Be warned this blog is all about hard times in Ozzie land!

Our trip back the way to South Australia started out well, our overnight bus was luxury compared to the bus journeys we'd taken in Asia so we arrived in Adelaide at 6am raring to go and get started on some grape working!

Jackie, the women- actually calling her a women is giving her a compliment, we'll describe her as the dirty, smelly, dyke - that we were going to be working for had said she would pick us up from the bus station and get us all settled before we started work. We didn't realise she meant we'd get picked up after 12pm, there is only so long you can stay patient sitting in a tiny bus station! When she did finally show up she proceeded to tell us that we could put our bags in her car, whilst we went to the market and did some shopping with her, and waited for her 'mates' to come and get us to us back to her house. Great just what we want to do after travelling all night and sitting in a bus station for over 4 hours! Walking around the market she's telling us how she doesn't like a dirty house, she likes to be healthy, eat good food, expects everyone to clean up after themselves blah blah blah. We started getting a little bit suspicious when she wouldn't answer any of our questions about where we'd be living and how much work there was, and I'm thinking how if you like to be clean, is your hair so greasy?! We had been told whilst in Melbourne that yeah we could live in her house whilst working with her and it all seemed like a pretty good deal. How wrong could we be! Her 'mates' as she called them eventually showed up to take us back to where we'd be working. They weren't her 'mates' at all, just one seriously freaky Danish guy and one German girl who followed the Danish guy around like a lost puppy, who were working for her. By the time they rocked up we were trying to be optimistic but everything just seemed a little bit dodgy! We attempted to ask more questions about the work, like we know we're getting cash in hand, but how often will we get paid? Weekly, fortnightly? How much money does she want from us for staying in her house? We're then told that no you'll get paid when I get paid and the subject was swiftly changed to how much she wanted from us. $140 each, plus another $30 each for share food, i.e. she does a shop, decides what everyone is eating, doesn't feed you enough and pockets the rest of the money! Mmmm I don't think so!

We finally took off back to the house and thought that we might get a bit more info from this two brain washed children. All they could tell us was Jackie was amazing, she doesn't pay you until you leave as she likes to save the money for you to ensure you have enough to carry on your travels and that her house was simply the 'best house they'd ever seen'. We're thinking what a load of crock, no way is she keeping our pay from us. It's crazy to think that so many people are taken in by her and don't get paid for months on end!

We're trying not to worry and are thinking that hey things might end up being ok when we pull up to her house that is miles from anything. We're shown to the 'granny flat' that we'll be staying in and oh my god things just got pretty bad! Words cannot explain how disgusting this place was. We were met with mice scurrying up the walls, FILTHY mattresses on the floor and holes in the roof. To top it all off where we were supposed to sleep had mice poop on the mattress and was right underneath a hole in the roof where a possum decides to come in every night. Lovely! We were looking at each other thinking what the hell are we doing in a place like this!? It honestly looked like something out of a backpacker horror film. We put our bags down; I put mine on a plastic chair as I didn't want to put it on the filthy floor, and went into the main house to meet everyone else. When we say everyone else we mean about 12 other people, all crammed into either the 'granny flat' or living on mattresses on the floor in her house and sharing one tiny bathroom. So much for the dirty, smelly, dyke liking a clean house, the place was disgusting! She had two dogs and one was full of fleas, so much so that she was permanently scratching and yelping at the same time, poor thing.

We decided to go for a walk to clear our heads and decide what the hell we were going to do. We were now stuck in the middle of nowhere with no way of getting back into a town so had no option but to stick it out until we bought a car and could leave. It didn't take us long to change our mind and realise, we had to get the hell out of there the next day, no way were we living in conditions like this. She should be locked up for running a so called business like that, she is ripping backpackers off. She knows so many of them are down to their last $ and don't have a choice to work & stay there. She must be making a fortune! The only thing that got us through the night was the shelves of red wine (perks of working on Vineyards) that we helped ourselves too......it was the least we deserved! What a waste of money travelling all the way back to this hell hole, we'd literally spent hundreds.

The next morning we got ourselves out of there, we had no idea where we were going, all we knew is we couldn't hang around there one more minute. The dirty, smelly one had the cheek to text us and asks why we didn't want to come to work, she got a prompt reply saying we weren't living in squalor whilst she ripped us off. We had to laugh when she text back saying oh so have you left the house then, not even mentioning what we had just said to her. Duh of course we have! We started walking up a deserted country road hoping that someone would take pity on us walking around first thing in the morning with huge backpacks on but nobody did. We'd been walking for about half an hour when we realised we were walking the wrong away, so we about turned and walked for about an hour before we finally came to a small town called Lyndoch. It may be a tiny little town but man were we relieved to see some sort of civilisation!! The rough plan was to bus it back to Adelaide, actually that was the only part of the plan we had. It was the Thursday before Easter Weekend and we knew it would be hard to get accommodation. Easter is a pretty big thing over here, who knew Ozzies were all so religious - all the accommodation is booked up and everything else comes to a standstill. As it turned out the bus to Adelaide didn't leave the Barossa until 4pm so we had a long wait ahead of us. We had nowhere to go so we collapsed onto some seats outside a pub that was closed, made cheese sandwiches with Dean's penknife and tried to figure out our next plan of action.

