Oh it's a hard life working on the spuds. All the hard work paid off though and we are now officially tattie experts!

After the fiasco of our last blog you'll be pleased to hear that this job went pretty well. We were met off the bus as promised, shown the field (paddock in spud farmer terms), where we'd be working, taken for food shopping and then driven to the caravan that'd we'd be calling home for the next while. In normal circumstances I would have probably been horrified at living in a caravan in a middle of a field, but after that 'house' we were expected to live in this place was not bad at all. Ok it needed some cleaning, so much in fact that it took 4 antibacterial wipes just to do a tiny a table, but we were living rent free & being driven 15k to work and 15k back so we really had nothing to complain about. We were sharing with a French guy, Julian, but had our own room and could even have a toastie hot shower, well as long as you made it under the electric fence and then over the barbed wire one without croaking it! The 'bathroom' was open air, and the cows had a good look when you were on the loo, but at least we weren't expected to go in the bush! There was a little bit of a mouse problem but Dean was on the case of Chief Exterminator and soon got rid of them with the traps. It turned out Julian had been setting the traps, but not putting any food down to entice the mice towards them, and then wondering why he couldn't catch any?! Yep he really is a bit thick, more on him later though! Our next door neighbours were Greg Potato, our boss, and Leanne Potato, who we now know is his girlfriend. It took a while for us to figure it out but eventually we got there.......it's a complicated set up involving an ex wife whom Greg Potato stays with when he's not shacked up in the caravan with Leanne Potato watching dirty dvd's......trust us that's not a picture you want to think about!

The work itself was pretty hard going, although it felt good to be doing something and making some $'s! My bodies not used to such manual work so after the first few days I was knackered. Standing for hours on end in the back of the harvester, up and down the ladder and pushing about huge bins of potatoes definitely takes it out of you! We'd start at 7am, get home when it was dark, shower, eat, then straight to bed. Chris Potato, who we were working with, conveniently forgot to ever give us breaks so we were lucky if we got to sit down at all. Lunch was usually munched on the go, muddy hands and everything. Oh what hard working people we are! We were so filthy by the end of the day. I don't think our nails ever really got rid of the mud whilst we were there! Dean soon became the star of our workforce as he can drive a forklift, once they got him doing that I'd officially lost my mate and had to stand in the back of the harvester all on my lonesome. L

We'd been told by Greg that generally we'd be working 7 days so were prepared to work our butts off, unfortunately it didn't end up like that and we had a good few days with no work due to bad weather, or, Chris being lazy! He was doing Greg a favour by driving the tractor so just did as he pleased and worked when he wanted! The days not working were BORING! Being stuck in the middle of a field with absolutely nothing to drives you a little bit crazy! It didn't help if Julian had no work either, spending the day with him would test the patience of a Saint. There is only so long you can deal with someone never doing the dishes, eating out of the pan and washing their filthy socks in a bucket when you've even offered to take their laundry to the laundrette......yuck! He really is the stereotypical arrogant French person. