a few days before so it wasn't all that surprising. We went up the Marlston lookout again. The view was the same as before, but impressive none the less. After some shopping Mark brought us all ice creams, which more than justified the journey.
Sunday was my day off and I began my celebrations by having a several hour lay in till around 8.30/9, by this point we'd usually be halfway through the working day after all. After doing a relaxing not-much for a while I caught on to the crazy notion that I should actually do something with my time and as such I set off on a wander around the giant forests surrounding the property. Before I left I asked Pam the best way to go and she said as long as I kept turning right I'd go in a big circle and end up back where I started. Sounds simple enough doesn't it? Some time later and I'm begining to doubt the logic of this plan...and trying to think if I might accidentally have gone left at some point. In short, I wasn't entirely 100% certain where abouts I was. More bluntly, I was utterly lost. But never mind, its not as if I've headed out without important things like a phone or water...wait a minute...a quick check of my pockets confirms the only thing I have with me is my camera...maybe I could drink the battery acid if it came to it? This wasn't the brightest thing I've ver done though I wasn't really in that much danger as I'd passed plenty of other peoples properties and if worse came to the worse I could always ask for help...I didn't want to face the embarrasment of having to be saved my Mark and Pam quite yet so I decided to push on for a time. Eventually I found myself walking past a field that looked a lot like two dams and thus embarrasment was staved off another day. After what had transpired to be a three hour brief walk I opted to return to the not-much action of earlier, clearly this is where my true talents lay.
The week flew by before I knew it and on Monday Mark drove me back into Donnybrook and I jumped of a coach heading south. I had really enjoyed the whole WWOOFing experience, which was a good thing as I was headed directly on to more of it in Denmark. It was a five hour journey yet it passed quickly, I listened to music, had a small sleep and when I got hungry I ate the three mini-muffins and the apple Pam had packed in a brown paper bag for me before I left.
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