Travelling Post 21 - "I'm living in a hole but it's ok for now" he says as he begins an awfully wordy & probably not very grammatically correct post

On Tuesday I left Sydney for Canberra, then on Thursday I left Canberra for an overnight 12 hour(!) coach ride to Mildura, North Victoria to the Riviera Hostel. (I shall blog about the rest of my time in Sydney and Canberra later, Mildura is small so I don't think there is going be much for me to blog about, although I could be wrong. There is also a pretty good story on how I came to be at Mildura and not somewhere else I may blog about that later to, or I may not) Let us firstly say that Mildura is a nice small, place right next to a river with a population of just 40,000, it is very different to Sydney and there isn't much to do here.

My accommodation is different to Mildura on one aspect, where it is small and there isn't much to do here other than poker games and BBQs, it isn't nice. When I arrived and saw my teeny tiny room for the first time, I wasn't overly excited about the prospect of staying and when I saw the kitchen, well it took me time to get over that one, let's just unless I eat out I won't be eating very healthily here, it's gonna take me a little while to get used to the kitchen.. I arrived at 9.30 in the morning and after a sleep and a shower I did slowly settle in but at one point I really did think what am I doing here, I want to go home.

The reason I came to Mildura was for work, the promise of a possible $80-100per day with little to spend my money on. Luckily it seems I have come up trumps on that, if not on decent accommodation, but I'm not fruit picking. Instead of fruit picking I am the Cart Man, it is my job to go along with the boss, who drives the tractor and his son and collect the buckets which the grape pickers fill. His son and I take it in turns between stacking the tubs up on the trailer and being the person passing the tubs to the stacker. We then take the tubs and lift and empty them out on to racks of chicken wire shelves where they dry out and begin their transformation from grape to, I believe, sultana. The hardest job is passing the buckets to the stacker as these are 20litre+ buckets packed full of grapes, all this lift with your legs stuff doesn't count when you are moving at speed so a lot of the weight is on my back. The trailer holds 82 buckets and today we did around 10 runs which meant I lifted around 410 buckets twice. The boss wants to get this up to 1500 buckets a day which will be possible but I am going to have to work so much harder. This is also a 7 day a week job for 3-4weeks oh and when it is hot it can be in the mid 40s and it is much harder than fruit picking and and I have to get up at 6am. At this moment if i stay still for too long my muscles get stiff and I'm not used to it. On the plus size it is invigorating and I can see that feeling lasting for maybe 3 days, we do get given free coffee and home baked cake and the father and son are a hoot. Dave, the son, works a 40hour job supervising a week at a juice factory and takes his holidays each year to do the harvest. His father is an Italian who has been living in Australia since he was 22 and has owned the vineyard for 40years who is a really nice bloke but is barely audible and swears a lot. The bickering between the two is something to make every son think twice about working with his dad.

There is one another advantage to this Cart Man work and that is the money, it pays hourly rather than being piece work and if I do enough hours I could earn $600-$700per week. I'm also now a driver so I don't have to pay for my transport which saves me $35per week that means with my main expenditure being $125 for this horrible accommodation, a bit for food, a small amount for alcohol and and some money for books, as there really isn't much else to do in Mildura, I might be able to save up to $1,000 in this 3-4week period, but my target before moving on is $1,500.

I thought I would give you this information for all you people jealous of me, whereas at present this job is OK, after a few days I can see myself really suffering with the work. Maybe what will happen is I'll get used to the accommodation and begin to hate the work.