'To pick one apple you must use two hands.' Frances O'connell 1988 - 2010

I’m writing this on a rainy Wednesday afternoon from a little town called Stanthorpe two to three hours south west of Brisbane. I’ve been here for just over three weeks now, although it feels like about three years! I’ve been wanting to blog about Stanthorpe since I arrived as it has been such a bizarre experience, but we have been working so hard, that every night when we get home from work I barely have the energy to shower and eat never mind anything else. Days off have been fairly non-existent too, we just did thirteen days straight without any days off; it nearly killed us. We are only off this afternoon as it has been pouring with rain and apples bruise more easily when they are wet so we can’t pick, thankfully!

So I met up with Frances in Sydney and the day after Mardi Gras we were chatting on the phone about where we were going to go or what we were going to do, and being the organised people that we are we booked a flight up to the Gold Coast for the following afternoon, that was about as far as our planning went! When we arrived at the Gold Coast, having successfully managed to find a bus to the tourist mecca of Surfers Paradise, despite my having written down the bus numbers in the wrong order; we set about finding a place to rest our heads that night. We were actually really lucky in finding an extremely nice hostel that was a bit further off of the beaten track and a bit smaller than most, but that actually gave it a really nice alternative vibe.

We were at the Gold Coast for four days and I had intended on taking Frances to one of the four theme parks, to see the fantastic beach at Surfers and do lots of fun touristy things; but unfortunately the weather forecast wasn’t in on my plan and didn’t co-operate and it rained pretty much constantly from the moment we arrived. The four days pretty much passed us by in a haze of wine, a bit more wine, and some more wine interspersed with occasional dancing, eating, badly played pool and making lots of new friends.

Given that I was extremely hesitant about my first hostel experience due mostly to the films Hostel part one and two, I was pleasantly surprised. We met some fantastic people, had lots of fun and I generally didn’t have one bad thing to say about the experience. Except that maybe my bed could have been a little comfier, but for $25 a night (about £14) you can’t complain!

On the day we were suffering from the least severe of our collection of hangovers we started making some enquiries about fruit picking; having brought lots of wine, we thought that it would probably be a good idea to replenish our bank accounts. We spent several hours making phone calls and sending emails with no joy; Frances did seem to think that my preference for phoning the places with the heated pools was hindering our success somewhat. But even after I was forced in to being less fussy, everywhere was either already fully staffed, had had their season delayed due to the excessive rain or were only offering Banana picking, and Frances has this theory about spiders in Banana’s and was keen to avoid anything to do with Banana’s (this theory even extends to Banana’s in supermarkets…odd girl she is.)

We got the train back up to Brisbane the following weekend where some of my extra lovely super generous friends were kind enough to put Frances and I up for a couple of nights. Kat picked us up from train station despite being sick, which we were super appreciative of as the weather had still not decided to show Frances its usual sunny self. We settled ourselves down at Kat’s with the internet and several phones ready for a full day of job hunting, and the very first phone call I made brought us success; a job! We were to pick apples for $36 a bin in a place called Stanthorpe starting Tuesday. It seemed absolutely ideal, as it was easy for us to travel to from Brisbane, and $36 for a bin of apples, we thought we would be raking in the cash, as surely it would be really easy to fill up a bin of apples, after all, how big could a bin possibly be? Oh how wrong we were. The only other slight issue we were informed was that the local working hostel was full, so as the farmer really needed workers he had been kind enough to say that we could live in his cottage on the farm until a space came up at the hostel. Rent was only going to be $30 a week for the cottage; we were even happier thinking we had had a right result!

So we spent a lovely night with Kat eating take away and watching a film, the perfect remedy to our insane week at the Gold Coast and headed to the Salvation Army the next morning to bag ourselves some bargain fruit picking clothes! Frances got her first look at Brisbane city as Kat gave us a lift over to Kathryn’s house. (Kat and Kathryn gets confusing I know!)

