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  • Day 197

    Shamrockvale

    October 16, 2017 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 22 °C

    The farm where we will be working for the next 2 weeks, situated in the Kerry Valley, is called Shamrockvale. At around 4,000 acres it's pretty huge, the majority of which is dedicated to cattle, in particular wagyu cows. They also grow a range of crops, have an organic beehive business as well as some chickens (or chooks as the Ozzies call them), ducks and peacocks.

    The farm is around a 2 hour bus journey (on 2 buses) south of Brisbane. The bus dropped us off in a town called Beaudesert where Chris, the Farm Manager picked us up and took us to the farm. On the farm we are known as wwoofers which stands for willing workers on organic farms. This farm has separate accommodation for wwoofers which is really nice. Its fairly new by the looks of things with a nice kitchen, table and huge sofa. Separate from this there are 4 bedrooms. There is only one other wwoofer working on the farm at the moment called Sony a so we have managed to get a huge room to ourselves with a double bed! There are also 2 separate toilets and showers which are also pretty nice. I think we are going to like it here.

    Once we had settled in, Chris went over some paperwork with us and then gave us a quick tour. Chris had arranged for Sonja to take us to the supermarket after she finished work so in the meantime we could just chill. On this farm they don't provide us with food and instead give us supermarket gift cards. For our first week we get $100 each for food and then onwards we get $77 each. That is considerably more than we have been spending so it was a very exciting food shop. We also have an oven which you never get in a hostel so for dinner we had smoked cod in a garlic and herb butter, sweet potato wedges and vegetables, delicious. There are a few books here that you can read, the majority of which are in German except for the first Harry Potter book. Simon has suddenly discovered a love for books and by the end of the evening was a third of the way through. This is quite a big deal for him and will be the first fiction book that he will have ever finished. Our working hours are Monday to Friday, 7am - 3pm with an hour for lunch and smoko (what they call the morning tea break) around 9:30am, so once Simon managed to peal himself away from Harry we tucked in early.
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