Ha! Well so much for door-to-door salesmen. Conor and I lasted a grand total of 2 hours before admitting to ourselves that it sucked big time… and lasting the 2 hours was chore enough. I guess I’m just not made to be a Jehovah’s Witness; at least not in this life.
So that posed the grand problem of what to do next in order to bread-up the table (and to make it to South America, of course). For the first step we left the city and headed back to backpacker bread and butter… farmwork - and specifically for us, pineapples...
Now have you ever wondered how pineapples grow? I must, for one, confess that I have really never cared enough to donate brain cells to the matter. But if you had pushed me I would have suggested that they grow on trees a bit like coconuts do – Wrong! It would seem one of the more delicious of fruits grow on a bed of razor sharp knife-leaves spouting out of the ground. To pick; simply stumble through the leaves picking up pineapples and throwing ‘em onto a conveyor belt which is dangled in front of you by a tractor (the driver of which has somehow bribed his way to the bestest job), all whilst loosing limb by limb to the knife-leaves. On the plus side I did generally seem to get some good basket ball practice as I had to throw further and further, whilst losing my personal race with the tractor. But I did actually last more than 2 hours this time: 2 days in fact! Improvement I hear you cry.
As it happens I didn’t actually throw in the towel on this particular pineapple throwing extravaganza (and would have been happy to continue), but I was randomly offered a better opportunity – Guaranteed 4 months work making cardboard boxes of all things. So here I am living in Caboolture, a place my boss and landlady like to keep reminding me is a ‘socially deprived’ suburb of Brisbane. However my housemates rock, and keeping with the Australian theme I am living with another Korean, Tawanise and 3 Japanese people... all awesome. And we are close enough to Brisbane, the Sunshine and the Gold coast to escape and provide sanity at weekends.
So with travelling now very much on hold again (this time at least until October), this will be my last update for a while. I’m sure we can enjoy these times of spiderweb fellowship next time I hit the road. For now I’ll be getting on with practicing my Spanish.
Adiós Amigos! xxx
