Kieran Campbell

On the advice of the genuinely helpful mechanic at the Tallangatta garage, I did the immensely boring 4-hour drive to Melbourne and, after an unintentional detour into a graveyard (this time not the fault of the Australian roads: I just needed somewhere to park to work out where I was), caught up with Kevin and Antoinne again. It was awesome to see them: we’d first met in Kununurra, but only really got to know each other through landing at the same mango picking farm in Mataranka and seemed to keep bumping into each other in different corners of the country

My arrival in Melbourne marked the beginning of a time where everyone’s plans changed quickly, unpredictably, but in the end, in ways that worked out great for everyone. Kevin decided that his job at a shisha cafe wasn’t as fun as dragging everyone out in Melbourne and so packed it in a few hours after I arrived. In a few days Antoinne was on a plane back to Darwin to witness the wet season in all its glory – something I must do myself sometime – and David had headed off cycle Tasmania. Sometime in the first week I got time to put out adverts for my car, but didn’t have much luck seeing as most backpackers were annoyingly more savvy with car-hunting than I was, and so I quickly resigned to the fact I wasn’t going to make a quick turnaround in Melbourne and be in Bright for the January paragliding course.

Since we were relatively close to the start of the Great Ocean Road, Ekin, Kevin and I did an overnight trip to Torquay, stumbling across Bells Beach which, although seemingly in the middle of nowhere when found in the dark, was fairly popular with backpackers regardless of the usual ‘no camping’ warnings. We followed suit and, in what was the most uncomfortable sleep ever in my car, slept in the boot of the car. Sleeping 3 people in the boot of any car is never going to be luxury but we made the fatal mistake of playing shithead for ages, with the lights and doors open, so by the time we went to sleep the car was infested with mossies, who proceeded to feed on us, all night.

Next day we headed back towards Torquay and found the gem that is Jan Juc beach. Jan Juc beach, a few minutes out of Torquay, is probably the best beach I’ve ever been to: the slope of the sand is so gentle that I could wade out for 50m and still touch the ground, and it creates great breakers for body boarding as well as some alright ones for surfing too. We spent the whole day at the beach – we’d hit nirvana and there was no need to explore anywhere else – only realising at the end of the day that the lavish amount of sun cream we’d put on wasn’t nearly enough and we all looked like lobsters. Back in Melbourne the news was reporting that it was looking like the hottest day on record and, sure enough, at midnight the temperature had only dropped to 38C!

Now with an empty schedule for January, we hatched a fantastic plan: take Kevin’s car on the ferry to Tassie and spend a few weeks there, getting back to Melbourne in time for my birthday, incidentally giving me a few days to find my way to Bright in time the start of the February paragliding course. Somehow a week after having all my plans blown into the sky, everything was falling into place and working out even better than the original plan. After 4 months I was finally learning that I’d been planning to fail and that embracing the spontaneous things that backpacking threw up was the way forward..

Sleeping in a car wasn’t so bad after all, so I managed to escape the campsite before anyone could so much as try to extract money from me for the previous night’s stay. The road out north from the caves was steep and winding, and as my car crawled up the hill and through the dreary misty morning I was quite happy that I wasn’t part of the group of cyclists I’d met last night, who had also covered the same road as me yesterday, but were heading to Canberra today. It wasn’t long before I was out of the mist and on the main road to Oberon, but feeling as though I were back in Aberdeenshire – so striking was the resemblance of the countryside round that side of the mountains to my homeland.

After engrossing myself in the detailed map of the west side of the blue mountains for quite a while, a very helpful girl at the Oberon visitor information centre confirmed that a trip to Kanangra-Boyd National Park and the Jenolan Caves would be well worth it and so I got the car and myself fueled up for the road. It’s annoying how quickly I felt scummy when driving the car on hot days: I’d had a shower the night before, but sitting round the side of the road-house, eating my (surprisingly tasty) mega-chicken burger, feeling a bit sweaty from the morning drive that had got pretty hot pretty quickly, with my tatty, holey shorts, I couldn’t help but feel like I looked like a bit of a scab. Oh well, I was in a for a week of that then.

A quick stop in Edith to take a few shots of the oldest house in the hamlet, which is tragically derelict and condemned, I was back on more dirt road in the Kanangra-Boyd National Park. It was a really annoying road, as every time I thought I was on a smoother stretch and eased the speed up, a pothole would appear out of nowhere, leaving me cringing at the bang, wondering when one of the wheels would fall off.

