And here we are... After a 3 hour flight from Christchurch we arrive in Sydney. We were sad to leave the plane really, as the Emirates flight had been amazing with a fantastic choice of films, own screens, brilliant seats with plenty of leg room and a 3 course meal - it was, as Borat would say: 'Very nice!'

In Sydney we stayed in a hostel a short walk from the central train station, which turned out to be a good choice, as there were loads of activities and freebies to take advantage of if we got bored. We had initially booked the cheapest accommodation which was in the 32 bed 'church' dorm, but thankfully we were upgraded to a 6 bed when we arrived. The first day in Sydney we had brilliant sunshine and went to the harbour to check out the Opera house and Harbour Bridge. The following days it rained and we focused our efforts on finding a job as soon as possible, as we had to move on from the hostel by the end of our third day. On the final day in Sydney we managed to find a job, book a Greyhound bus ticket and do a free guided city tour in the pouring rain. We had found a Wwoofing job near Byron Bay, which was a 12 hour coach journey - our longest yet. This was not a particularly pleasant experience, made worse by the fact that for some reason we were given seats far away from each other, making our plans of sharing our blanket impossible, and the coaches faulty gear box, which meant a horrible noise and reduce in speed every time there was a gear change. Anyway, we arrived in Byron Bay in the rain early Saturday morning and checked into a nice hostel in town. That night we went to bed at about 7pm, despite the party and drinking games going on in our room (the majority of guests at the hostel were 18 and spent all day in bed and all night drinking - ah those were the days).

On Sunday we checked out and sat inside out of the rain reading until Trina, our new employer, came to pick us up and take us to Mullumbimby where her Banana farm is. And here we are now. As mentioned earlier, we are Wwoofing which means we do not get paid for the work, but get free accommodation and food for our efforts. The farm is in Mullumbimby Creek and gets completely cut off from civilisation when the rain is bad, but thankfully the rain seems to be coming to an end now. The farm has both bananas and mangos, but the main focus is bananas as the mango are only in season once every 3 years here. Saying that, we managed to get the last of the mango season this time around and we spent the first week here cheeking mangos (yes that is cheeking, not checking). That was pretty boring and extremely messy and as Trina (the owner) is still building a reputation for the farm's produce she wants all the mangos we bag up to be very tasty and sweet, of course. This means however that every single mango that we cheek, we have to taste the seed before ok-ing it. Thats a whole lotta mango and unfortunately the majority at this point are starting to ferment, so its really not the easiest task! Also I'd hate to think wht its doing to our teeth! We have to floss after work now as you manage to gather more than you would think possible in the bottom front teeth about an hour into work. Nasty! Work is from 7am to 4pm and we get an hour for lunch and then have weekends off. Food is good and theres a huge variety and choice and lots of it. The house we are staying in is on the farm but pretty bug free (so far). We share a room and have twin beds with a table, basic but pretty nice. When we arrived there was 5 of us, but one guy has just left so now there's Jamie, a tall bloke from Sunderland who has come from a year in New Zealand and Taka, a Japanese guy who met Jamie in NZ and is training to become a tattoist here in Oz. Also there's a friendly Spanish guy called Xavi who is the resident cook, although he's been away for the last week so we've had to fend for ourselves. When he gets back he said he'd give us cooking lessons.

As we have finished the mangos now, we have joined the guys up the farm, which is on a steep hill with some amazing views (pics and videos to follow) and containing many different variations of wildlife including spiders and poisonous snakes, much to Sophie's horror. We are now 4 days into our farm experience and so far the wildlife encounters include: 2 snake sightings, many many spiders, a possum rescue from the pool and a great deal of lizards, oh and waay too many cockroaches! The work up the hill is pretty hard manual labour and our muscles are coming along nicely. Some of the time we do the chipping, basically weeding the ground around the banana trees, and some of the time we get to swing big machete knives around chopping down banana leaves, and when we're bored of that we start chopping up the bananas too. The trip to get up and down the hill is the best bit of our day, hanging off the back of the Ute, ducking to avoid banana leaves and spiders webs - Jamie hasn't got the hang of that yet - with the car jumping in and out of all the pot holes and winding up and down the steep hill. Funtastic!

Today we spent the morning in the sheds sorting bananas. The boys took the 'hands' of bananas off then we broke these up into the bunches of bananas, while Greg - the farm manager - sorted them into the boxes. Greg is a 40ish year old guy with dreads, a love of organic food and the idea that he is in fact a tree... The job today resulted in us being covered head to feet in sticky banana sap that just won't come off. We found a load of double bananas, which we were very impressed with and have taken afew of them to have a banana or two later on. Now we're back at the house, having just baked a big batch of vegan banana and chocolate cakes and muffins ready for another day up the hill tomorrow.

Sophie and Marie x