Fun in the sun

It's so hot here in Mildura. It's like a desert-type climate: 35-45 degrees during the day, not a cloud in the sky, and no shade anywhere. Then at night the temperature will suddenly drop to chilliness, and leaving for work at 6am normally sees me shivering and wishing I'd brought a sweater.

The landscape outside of the town (which is one of those small Australian towns that feels American to me, probably because of the new-ness, the low-rise white buildings, the K-mart and the McDonalds -but which does have a few nice places) which isn't cultivated is dry, dusty pinkey-red soil and scrubby grass dotted with stunted, pale trees, completely flat and stretching away into the distance on either side of the long straight roads. Then the vineyards are beautiful - hundreds and hundreds of metres of lush green vines under the clear blue sky.

Grape picking is going...well, it's going. It's hard work and gets harder every day as my muscles ache more. Mike and I managed 2 rows between us on sunday, but then yesterday we were switched to a different type of grape - really small black ones, which are all tangled into the vine and take much longer to fill the buckets, grr. However, I'm definitely not hating it and I would say it's alot better than the call centre. Not in terms of pay - think I'm getting paid about half what I did there by the hour - but in the sense that you are free to think your own thoughts, listen to music, talk. The (only) advantage to being paid by the bucket is that you're effectively your own boss: the farmer never bothers us to work harder/longer, we can choose when we take breaks and how we work, and so on.

There are some old Greek men working with us, who don't like us very much (they're all amazingly fast at picking and feel that the better rows of vines belong to them, so if we accidently start picking one of their rows we get yelled at and chased off). I enjoy having them around, though, because I can hear them speaking Greek and then catch sight of them sitting in the shade under the vines, smoking filterless cigarettes: it makes me feel like I could be on a Greek island any time in the last couple of hundred years. I keep trying to work up an enthusiasm for grapes by summoning up Greek verses about Dionysius, etc. It's not really working.

Aside from work we have been having some fun. On saturday night a group of us from the hostel went to the Apex park for a barbeque on the banks of the Murray river, and it was truly one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to - sunset, a long stretch of deserted beach by the river, surrounded by woodland. So peaceful and serene.

However, given that we think we're earning about $50 a day each, BEFORE tax, Mike and I have decided that we're going to leave at the end of this week (I feel it will be character-building for us to complete a full week). We've come up with a Plan B (OK, we've gone through so many plans recently that it's probably more like a Plan H, but still). We're going to head back to Melbourne and take a trip down the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide, from which we will head to Perth somehow (plane/train/bus) in order to catch up with Chris and Laura and Mike's car. Then we'll look for more lucrative employment options in Perth. Of course, doing this means I have to cancel my Tasmania trip, which is lame, but it's just timing - and the vast distances of Australia making it difficult to backtrack.