A tad annoyingly, I was back in thick mist by the time I reached the end of the road and lookout over the valley. It was quite strange getting to the lookout, peering out into into thick mist that rose level with the ledge, having no real idea whether the drop below was 50m or 500m. The scene was quite compelling though, so I set up my tripod for a self portrait but when I turned round towards the ledge again, a few holes in the mist had cleared, revealing – in quite a dizzy-ing fashion – parts of an epic valley that was, in fact, pretty much 500m deep. Peering over the edge of the cliff, watching the mist rolling up the cliff face and rising straight up in front of me gave a bizarre and almost vertigo-inducing sensation of falling and I wondered how great it would be to have a paraglider right now. I hung around for a while at the lookout, taking a detour to the falls, in the hope of the mist clearing up so I could see the full grandeur of the valley. That didn’t happen so I headed back a few kms to the camp ground and spent the evening with an anglo-australian couple who had some nice Scottish whiskey, which warmed us up nicely on the cold and damp night.

Next morning I headed on to the Jenolan Caves, down a steep – but at least sealed – road strewn with switchbacks, which would probably be really fun to drive up in a much a better car than mine. The price of the tours was a bit off-putting, but with so many on offer I figured I had to be missing something, and after I had splashed out on the Temple of Baal I was thinking about doing another, as a testament to the quality of the tour. The cave was awe-inspiring, and the presentation of it almost as impressive as the formations within. We entered each cavern in near-total darkness and then usually spent the next few minutes gaping, ooh-ing and aah-ing as spotlights slowly composed a scene of spectacular formations. The final cavern – The Temple of Baal – was presented in complete darkness except for a projection of running water over a 20 square-meter far wall, accompanied by an orchestral rendition of Queen’s Who Wants to Live Forever, all combining to produce a highly goosebump-inducing experience. When the lights did come on, we found ourselves at the bottom of a 42m high cave, with thousands of formations – many so striking that they’d been given names such as the angel wing (a 9m high pure white crystalline shawl) and the church organ – and the whole thing was described in detail by the very knowledgeable Barry, our guide.

I explored a bit of the free walks after the tour, checking out the cave above the cave that the road goes through and almost puckering up the lunacy required to climb over the peak of it – if it weren’t so windy I would have probably done it too. The day was looking so nice that I decided to double back to Kanangra Walls for one final attempt at seeing the valley devoid of any clouds and it paid off with a spectacular late afternoon view of the valley. This time I went along the plateau walk and met a Swiss guy who had a Canon 7d; once I got over the camera-jealousy I gave him my camera and he took some cool photos of me posing and jumping on the perilous looking overhang that is part of the Plateau. In the hope of getting a view of the valley at dawn, I slept at the lookout carpark instead of going back along the road to the campsite, but the view in the morning was pretty cloudy, although the early sun did create a nice atmosphere which was great to wake up to even though it didn’t yield much in the way of decent photos.

Tamarama Bay, by Kieran Campbell

Buckling up on the plane from Darwin, I felt like a bit of snob for being surprised at seeing the cabin crew wearing t-shirts, ‘even Ryanair can kit their staff out in suits’, I thought. On the other hand, I was glad to find nobody sitting beside me so got to lie down on my makeshift 3-seat bed and get some half decent sleep through what was left of the night. The peace came to an abrupt somewhere round about 5 though, as the bunch of 4-6 year-old sisters in front of me uncannily sprung to life as at the first sign of dawn. The landscape went from agricultural plains to rugged mountainous land to a carpet of forest with the occasional house tucked in the corner of a river valley, so I was quite thankful to be woken and not have missed it but I could have done without the running commentary, dominated by the girls thinking (well, shouting) obscure usernames and passwords for their future facebook accounts and then battering the seat tables in what turned out to be an exercise in e-mailing each other. I was through Sydney airport and on an expensive train – $15 single to roughly the same corner of the city – to Bondi Junction, doing my usual staying at the door just in case I missed the two stops although in hindsight, I’d have done pretty well to miss Central Station and even better, Bondi Junction, where the train terminates.

