"You say tomato, I say tomatoe..."
Trip Start
Oct 04, 2004
1
83
102
Trip End
Ongoing
Bowen,
Australia
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Maybe a little presumptuous of us, we thought we would find a job somewhere up the coast with no problem, but this wasn't to be the case! After a few frantic phone calls to many agriculture agencies, we discovered a small town called Bowen in North Queensland was the only place on the East coast with work.
With a destination in mind our next problem was somewhere to stay. It looked like every other backpacker in search of work had the same idea, as after even more frantic phone calls we realised all the backpacker hostels were full. Our problem was we had just enough money to fly there and cover rent for about a week, but we had no where to stay. Throwing caution to the wind we booked the flight neverless and at 8pm we arrived in the tropical paradise town of Bowen. Realising the only place available to sleep was a local caravan park we checked into an outrageously expensive deluxe cabin.
We spent the next 3 days phoning and pestering all the hostels before finally finding out about a local pub with 'basic' rooms above. Built in 1863, the architects of the Grand View Hotel didn't really think about sound proofing, building all the rooms in wood, meaning every night was spent trying to sleep with fingers in your ears, trying to block out the music from below! I guess there weren't many jukebox's in the 1800's, either way the chemists did a roaring trade in ear plugs!
But it was cheap accommodation and supplied a free bus to work every morning so it was good enough for us! The only drawback (as well as the noise) is the place is full of Japanese and Koreans, who although you would think would be clean and tidy, were the messiest race I've ever met.
01. Queens Beach in Bowen
The state of the kitchen after 50 of them had cooked their rice is unbearable, which led to us eating out most nights!But we were here for the work, so the next day we were up at 5 and on the bus ready for day 1 of 60, needed to complete our visa. Back in Kununurra, we were told corn detassling was the easiest and least painful fruit picking work available. At the time we thought it couldn't be true, until we started picking tomatoes!
I can honestly say that picking tomatoes has got to go down as my worst job ever. You spend literally 10-12 hours a day bending over picking the fruit into buckets, with your only restbite being when someone on your team fills their bucket, leading to them all being emptied onto the waiting truck. How people do this job full time is beyond me! At least we have the daily tomato fight between teams to cheer us up!
The annoying thing is that you never know how much you are going to earn each day. Although some days we might make $150 (£60) (That's a good day by the way) we would usually only be lucky to take home $50-60 (£20-25)!
Because of this, we started to take rather a few days off, tending to work 2 days on 1 day off! Well Bowen is famous for its beaches, with 6 to choose from it was always hard to decide which one to go to! Being so far north, we were also fortunate enough to be able to snorkel on parts of the Great Barrier Reef, so you could see why we were always away from the fields. Well there was that and of course the fact I found a dead Taipan snake (deadliest in the world) in my row one day, and then actually stepped on a live brown snake (2nd most deadliest) another! But more about that next time!