It was nice to be back at Kathryn’s house, albeit briefly, I’ve gotten pretty fond of living there. We headed out to help Sarah celebrate her birthday, which involved free drinks on the house from the bar we were in; although sadly Frances and I were still feeling a little too worse for wear after the Gold Cost to take advantage of this to the full extent that we usually would have!

So on Tuesday morning Kathryn was kind enough to give us a lift to the Transit Centre so we could catch our coach out to Stanthorpe; and this is where Frances and I began to discover than when left to fend for ourselves we generally fail on epic proportions.

Our first task was to find a locker in which to leave our stuff whilst we went and did some last minute shopping, and after ten minutes of struggling to lift our extremely heavy cases in to the very top row of lockers we spoke to the very amused man at the coach desk who told us we could have just left our luggage with him, free of charge. Mistake one of many yet to come.

I was pretty confident of the way down to the shopping centre near the transit centre having been lost in the general area several times before, but Frances wanted to be sure about where we could buy some gardening gloves as we thought they might be a handy thing to have for apple picking. Frances being Frances walked straight up to the first passer by she saw, who happened to be a middle aged builder, and said and I quote

‘Excuse me; do you know where I can buy some gardening gloves?’

I’ve never seen somebody look so bewildered (and slightly frightened) in my life!

Heading down to the shopping centre I managed to equal up our tally of ridiculousness by walking in to a spiders

web, complete with nasty looking spider right in front of a group of workmen; who were most amused at my spider dance (you know the spider dance you do when there’s a spider on you and you’re trying to get it off?) whilst Frances did an Oscar winning performance of pretending she wasn’t with me. My situation was exacerbated by my pull along hand luggage case (I’m my fathers daughter and wasn’t willing to leave my laptop in a locker!) deciding it no longer wanted to be a pull along case and I therefore had to carry the extremely heavy awkward shaped case in my arms for the rest of our walk. We should have realised by this point that our trip was only going to get more ridiculous with every step we took.

So after a very pretty coach ride through the Queensland countryside which included one of the best sunsets I have ever seen and a very eerie experience of driving through the clouds at dusk we arrived at our destination. Although my paranoia about everyone being out to steal the organs of backpackers was kicked back in to life when the coach driver told us it was our stop, took our bags off the coach and drove off leaving us most bewildered looking around the pitch black country lane surrounded by nothing but trees and darkness. Eventually as our eyes adjusted we spotted lights through the trees, which thankfully, belonged to that of the local hostel, who we had arranged would give us a lift to our cottage.

We met Fabian, one of the brothers who run the hostel, who was kind enough to give us a lift to Woolworths so we could get some food (we were STARVING) and we bled him for information about the picking on the way; he warned us that it was hard work and that the supervisors could be a bit mean, but he did so in such a cheerful way we were feeling pretty positive about the experience!

Then we arrived at the ‘Cottage’ which shall be hereafter referred to as THE SHACK. So we have arrived in the pitch dark, after driving along a bumpy dirt track for quite some time, and as utterly kind and lovely as Fabian is they have since admitted to us that they hate taking people to the shack so he took off pretty much as soon as we had unloaded our bags. Before we had even found a light the first thing to hit us upon opening the door was the smell. Its pretty indescribable but it was some sort of mix of rat faeces, rot, decay, damp, urine and death all mixed in to the kind of stench that catches you at the back of the throat and makes your eyes water. Turning the light on was no real help at all and in hindsight candle light may have been better so we didn’t have to see the details of our surroundings.

The Guided Tour of the Shack

Turning right from the front door you enter the kitchen, which was our favourite room of the house, and also Roger the Rat’s favourite room as he chose to live under the fridge and left us droppings in the sink and on the table. We had a rickety little table, which bless the guys that run our hostel they had tried to make it look homely with the addition of a red checked table cloth. We had a fridge, which was the rustiest thing I’ve ever seen, and still had tape marks around it where someone had clearly dumped it and then it had been rescued and put in the shack. We had a sink, albeit we had been warned about the possibility of mosquito larvae in the tank water so we boiled all water that we used. We also tried to spend as little time as possible standing anywhere near the sink, as there was a smell so bad coming up from the drain that one whiff of it was enough to make you dizzy and nauseous, I would still rather not know the source of the smell. We had one plug point shared between a kettle, a toaster, and one hob ring, which took half an hour to boil a pan of water (and that’s after it had been boiled in the kettle first!) but as far as modern amenities go in a shack we were pretty appreciative of them.