So, I’d made it to what was originally going to be the half-way point of my trip, although with quite a bit of cheating seeing as I’d missed the whole the east coast through Queensland and most of NSW, but all that could wait for now as I’d found there were still spaces left on a 9-day paragliding license course in Victoria and it was time to act on what was, before I’d got distracted by this whole year out in Australia, my main goal for the year. It’s great to be staying with an uncle and auntie who I’ve not seen for 11 years, and my cousin who I’ve never had the chance to meet before. Obviously having my own room in beautifully restored house (and the only one on the street that hasn’t been sub-divided into a semi, or worse, too) in the afluent eastern suburbs, with a view to a bit of Bondi beach was a bonus. Round the corner, I checked out the car adverts in the YHA and found one or two of interest. As is often the case, a few of the numbers rung out or just didn’t connect but eventually someone answered and I sorted out a test-drive for the next morning. The Ford Falcon was exactly what I was looking for, with plenty room in the back to leave a permanent sleeping space and with the peace of mind that it’s reliable and can get serviced almost anywhere. I don’t like automatics but the car drove well so I shook on it and was the proud owner by the end of the week.

In hindsight, I should have done a lot more homework before looking to buy a car, never mind actually handing over money for one, but I’d never owned a car before (not bad for over 4 years driving) and was blissfully unaware of the complications of buying a second hand car in Australia. For a start, each state has it’s own rules and cars have to be registered, generally yearly, in any one state to be driven anywhere in the country. When selling a car, the seller should provide a current safety certificate with the car, as one is usually needed to officially transfer the registration to the new owner. Also some paperwork should be filled in to prove transfer of ownership. There’s other stuff about ownership transfer tax and that sort of thing, but those are the main ones. If the car’s registration isn’t due for renewal any time soon then these things aren’t so much of worry, since as long as you’re displaying a valid sticker on your windscreen the police aren’t going to bother you, although you technically have 14 days to transfer the ownership. Also things, tend to get more confused when trying to transfer the rego of car interstate. Anyway, you might guess that not much of the above happened during my buying experience, so next month things could get interesting when I’m in Victoria, trying to get a safety certificate and registration for a car that I can’t legally prove that I own and that was previously registered in Queensland. Fun times.

Between the Tuesday that I viewed the car and the Saturday that I bought it, I did fit in a bit of sight-seeing around the city. The was a bit pants for photos on my first trip into the CBD so I took a fairly direction-less walk around through the main streets, spending a lot of time just gawking up at the size and beauty of the buildings – every building seems to have a bit of appeal either through architecture of previous eras or through sheer size of the current one – and then found myself having a seat in Hyde Park, finding it slightly odd that although I’ve been told I’ve been to the one in London many times, this is the first time that I’ll remember being in a Hyde Park. There was an American guy, on a much shorter holiday than I, sitting next to me so we both headed through some massive cathedral and on to the botanic gardens as a map promised a decent view of the opera house and bridge from there.

Another sunnier day, I went back and headed for the Harbour Bridge as I now realised that I could climb one of the pylon towers, which are still pretty high, for a lot less than a full-on bridge climb, where I wouldn’t even get to take photos with my camera. Deciding to let my instincts lead me on a fairly convoluted route through the city, round by Darling Harbour and up past the observatory. The view from there is great, looking along level with the road over to North Sydney instead of peering up at it from the water. Eventually I was on top of the south-east pylon tower taking in stunning views of almost all the city and the harbour, watching boats zipping about all over the place and a constant flow of people doing the bridge-climb. I must have been up there over an hour – there’s just so much to see – before the wind started feeling a bit chilly and a remembered I was supposed to be earning my keep by cooking tea that night.

My auntie took me on part of the east Sydney coastal walk through Tamarama and Bronte beaches, both of which look way nicer than Bondi, I’d say, and on Saturday I helped with a garage sale we held to to get rid of some of the mountain of cds and books that were lying in boxes around the house – remnants of when my cousin ran a shop in the city. It was pretty quiet so I took the chance to discover some new music before I got the call that my car was ready to collect. Even on a Sunday, I didn’t like the thought of trying to find my way out of Sydney, especially I was going to try to avoid toll roads, so before 7am – pretty much a week to the hour since I’d arrived – I was leaving Sydney in my first car, on my first road-trip, getting my first taste of true freedom in Australia..

