Inland

In the past three days Alex and I went away from Brisbane, inland, for a bit of quiet countryside and nature. We visited Lamington National Park at Binna Burra (mountainous area, nice walk with caves and lots of big strangler fig trees). The photo shows the view from Bellbird Lookout.

Yesterday we drove by Lake Wivenhoe (a big artificial water reservoir west of Brisbane, north of Ipswitch). It has a surface area of more than 100 km².

Today we were at Crows Nest National Park. We were lucky enough to spot a Rock-wallaby! This is a kind of very small (50-60 cm) kangaroo that lives in rocky areas. They are shy, but like to watch humans from a safe distance. This one was just 6 metres away and observed us with interest, keeping very still.

Here is a close-up photo of the Rock-wallaby. It reminds me of a character in the Moomins series (Sniff, the leftmost one here).

Oh, and we cooked one of the sweet potatoes and it was *purple*. Very unusual colour for a soup. I couldn't take a photo, but if you want an idea how a cooked purple sweet potatoe looks, look here.

Alex is here

My mate Alex from Germany has arrived. I said goodbye to my wwoofing hosts, picked him up from Brisbane Airport and we spent the first day in Brisbane (going in by train, walking in the CBD, Botanic Garden and Southside, and out again by train).

Today we visited Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. It's a small zoo and really nice, they have not only hundreds of koalas there but basically all the typical animals of Australia -- kangaroos, wombats, etc. Every half an hour was another show -- for example a shepherd dog demonstration (how the dog is trained to muster the sheep to wherever they shall go) and a bird of prey (Greifvogel) show. You can pet (streicheln) the kangaroos. And for $16 you could get a photo taken with a koala on your arm (which Alex did). In this picture you see me shearing a sheep!

In the afternoon we visited friends I made two weeks ago, a Taiwanese fruit & vegetable farmers family. They welcomed us chinese style with tea and snacks, then showed us around the farm and gave us so many fruits and vegetables as presents that we hardly could take them. Now we have a car full of mushrooms, sweet potatoes (Suesskartoffeln), salad, herbs, pawpaw (Papaya), a pumpkin, a yam (Yamswurzel), and some interesting fruit we don't even know the name of!

Bribie Island

Yesterday Matt and I had a day off work, and I took him to Bribie Island. This "island" is just a part of the coast enclosed by a narrow waterstream, and a bridge takes you onto it. It is close enough (1 hour drive) from Brisbane to be a popular place to go to if the citizens want to go to a bit of nature. To the left and right of the road, the most attractive locations have been sold as waterfront properties long ago. But there are also some protected areas along the beach and foreshore. Many birds and other wildlife live there. It was too cold to go into the water, but we did a walk taking photos of birds and the shore.

There is a funny type of U-shaped jellyfish, crystal clear, that is washed ashore here. No head, no visible organs, no way of locomotion, no signs of life. A jelly bean the size of a Weisswurst.

At the same time, elsewhere..

Just a quick update of what some of my friends are doing at the moment:

Cori has left Adelaide and has flown to Perth to meet her sister who has come in from Berlin. They want to travel in the next 3 weeks with a hired "Wicked Camper" van from Perth via Broome to Darwin. And then they will both go back to Germany.

Fabian, the brother of my sister's friend Pizza, has arrived in Sydney. He will study there for one semester. He has also started a blog. Perhaps I can meet him later this year.

Alex, my friend from Augsburg, is packing his bags at the moment. He will fly off tonight (from Frankfurt) and arrive in Brisbane on Monday morning where I'l pick him up from the airport. We will then travel together for 3 weeks.

Moni, my sister, and Flori, her boyfriend, are also in their preparations for coming here to meet me in Brisbane. They will arrive in 10 days, and then travel north with Alex and me (so we will then be 4 people in 2 campervans).

Toiling in the mud

Perhaps some of you may remember the scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail where the peasants of England are working on their fields. The most miserable, wretched, pitiable creatures, covered all over in dirt, toiling in the mud. It is not that bad here! But we are toiling in the mud too. With shovels, hoes, wheelbarrows and buckets.

I'm at my third and last wwoofing placement this week, which is an organic vegetable farm 30 km north of Brisbane. They had very heavy rainfalls here a month ago, and we are still working on the aftermath of the floods. The soil here is clay. It is rock-hard when dry, but turns into horrible, heavy mud when wet. We need to get that mud out so that the furrows between the vegetable beds drain off the irrigation water better. The work here is the hardest I've done in a long time.

On the positive side, the accommodation is very good. I have my own room in a nice and newly built house. They can accommodate up to four wwoofers here. At the moment we are two, Matt from France and myself. We work with Anthony, who is employed full-time at the farm, a young guy whose hobby is to talk the ears off of anyone who is polite enough not to tell him to please shut up at least for 5 minutes. The food is good and we wwoofers can do some cooking too. On Tuesday Matt made pizza and yesterday I cooked a German dinner for all of us.

The owners are Len and Renee, who have a little daughter (18 months) named Stella. She is of course the star of the family (and she can say my name: "Martin!"). Her Italian name has a reason: Len's father is an Italian who migrated here after the war. He had a big poultry farm here on this land before he "retired". Now he's 80-something and still works on the field every day. An admirable man. And Len is short for Leonardo. He was in marketing before, but it had always been his dream to become a farmer, so 3 years ago he gave up his old life and started up this organic farm here. These vegies are their first crops.

