Bundy

Trip Start Sep 07, 2005

Trip End Sep 07, 2006

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Where I stayed

The Cellblock

(Bundaberg hotels)

Flag of Australia Bundaberg, Australia
Saturday, November 19, 2005

Driving into town somewhere early in the afternoon and not having arranged any accommodation we counted ourselves lucky to basically run straight into the newest hostel in town....Cellblock. We could not have known the irony in that name yet, but that would soon change. After having packed our stuff into our room we went out for a little look at what the hostel had to offer. The place was definitely new and relatively clean, which took away a little bit of the pain that shot into our guts when we entered the courtyard and met our fellow prisoners. Unlike any of the other hostels, we found out later, Cellblock was a "upscale" party hostel. Here was a place where people could and actually did blow all their cash at the bar after having spent from 5:00 am till 1:00 pm bent over row upon row of knee-high capsicum plants, picking and dragging the buckets after themselves while fighting off the flies. Standing in the courtyard trying to hold our own we were nervously informed by a stranger that the 45 year old guy stalking around throwing the young girls into the pool all day was John, incidentally also manager of the place. We signed up for work that same day. Hostels in Bundaberg are there for only one reason, and that is to provide lodging for agricultural workers. There is absolutely nothing to do but work in the smoldering fields and/or drink in seriously mediocre bars. I've seen Thank-you notes written on the walls of hostels by people that actually spent 6 of their 12 months in Australia working and drinking there, leaving the place without a single extra dollar in their pocket as when they first came there!!! Besides being one of Australia's largest farming communities, Bundaberg is also the home of Australia's finest rum, aptly named Bundaberg Rum, which although brewed there, is not bottled there. The bottling takes place somewhere very, very far away from Bundaberg, which means it costs exactly the same half a mile away from the brewery as it does across 4000 miles of desert, in Perth. At 40 dollars a bottle you can believe we drank nothing but Bundaberg!;-P

After several days of making 30 dollars per day we finally got a relatively decent job with a huge farm near Bundy. We spent a full week in the company of three 50+ Aussies, sitting on the back of a tractor, planting new capsicum plants from 05:00 am until it became too hot. Jeanette, Gordon, Maarten and myself were on the back, slamming the little plants into the holes created by the tractor. Local legend John walked behind us, filling up where we had missed, talking shit the entire morning with Gordon, whose every third word in a sentence was either "fucking" or "cunt". Besides short forays into the fine art of brewing moonshine or farm life in general the topics of conversation usually ranged anywhere between how fucking hot it was, being hung over after "being on the piss", looking forward to getting on the piss again, or being on the piss.... good times good times!!! After about a week we got moved to other work, which consisted of continually hauling large buckets of capsicums onto a moving trailer and making sure that the pickers had enough buckets to fill. John, his wife Jeanette and Gordon were there with us...bringing at least some good humor as we crippled our backs while being roasted alive. Though still sweating like rapists we eventually got used to the heat and the days were not as bad anymore. Hostel life continued being a continual source of inspiration to suicide, so we pretty much kept to ourselves. After two weeks of fun in the sun we finally decided to value our sanity higher than the obscene amounts of cash we were making and said our goodbyes to John and the crew. With each a cool 1000 dollars in our bank accounts we're heading down the coast again, looking for a good surf spot!:-)