Departing, by Kieran Campbell

On approach to Darwin I was surprised at myself for almost being excited at seeing high-rise buildings – they weren’t even that big – but this was the first time I think I’d seen such a spectacle and sure sign of a place of mentionable social prospects since I’d left Perth, 3 months ago. Geraldton, although quite large, was purely like that for industrial reasons and Broome was such a feeble hub of people that it took me at least 2 days to find the town centre, even though I was living almost across the road from it. The fact that that morning I’d woken up in my room in the caravan park in Mataranka: population 200 – only now do I realise that my mango-picking crew boosted the head-count by about 15% (and probably the month-end earnings of the pub by 300%) – probably only made me appreciate more the social oasis that I was about to enter and, although I normally prefer country to city, this was exactly where I wanted to be. That thought diminished as soon as stepped foot off the bus and into the tangibly humid air, and before I could even mutter, fuck me that’s hot, I was sticking to my clothes, or really, they were sticking to me.

And so I headed off down, or up, Mitchell Street to find the YHA that I’d booked into a few hours earlier on the bus – one reason I’m loving having bought a cheap-ish pre-pay Telstra mobile: $10 of internet lets me download the Gmail, Google Maps and Opera Mini apps with enough to spare to let me browse, email and navigate for the rest of the month, with almost no need to ever go near a $4-6/hour internet cafe; the other reason being that almost everywhere I’ve been along the west coast, I’ve met some poor soul who opted for Optus or Vodafone and had no signal whatsoever – but what time I saved by booking it when I had nothing better to do I more than lost by trying to find it, on a dead straight street may I add. See, the problem with Australian proprietors, is that most of them seem almost embarrassed to display the number of their property anywhere, making it ludicrously hard to find places because even when you do find a place crazy enough to display the one thing that absolutely identifies it on the street, that building happens to be roughly mid-way along so you still have no idea in what direction the numbers go. I walked past Shenanigans three times before I felt less of a noob than I did confident that the direction I was walking in was going to lead to the place where the bed I’d paid for awaited me.

Refreshed from a shower and a change of clothes, but having failed to spark up any banter in the hostel, I headed on a fairly aimless walk along the esplanade, mainly as, having seen it from the bus, it was the only place I knew the location of and partly because I hadn’t seen the sea for almost 7 weeks. Looking out over the flat waters of the bay towards what I could have been an island for all I knew, but was more likely Mandorah, I couldn’t help but think back to last summer when I was in Leverburgh, Harris watching the sun go down over a calm sea on a mildly warm and probably to some degree humid evening. Even though there were similarities between the two scenes, I was still surprised to find an evening spent in a tropical city where there is no such thing as frost – it would be funny to see though, if a freak frost were to occur amongst all that humidity, would the air just turn to block of ice and would people have to pick-axe their way out of their doors in the morning, but anyway – itched my memory just the right way to conjure up scenes from Scottish Highlands. Crossing over Mitchell Street I came across a Christmas show setup at the bottom end of the Smith? Street Mall and, although I was dismayed that such an event could take place before December had started, I hung around for a while because the atmosphere was really nice, especially because of the beautiful arrangement of lights and (presumably) Asian-style lanterns hanging from the trees who’s limbs arched right across the seating area, creating a ceiling of twinkling lights on a backdrop of sunset-coloured storm-clouds.

After a while I found myself in a small cafe, through a complete lack of desire to cook, which suited me perfectly, serving Indian food and being completely empty. As I ate the delicious beef madras, cautiously but unnecessarily offset with a helping of butter chicken, the place livened up a bit with an American student and a very chatty Melbourne guy who seemed to have the ability to spark up a conversation with rock if he felt so inclined and so we all ended up there till close before heading off to somewhere that specialised in strong beverages and not-so-strong cuisine and so a good evening was had, rather unexpectedly, leading to a more than expected not-so-memorable walk home. That said, I do vaguely remember meeting someone I’d only had the briefest of encounters with back in Coral Bay, although she clearly didn’t remember me, but after remembering her name through some fluke of memory I joined her group for a few more drinks. All I really remember after that is talking, presumably quite enthusiastically, to an American guy, who after a few minutes rather abruptly kill the conversation with something to the effect of, you’ve asked me like 3 questions in a row and I’ve asked you nothing. Either, possibly by that stage there was not a lot of compelling conversation to be had with me or, more likely, he was a complete cock and shouldn’t have been out if he didn’t feel like being even passively social.