Sally from Rainbow Love Farm (see 2 postings below) has updated her blog today, with some more photos of me. "We have just had a wonderful week with our second wwoofer."

P.S.

I've got to show you the picture of the very first Koala I saw in the wild! That was in Noosa.










And yesterday I saw another Koala, right here on the organic farm where I do my third and last wwoofing week. More about that later.

Rainbow Love Farm

I'm at my next wwoofing place, near Kenilworth in the hills of the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Rainbow Love Farm is not a farm in the sense of a business. It is a private home of a young family (around my own age) with four children and a dog. They grow vegetables and fruit for their own needs. They have a blog and also a wwoofing blog. They just started wwoofing this year and I'm the second wwoofer they host.

Scott and Sally are making me feel very much at home here. I like the place. They have a very relaxed "live and let live" attitude that shows in everything. The property is a big playground for the children, a creative place that reminds me of the books of Janosch or the Villa Kunterbunt. Some buddhist and hinduist artefacts in the home and garden add a spiritual flair. Sally's cooking is vegetarian in the yummy Asian style that I love. They unfortunately have no accommodation for me in their small house, but I can sleep in my van and have a power lead connected so I can turn on the heater at night. This is really necessary because last night temperatures dropped down to frost: -1 degrees! Brrr!

The children here (aged 14, 10, 5 and 1), don't attend any school. They are homeschooled, but not in the usual sense of that word. Their education follows the philosophy of unschooling, which means there is no curriculum of any sort. Learning is playful and with zero pressure or expectations as to what is learned or when. Rules are kept to a necessary minimum and liberties to a maximum. We light campfires at night, play music (I'm practising the didgeridoo), and make our own games and toys.

I help with various chores around the house and garden. In the picture above you see me picking mandarines, they are fantastic: huge and sweet! In the past days Scott and I built a compost heap, renovated the bathroom, tiled the walkway, did some fence work, and various other jobs. Thus while I live here I can contribute my little share to building this place. It feels good.

A country music concert

My time at the dairy farm is over, but I want to continue wwoofing a bit more at another place. After my "close encounter of the cow kind", Saturday 11th gave me the opportunity to experience the "cowboy side" of Australia: Neil Duddy, a Queensland Country music singer, gave a concert at the caravan park here. For only $20 you got to enjoy the music, a dinner, and a free stay for the night at the park, so it was a great offer and the park was full -- 140 people, mostly elderly but still cool, open-hearted and fun-loving as Australians are, sitting around several fireplaces and tables.

Neil had hooked himself up with a wireless microphone and guitar, so he could move about the crowd freely while he was singing and playing, and we all had a very enjoyable evening. Later that night, Neil let me play his guitar, and I entertained the audience a bit with my music too, at the fireplace, and they all applauded and encouraged me to play another song and one more! :)

Wwoofing

The word wwoofing comes from the abbreviation WWOOF, which stands for "willing workers on organic farms". So now I have transformed from a tourist into a "wwoofer" and am at my first host for one week, which is a dairy farm near the town of Gympie in Queensland.

I live and eat with the farmer's family: Glenn and Therese, and their four children Finn (9), Liam (7), Ariel (4) and Rhian (2). On their farm they produce organic milk (Biomilch). They don't make cheese or other milk products here, but someone else does and that cheese is quite good too. They have had wwoofers on this farm for years, so everyone including the kids is used to having such a guest like me around. Next week, when I'm gone, they will have a couple from Belgium.

The family is very friendly and gives me enough work to have a fulfilling day everyday, and it's never boring because there is lots of different work. I can help not only in the daily milking, but also with e.g. the bottling, or doing various jobs around the house and garden. I've been cutting firewood with a chainsaw for example, scraping the sticky remains of an old carpet from the floor, and mowing the very high grass all around. In between there's always something to clean up in the kitchen.

If you want to know how the milking is done here: the 65 cows are not in a stable but always out on the pasture (Weide), so we have to drove (treiben) them in to the dairy (Melkerei) and out again twice a day. Dasher, the farm dog, helps us with this. He has fun chasing the cows and dashes around like his name suggests! The milking itself is done in a milking pit (Melkgrube), so the cow's odders are at a more convenient height. The cows are milked in groups of eight at a time, while they get some milled barley. We don't milk by hand but with a milking machine that works on vacuum. The whole dairy is set up so that one person can operate it and do the complete milking by himself, but of course it's easier and faster if there are two.

And the usual call to get the cows moving is: "Walk up ladiiiiies!"

Back in Australia

I'm back to Queensland. My car was still there waiting for me where I'd parked it in a safe neighbourhood, and I was relieved. On Monday, Cori flew back to Adelaide, to her boyfriend, and I started to look for work in the Brisbane and Sunshine Coast area.

That was a frustating task and I had nearly given it up, but just now it looks as if I found something: it's not work for money but for board and lodging on a farm. This kind of thing is popular among young travellers in Australia and it's called wwoofing.

So from Saturday I will have a one-week wwoofing placement in a dairy farm, in a town called Gympie! I'm already in this area now, so I'll hang around here until then. At the moment the weather is good here, sunny and warm. The photos I just added were taken in Tin Can Bay and at the Carlo Sandblow in Rainbow Beach.

That sandblow is a place at the coast where the wind has blown great masses of sand from the beach inland, for hundreds or thousands of years, so that all the vegetation was buried and the area became one giant sandbox, like a mini-desert.