The next ‘room’ along from the kitchen was the so called bathroom. This room had its own particularly unique smell, and I’m pretty sure that more than ten minutes in there with the door closed would result in death. Apparently the maggots that we regularly had to dispose of from the bathroom floor were not bothered by the smell.

We had a bath with a shower, but the bath had a layer so thick of what can only be described as ‘skank’ and rust that once again it posed a risk of death or at best serious disease. The shower initially worked for the first two days, but then it gave up and decided to stop working. Over the next four days we began to smell so bad that I am absolutely telling the truth no exaggeration we literally had a permanent cloud of flies following us around; it was that bad! Eventually the farmer offered to take us for a shower at the home farm, which did literally consist of a shower head inside a tin shack, but it honestly was the best shower I’ve ever had in my entire life, and probably ever will have!

The next room was the lounge which consisted of several sofas again the hostel people had done their best to help us out and had covered them over with blankets, we opted for the ignorance is bliss tactic and had no desire to know what lay beneath the blankets! The lounge was home to the majority of the spiders webs of the shack, with each corner thick with webs, thankfully their owners decided not to make our acquaintance.

Attached to the lounge room was the bedroom; which consisted of two bunk beds, a single bed, and a stack of random furniture including sofa’s, beds and wardrobes piled up high taking up the majority of the space in the room. One of our shack mates, Katja, 28 from Finland, had arrived first and bagged the best bed, the one in the middle of the room which relieved her of the draft from the window that did not shut and safe distance away from the door to outside which did not lock. I decided that the next best option was to find the comfiest bed, I succeeded in my mission but this landed me the top bunk next to the window that did not shut, so I was permanently freezing cold, as Stanthorpe is not a warm place! Frances opted for the bed below me, I’m pretty sure just so that she got to thump me in the back to wake me up each morning.

Our other shack mate, Nova, 24, from Canada, who has become a very good friend of ours, opted for the bed closest to the door, possibly so that if it all got to much she could make a prompt escape.

But where is the toilet I hear you cry? Well it did exist, but it existed outside on the other side of the shack, so on our first night we didn’t even know it was there, and after that we still had the problem of the fact it was pitch dark outside, and none of us were willing to walk outside in the pitch dark in the middle of the nowhere in Australia. All I will say is none of us will ever look at a red bucket in quite the same way again!

I know this blog is possibly one of my longest so far, but there has just been so much that I want to share with you guys back home. I’ll try to make the next week of our lives in the shack as brief as possible.

The apple picking there isn’t too much to say about it, we hate it, its horrible in every way you can imagine, but its dollars in the bank and days ticked off for my visa extension. The so called ‘bins’ of apples turned out to be crates, crates which hold around 2000 apples and take between two and a half to three and a half hours to fill. We wear picking bags on our front which when full way around 20kg and leave us with permanent neck, shoulder and back ache, and probably permanent damage too! We regularly come across spiders hiding in the trees, unfortunately for me my first spider happened to be an oversized huntsman. Upon realising I was holding an apple with a big fat hairy obscenity on it (Frances and I have decided the only fitting way to refer to Australian Spider is as an obscenity) my first instinct was to of course drop said apple, which resulted in said apple and spider now being in my picking bag, which is of course attached to me. I then committed the girliest act of my life in flinging off my hat, throwing the picking bag over my head, screaming and running away. Frances mocked me until she found her own spider ten minutes later, and promptly sat down on the trailer and refused to pick for the rest of the day.

Now being week three we are sort of starting to get used to seeing them, but we still struggle, especially as they have jumping spiders here (yes they actually JUMP) , and we have seen red backs and white tips both of which are poisonous.