An eventful first few hours in the city subsided, mainly through a complete lack of motivation to do anything brought on by the humidity, to a fairly quiet week filled mostly with car-hunting, dips in the pool and cooking 2-minute noodles. Darwin revived the pattern of bumping into lots of people who I’d met at some point on my travels up the coast: Joseph, the quirky Estonian who I’m almost certainly went mildly insane waiting for a job in Kununurra, turned out to be in the same room as me, and I met one of Swedish girls who’d been on that awful bus to Broome. It was great to meet up with Kevin, Antoine and Vincent – who had to leave Mataranka early because they got severe mango rash – and when we drove into Litchfield National Park for a day, I met awesome-Thai-green-curry-Yvonne from Broome.

Having skipped the apparently awesome Kakadu National Park on the advice of a number of people that it was loosing its appeal at this time of year, especially with some attractions closed for the wet season, the only area of notable natural beauty I explored was Litchfield National Park. Although featuring less prominently than Kakadu in all tourist guides, most people said they liked it better, and I found the plunge pools amazing, although the termite mounds and tablelands were pretty good too. One day, on the advice of David, my cool Israeli roommate, Vincent and I took the ferry to Mandorah, a little piece of highly accessible, and so more surprisingly peaceful, peninsula directly across the bay from Darwin. I’d meant to sort out bicycle hire before the day, but as usual was too lazy, so we found there wasn’t a great deal to do but while away a few hours at the pub at the other end of the beach from the pier, enjoying the tropical island feel but with the postcard view across the water to Darwin.

By that point I’d more or less exhausted my motivation to see much of Darwin so, as we sat under a tree on a typically warm and sunny afternoon, looking back across the sea to Darwin, I booked my flight to Sydney – once again I’d like to pay testament to Telstra, my phone and my geeky-ness for letting me do something that is generally only possible in overly-ambitious tv adverts – and a few days later I was away, happily bidding farewell to a place that I’d have liked to have gotten to know better, and felt a bit guilty for not making more of an effort with. Maybe another time.

100,000 Mangoes Later, by Kieran Campbell

Disembarking into the caravan park that was going to be my home for possibly the next six weeks, I was introduced to Steve, the AREA supervisor for our farm, and shown the room that I was to share with a Irish couple, Aidan and Pamela. Seeing as tomorrow was going to be our first day picking and all we knew about the job was that we had to be ready for 5.30am and would finish picking when we’d filled the lorries, whenever that may be, so we hit the sack pretty early.

Getting up at 5 was never going to be easy but I think the excitement of starting something new, even it that something was probably going to be pretty underwhelming as far as experiences go, always makes me want to get up early, so I was skulking around in the dark at 4:50, trying not to sabotage the last ten minutes of my room mates’ sleep. Then there was the decision of which of the grotesquely over-sized charity shop shirts to wear: I settled on the one that was probably equivalent to a medium and so looked the least absurd and, almost, stylish to boot, along with my trousers that were about 2 inches to big in every dimension, and girls’ hat. Mornings quickly turned into my favourite time of the day: stepping out into the relatively cool, faintly-lit pre-dawn air; the ten minutes of time on the bus with nothing to do but watch – almost without fail – the clouds set ablaze by the yet-to-rise sun; and the 10 minutes out in the field watching the fiery sky give way to the rising sun, counting down the minutes till 6am, when we started picking.

As far as first days on a job go, the first day at the Oolloo Farm, Mataranka, wasn’t great. After a quick demonstration of how to pick mangoes we were set loose to the do the only productive thing were ever going to do in the next 6 weeks, but it was slow going at the start. Although we’d be made believe that picking was completely scientific and that there is a set minimum size of mango to be picked, once we were out picking them ourselves with no reference and very little feedback it very quickly turned into a subjective exercise. As with any repetitive job like this, we were slow, really slow in fact, for the first day but things soon picked up. To put it in perspective, on day 1 we had to fill 2 road train trailers; each trailer holds about 65 bins; each bin holds maybe 700 mangoes. It took 6 teams of 5 people (with mostly only 4 of those actually picking) 11 hours to finish that. In a few days, the same 6 teams were filling 3 trailers in 8 hours. So, understandably after my first 11 hour shift, through 40 C heat and perpetually clear skies, I resorted to all that I could be bothered cooking, 2 minute noodles, and pretty much headed straight to bed.

