i am soooooooooooooooooooooo pleased to be out of this **** hole!!! really! you dont understand unless you go there. if your thinking of it just DONT!!! got dropped off 7kms away for a start which meant we had to get a taxi = grrrrr.

went to our hostel the 'grand view hotel' the picture we saw before we went was from the 1800's which should have given us a clue! kitchen and showers were soooo manky we didnt wash for 3 days and ate out. it was rough as it gets and full of alcoholic gambling addicted inbreds. we decided to go for a walk = mistake, the place was like a ghost town and people we did see were just proper rough wierdos, it felt like they were all just waiting to die. at one point i went into a knife shop to buy a flick knife but bottled it incase they turned it on me. the dorm was supprisingly clean and the two german girls i was sharing with tidied up a bit.

the job.... if you want to be a tomato picker then either you hate your life or you hate your life. we had to be on the bus for 6:30 to start at 7. talk about slave drivers! in the nicest terms possible the guy way a nob. we got told you could make good money because you get paid $80 a crate. little did we know a crate was 2x2x1m!!!! we had our own buckets aswell so after picking ridiculously fast for about a kilometer it was half eleven with no break and we'd already picked around 1500 tomatos each. the guy was gettin on my nerves so much and the money was CRAP and we werent going to finish til 6pm so i had a strop and quit. (much to jonnys relief.) it was midday and boiling hot and we were 35kms away from the hostel. the guy was a nob again and didnt even give us directions even though we had paid $50 for a weeks bus (which we never saw again) we walked for a bit and got to the end of the field and found a wierd tomato woman, we asked how far it was to the highway (because we were on dirt tracks with no names so couldnt get a taxi and had no mobiles because we had to leave our bags on the trailer) she laughed and said 10kms.

sooo, off we trecked, luckily with our big water bottles. we were soooo pleased to get away from that place 10kms seemed like nothing. anyways we walked a few kms maybe 5 or so then two guys in a pickup gave us a lift, luckily going into bowen so we didnt need a taxi. after watching wolfcreek on magnetic island i wasnt keen on hitchicking again but if we didnt we would of been properly screwed without a compas or map.

i HATE bowen!!!! but we survived. not jokin weve bungeed, skydived, dived and camped with a croc, and the scariest thing was going to bowen.

light at the end!! we booked the first bus out of there and made it safely to airlie beach... and got washed!!! :D

xxxx