Walking home from work one day we spotted a red belly black snake, which in my opinion is a stunning creature and I was absolutely fascinated, Frances thought I was far too over excited, but I was happy. Walking home from work was always an interesting experience, including one evening when we spotted a turtle shell at the side of the road, naturally we went to investigate, and felt pretty sad for the poor little dead dried up turtle, as Frances said he looked like he had died in pain! We also saw the biggest, fattest, ugliest most evil looking ants crawling on the shell, so we decided to leave fairly rapidly, although as I was to discover, not rapidly enough!

When we got home I sat down and took off my shoes and began to take off my sock and immediately felt a searing pain in my lower leg, which then shot electric shock type pains to the tips of my toes and towards my hip, whilst I was reeling from the shock of the pain the whole thing repeated itself just above my knee. I threw my sock across the room and half hopped half ran in to the kitchen where Frances was to inform her I was in agony and needed a doctor, laugh at my overreaction if you will, but you have no idea how much pain I was in!

As I lifted my trouser leg up we watched my leg redden and start to swell, and the pain did not ease at all it stayed intensely painful for at least ten to fifteen minutes but for what felt like hours. Frances did her very best lets be calm about this act and I agreed to go change in to my pyjama’s and lay down and see if the pain eased at all.

We searched the floor and my shoes and socks but could not find the offending creature, so we had no idea what it was that had bitten me. I have to admit the amount of pain I was in I didn’t feel that my shack mates were taking what could be my imminent death from the venom of some sort of Australian creature coursing round my body seriously enough; so whilst awaiting help from the texts I sent to Kathryn and Lynelle asking for advice too, I phoned Jesse the other brother who runs the hostel. He was very good and got me to explain the type of pain and what the bites looked like and went to make some phone calls about what it could be. He got back to me and said that from the description of the pain it sounded like the bite of a bull ant, but that he was happy to take me to hospital to be sure, to be honest I really did want to go to hospital, but I was so tired that I couldn’t face going back out again so I said I would let him know in the morning how I was, if I was still alive by then!

So the next morning I woke up, and the pains had eased and I appeared to still be alive so I went for a walk outside to the outside toilet to get changed in to my work clothes. Whilst pulling my trousers up I could not believe my bad luck that I felt that same awful pain, again! Somehow I managed to resist the urge to run screaming out of the toilet with my trousers round my ankles. Upon going back in the shack and telling Katja and Nova (Frances was in the bathroom of death) that I’d been bitten again we began to turn my trousers inside out. When I caught my first glimpse of the leg of a creature I was too terrified to look and had to cover my eyes. In hindsight I wish I had been braver as I had to listen to Nova shout;

‘Oh my god guys it’s a MASSIVE spider.’

Shortly followed by Katja’s addition of;

‘No its not it’s a Scorpion, look at its massive pincers!’

At which point I was slowly but surely falling in to a state of utter panic and was ready to retire to my death bed when Frances came and joined in with;

‘Look at the size of its head!’

Thankfully Frances then noticing my gradual descent in to hysteria resumed some sort of calm and order to the situation and took a closer look and decided it actually was the biggest, ugliest, fattest, meanest most evil looking ant in the world, commonly known as a bull ant. It was only at this point that I plucked up the bravery to take a look, and I have to admit I almost wish I hadn’t it was the ugliest looking thing I had ever seen, and it felt so horrible to know that it had been that thing that had bitten me. But the knowledge that it wasn’t a spider was the biggest relief. It still really really hurt, and I had big swollen welts where the bites were for several days, but it was good to know that I wasn’t going to drop dead any second.

There’s still so much more I want to tell you, but having hit 3000 words I feel I really should stop writing now, so I will write again soon to tell you more about the apples, the hostel we are now staying in (Which I LOVE) and all of our other Stanthorpe adventures.

So until the next rainy afternoon, I hope you enjoyed reading this, if any of you actually succeeded in making in to the end! Next time you bite in to an apple think of the poor abused over worked tired sore backpacker who probably picked it for you, blood, sweat and tears goes in to every apple picked I can assure you!

Lots of Love

Liza xXx <3>

(I’d say and Frances too, but I’m waiting for her to come home from the pub sloshed any minute now.)