Throughout what turned out to be the 4 and a half weeks it took us to ravage the plantation of all marketable mangoes, we probably averaged out at about 7-8 hour days. Because we were paid by the hour, and not by the bin, we were always torn between picking quickly so as to not get an arse-kicking from the bosses and get home a bit quicker, and coordinating a go-slow between all the teams so as to get paid more for picking the same amount of mangoes. To this end, if we’d been getting paid per bin we’d have probably finished not long after 11 most days.

Although mornings were the highlight of the day, being able to jump into a what seemed like quite a liberally-sized swimming pool for a caravan park after each shift was great, especially since I’d usually get it to myself for 10 minutes before anyone half as eager as me joined. On the other hand, something that I won’t miss for its monotonous, repetitive and generally un-compelling content are the local television stations. I once foolishly – and I won’t do it again in a hurry for any Australian broadcast, local or otherwise – perked up a mild interest in a particularly ominous looking advert for a storm-rescue documentary, which gave the distinct impression that some poor soul was in a fairly serious kerfuffle, stuck down a storm drain as a clearly visible storm approached. Alas, the camera approached drain, past numerous emergency service personnel and looked down the drain to find nothing but a feeble kitten mewing. It wasn’t even trapped, just completely ignorant. That was it, I immediately went outside and hunted down one of the grazing wallabies with my bare hands, just to feel human again.

And so the month passed without a great deal of excitement, well actually there were a few funny moments generally fuelled by alcohol and race-mis-relations. In fact, after getting told out of the blue – as was generally the way with any communication from our employers, who seemed to think that we just sat around picking our noses when we weren’t working and therefore didn’t need to be told till the morning whether we were going to be working or not that day – that we had a holiday the following day, almost everyone headed straight to the bottle shop and started an afternoon-come-evening of unrelenting drinking that split open every little social crack that had formed in the last few weeks of being stuck together in dump on the highway. I can’t remember what caused me not to join in that night, but it gave me an unparalleled view of the amusing sight of almost everyone trying to leather everyone else. A French guy gave an Indian guy a pretty decent run around (he had his reasons), leading to a Nepalese guy thinking this was a great idea and trying the same, but on all Indians, for no reason other than that the Nepalese don’t have a lot of neighbourly compassion going on towards the Indians; an Irish guy lobbed a beer can off my English supervisor’s head; and just when I’d gone to bed and thought it was all over, the gay guys in my room sparked up a hissy fit which escalated from one of them misguidedly resting his foot on the edge of the other’s bed to them both romping around on the top bunk with the resulting stability similar to an elephant on Penny Farthing. In fact, rather surprisingly, the only person, apart from myself, to not get in some sort of raucous was the pro-IRA-Muslim-Irish-Egyptian and that was probably minor miracle, seeing as after about half a can of beer his only communication with the anyone involves proclaiming that ‘it [Ireland] is my fucking island!’.

Although it was essentially a month work and not much else, there are so many things I haven’t got round to writing about, many of the good, like: having peacocks and wallabies running around our back-yard, meeting the French guys I’d first seen in Kununurra, going to the thermal pools and swimming along the stream of the bitter springs, getting drive for the first time in Australia and almost hitting my first ‘roo while I was at it, eating warm mangoes straight off the trees and getting paid for it, pelting the other teams with our dodgy mangoes, spending most of my working hours dreaming of buying a car and learning to paraglide, having the privilege of seeing the making, and tasting, of authentic Indian and Nepalese cuisine, meeting and getting to know so many foreign people, shooting a cover for the single that a French and Nepalese guy wrote about mango picking, and finally getting the hell out of the place when it was all over.

Obviously there were a few bad points, almost entirely related to the mango picking: getting mango burns in the first few days (but they cleared up), getting mango rash in the last week after I thought I was immune (but I survived till the end), having an arse of a recruitment manager who tried to tell me I couldn’t find my own way to work because that would mean less money coming in for his bus (thanks in particular to Aidan for telling him where to stick his greed), not knowing when each day would end, not knowing when the work was going to end, drinking at least 4 litres of water a day and sweating it all out, walking around most of the day with wet feet from the sprinklers (I was almost a martyr for the cause, getting bollocked a few times for waging war on the irrigation system), literally burning our feet through our soles because the ground was so hot, waiting in the searing heat at the end of the day for the bus when all we wanted to do was get home, and generally finding some sort of discrepancy on our payslips.

