Farmer Billy-Joe-Bob-Mike

So you probably all think that with a two month gap I must've gotten into some major mischief if I couldn't be bothered to update..... and you are correct.

Where to begin?

I left Melbourne at the very beginning of April to try my green thumb at fruit picking in a lil' ol town in the far north western corner of Victoria called Mildura. In tow I had another canadian bloke named Klay and an english lass named Lisa. All of us were dying and needed money, and the idea of being a drug trafficer didn't seem very likely. So we would seek our fortunes in the 'bush' pulling out veggies and fruit for a living.

The family that owned and set up work for us in Mildura were fucking crazy. I have no other way of explaining them. I think the 70's and 80's drug fad blew their brains away long ago. So what did we get stuck picking? Asperagus..... what the flipping hell? The so called money didn't seem to happen either. We were getting paid $8 for a bin of asperagus which pretty much came to us making about $40 a day. Screw that! We raised a stink after a week and begged to switch farms to hopfully increase our pocket money. We were able to do grapes for one day only to be switched off that and onto Green beans.... if you guessed that there was no money in green beans either then give yourself a gold star. We were earning a whopping $1 a kilo for the beans so I wasn't getting anything more then $50 for my 8 hours of labour. At this point I was about to give up when an ad for a garlic packing factory caught my eye in one of the job advertisments. I jumped on the horn and found that they wouldn't be ready for another week. Could I survive one more week in green bean land? Hahahaha (let me catch my breath from laughing so hard). Okay, that's better. Nope, I couldn't stand to stay at that hostel anymore with the crazy lady running the show and stealing all our money. I needed something to do for a week that wouldn't cost me money. I prayed to god for an answer and god sent me a young swedish girl named Ulrika. She was working the same farms as me and had also had enough. She told me about a grape farm where we could work for food and accomodation for a week but we would earn no money. Being a male, I must've just been staring at her beauty and only heard the part where she said I could go with her. I followed my hormones on a wild adventure.

Next stop, Ballarat. Ulrika and I ended up in ballarat at 4am and got ourselves to the family farm that we would be living with for a week. At this point I found out there was no money to be earned and I soon found out how big of an idiot I was, but I figured "all is not lost, I still have a cute girl by my side. It can't be too bad." The first few days were easy. I must've clocked an average of 2 hours of work a day for a place to sleep and food on the table. I spent any and all free time trying to impress Ulrika with my skills (if any) in cooking, social events and just pretty much my overall idiocy which was apparently entertaining to her. Soon afterwards another backpacker showed up to help on the farm. a 40 year old dutch woman who was annoying as hell. I won't go into detail, but I must say I haven't met anyone more annoying then this woman. Period. Anyhoo, we got to harvest some wine grapes with the family for a day and worked at a farmers market selling their wine that they make from those grapes. Plus lots of free wine for us. Ching ching! We then got to experience the joys of potato picking with the family pot head. I suppose it wasn't all bad, he did offer his spliff to the rest of us then took us out to the pub for some free drinks. We also got to endure the splendid task of chestnut picking. The pot head said he'd pick us up from the chestnut paddock in an hour..... 3 hours later we figured he wasn't coming and we gave up and walked back to the farm house. We found out later that the sheep live in the chestnut paddock as well and ate our 4 bins of nuts we had picked. ooops. Ulrika got to have her dream of driving an 'aussie car' on the farm, which to her is just a beat up old truck (it was missing the driver side door) with me hanging off the side yelling "YEEEEEHAAAA". Then our most adventurous journey upto that point had to take place, the walk from the farm to the nearest town ,daylesford, so we could get cellphone reception to check our messages. It started with us hitching about 5km up the road then a 2 hour walk before we gave up. We then walked back only to find that the family said we had just hiked about 18km. Whooo. We were bound and determined to get our cellphone reception so I took drastic measures. The next day we decided that the big hill that was on the neighbours farm should be tall enough for us to use our phones. The first idea brought up by the old dutch woman is for us to climb the fence. I was voted as going first, big mistake. I found that it was an electric cattle fence and got a nice shock and jump start to my heart. For about 3 seconds I was devoid of no thoughts or senses. 5 seconds after that we all thought it was funny. I then thought of doing the reasonable thing to do, beat on the neighbours door and just ask to climb the hill. That approach was more fruitful and less 'shocking'. In the end we got our cellphone reception only to find that i'm the only popular one of the three of us.

Our week finally ended and Ulrika and I had to waste 8 hours in Ballarat before our bus upto Mildura (yup, back there again) was to depart. I got comfy and slept spread across a bench with my head in her lap while she read her book.

Back in Mildura finally. We got picked up and sped to our new home in the bush living in portable units right next to the factory. We had two days of hourly wage work and then got busted down to cutting garlic for 2 cents a piece. Sure that sounds bad, but I actually made $150 in one day doing it. Then half the Korean empire moved into the portables and too much money was being made by them so the company gave us a paycut..... 35 cents a kilo..... suck my white ass! I was back to making $70-$80 a day. And so it's been for the last 4 weeks. Things are okay though. We get to goto the pub once a week with our wages and party hard, and I have a strange relationship with a swedish girl.

So, looking over my last update on how I figured I would meet a girl that would hit me big in the month of April... I was correct! It's hard to define my relationship with Ulrika though. Sometimes we're the tightest couple who share the bottom bunk of a bunkbed, and other days we're no more then just good friends. For the moment she likes to pawn us off as a couple and I let it slide for I know that we'll seperate in another 2 weeks at the most. I'm actually quite amazed that I have met a girl who is just as sarcastic and completly non-serious as I am. Even though I have mentally and emotionally prepared myself for the seperation, I know i'll be hearbroken either way when it comes to an end.

And there you have it. I believe some smaller things happened inbetween as well but I need to save some stories for when I get home..... and for those that keep asking, I'll be home in June. I'm about 95% positive on that now.