Over the course of the day we came to realise that there was a very high chance that, unless we booked into a 5 star hotel, we could be sleeping outside. Everywhere in Adelaide was booked due to the Easter Weekend, and everywhere around the Barossa was booked due to it being Easter Weekend & on top of that the Annual Vintage Festival was happening. Where's our Wiked Camper when we need him?! Thankfully one of the Barmaids in the pub that we'd made home for the day gave us a number for a little caravan park, not far from where we were, that had a cabin for the night. Words cannot describe how relieved we were. It felt so amazing to get a shower, have something to eat and have somewhere to put our heads down for the night. We were totally & utterly drained. Thank you to the other Barmaid for giving us a lift, we really didn't have any energy left to carry our backpacks all that way.

I had a pretty restless night dreaming about spiders & mice, and to make matters worse, the following morning a huge spider decided to crawl out of the leg of a pair of my trousers. Even he didn't want to hang around that filthy place!

We still didn't really know what to do next, so, since the caravan park had a spare van for the next night we decided to take that. During the course of the next day, knowing that we had no way of getting back to Adelaide or finding somewhere to stay, we took up the offer from Michelle (owner of the caravan park), to take another one of her vans for $150 for the week. We had no intention of staying in it for the week but knew we'd have to hang around until at least Wednesday when everything was open. Lets face it we didn't have any other option!

It was such a shame that our second time back in the Barossa was in such bad circumstances; it is a gorgeous place. Unfortunately for us the caravan park that we'd have to call home for the next while wasn't so gorgeous! Our cabin and the first van we lived in were perfect, the second van was average but the people in the surrounding vans were just awful! The caravan park was actually their home.....we'd came across actual trailer trash!! We can laugh about it now but at the time the last thing we wanted to do was listen to the trash screaming at their kids or getting drunk outside their so called homes every night! We don't want to disgust you even more but they really did smell PRETTY bad!

Every cloud has a silver lining though and during one of our 5K walks to the local shop, a guy who we now know as Hayden, stopped and gave us a lift back to the caravan park. Him, his girlfriend Georgie, and their little boy Liam were having a weekend camping trip away. They are the nicest couple, we ended up having a few drinks with them that night, which then lead to us having a fab day at the Whistler Vintage Fair & Whispering Wall the following day, then BBQ'ing that night. I'll tell you the BBQ tasted a whole lot better than Dean's so called soup that looked like baby puke! I know you're thinking Whispering Wall?! This wall really does whisper, well you whisper and then the sounds is carried along the wall so whoever is at the other end can hear you whispering sweet nothings! In hindsight, it was a good thing the Vintage Fair was on otherwise we would have been bored to tears. We had a laugh watching people compete in the grape crushing competition at the Lyndoch Family Day....a giggle was definitely needed after worrying so much.

Finally Tuesday came, and although it was Anzac day (a national holiday for the war veterans) some things would be open and we could get to the internet and look for a car & another job to get some of our seasonal work out of the way. We were climbing the walls being stuck at the caravan park so we set off on the 15k walk to Gawler. We'd been walking for about an hour when a guy stopped and gave us a lift the rest of the way. These country folks are very nice people! He ended up giving us a lift back the way too, I was a little bit weary thinking he may be some sort of crazed backpacker murderer, but we're still here to tell the tale! He gave us loads of info on places to visit in Queensland and then proceeded to tell us there was free internet in the library in Lyndoch. So we didn't need to walk for an hour in the roasting hot heat after all!

The next few days were spent calling around for cars, jobs and constantly calling Wiked Campers to try and find out where the hell our deposit for the van was, so much for it being back in our bank account within 3 to 4 days. This was another stress that we really didn't need, it felt at this moment like everyone was out to rip backpackers off! I would like to know how would they feel if they had to live in an old caravan and live on rations?! Eventually we landed lucky when a job potato harvesting came up in Mt Gambier. The only thing holding us back was the fact that we didn't have our own transport. After numerous phone calls and running back and fore to the internet we arranged to meet with a girl selling a car in a small town not too far from Gawler. This meant us having to get ourselves and our backpacks into Gawler, getting a train to, meeting the girl, walking with our backpacks to wherever she lived and then hopefully find the car in good condition so we could buy it and drive to Mt Gambier to start working. We did make it to Gawler, via a $40 taxi, we then made it to the little town, but for reasons we'll never know the girl never showed up to meet us. Stranded again! You don't even want to know the words that were coming out of her mouths!

So it was back on the train for us. We decided, whilst standing at the tiny train stop in the rain that our best bet was to head back to Adelaide. Georgie and Hayden had offered us a place to live any time we were in Adelaide but we felt bad calling them up at such short notice, in the end though I spoke to Georgie, told her what had happened and she got the spare room ready for us. Our saviours! Honestly you have no idea how amazing it felt to sleep in a proper bed after being stuck in trailer trash land for a whole week! G & H totally looked after us. We had an amazing day out at Cleland Wildlife Park, hand feeding kangaroos and wallabies and getting cuddles from a super cute koala. The weather was pretty miserable but we Scottish folks can handle a wee bit of drizzle! That night we spoke to Greg Potato, as we now called him, from the job in Mt Gambier, explained the carry on with getting a car and that we wouldn't be able to come and work for him. He must have taken a liking to us because he told us not to worry about it and he'd get someone to drive us from the caravan we'd be living in, to the field, or paddock in farmer terms, that we'd be working in until we got ourselves sorted with some wheels. Don't want to speak too soon but maybe our luck is taking a turn for the better?! We jumped at the chance and spent one more night with Georgie, Hayden & Liam before taking off on the 6 hour bus journey from Adelaide to Mt Gambier. At least we were travelling back the right way this time.

So there you go, the tale of our worst week whilst travelling finally ends!

Lots of Love

Chelle & Dean xxx