But none of that matters now: it’s all over, I’ve made it to the other side, and now have the money to hopefully chase that dream of getting a car and learning to paraglide, and I’ve racked up almost 1/3 of the working time I need to do to be eligible to apply for a second year’s visa in Australia.

Coco’s Didge, by Kieran Campbell

Spending over two weeks in Kununurra meant it was a bit more of a pain to be back in a bus trying to kip down for the night, but it was good to be on the move again after what seemed like a wasted last week spent stranded in the Kimberley. Arriving in Katherine, I got the same feeling that quite a few other people I’ve subsequently met also got when passing through the town: there’s not a lot going on here and I’d rather move on as soon as I can. But with a renewed motivation to find a job I knew I had to at least have a look around the town and find some recruitment agencies before jumping on the first bus that would have me.

Going on the guidance of my Lonely Planet, I headed for Coco’s Didge Backpackers as it should have been the cheapest place in town, so I was a bit surprised to find Coco asking $26 for a night’s stay at what seemed like the most basic accommodation I’d yet come accross. Anyway, I was too hot and bothered to walk the two blocks to check out the other backpackers so I bit the bullet. It turns out that all the accommodation is part of Coco’s house, which makes for quite a different feel to the place over a normal backpackers. The kitchen, outdoor shower and lack of pool definitely make it feel more basic than a typical backpackers but it had a certain chilled out atmosphere that just worked. After scoping out where the recruitment agencies were, I didn’t mind that I couldn’t go for a swim as I sat out under a tree, watching thousands of flying foxes heading off to feed under an intensely red sky, while frogs hopped about the grass and a guy played one of the many improvised didgeridoos made from pieces of plastic pipes.

Morning gave me a chance to do a very quick bit of sightseeing, which basically covered the road and old rail bridges over the Katherine river. On the rail bridge I met two guys who explained that they were the traditional owners of the land around river here as well as an area to the north-west. The guy who laid claim to the local land did have a pretty strong smell of booze on him so I didn’t get a lot more insight into his people, but he was pretty keen on me taking a photo of him and his mate on the bridge, overlooking their land, so I obliged with that. By then the Australia Regional Employment Agency office was open so I headed there hoping, with not a lot of optimism after my fortnight in Kununurra, to get some work that count towards my eligibility for a second year working holiday visa in Australia. Shreyas, the recruitment manager, seemed almost hesistant to tell me that there was one position left and explained that it was a mango picking job 100km from here, it would be long days and hot work and there was always the risk of mango rash which can be quite bad… I think by that point I didn’t really care and just wanted the work so an hour later I was signed up and heading round all the charity shops desperately trying to find some long-sleeved shirts, trousers and a hat.

Back at Coco’s, I was talking to the man himself and got round to my IT degree, to which he said I could be of use to him, so it turned out he was actually planning a bit of renovation and extension to his place and had some plans drawn up on his computer. He wanted some changes made to the car parking layout but didn’t have a clue how to use the software so I gladly earned almost two night’s worth accomodation for sprucing up his plans. Hopefully they’ve passed the scrutiny of the council and he gets to go ahead with his work. Incidentally, the name of the backpacker comes out of Coco having a small shop which sells a lot of didgeridoos and a bunch of indigenous artwork and it’s definitely worth having a look in by for this even if the level of accommodation isn’t up your street. Also, if you’re a cyclist, it’s worth stopping by as Coco offers good discounted accommodation – although it might only be for camping spots outside, i can’t remember exactly.

By the middle of the afternoon I was back at the AREA office with my stuff and the new set of fairly oversized clothes and I’d scraped together from the charity shops and was feeling a lot better about the month ahead. A quick check of the staff list confirmed the name of the place I was going to – Mataranka – and a quick of my phone confirmed where it actually was. After the fairly slow pace of life in the last week it was relatively exciting to have gone from being a jobless backpacker hopping on and off a pre-definied bus route to having a job in a place I’d never heard of, that wasn’t part of my original route, with some a guy I’d just met that day, and for how long? As is the way with a lot of harvest work, nobody really knows the timescale until it’s over. Not that it mattered anyway – I’d done what I set out to do, and I was getting away from Katherine too.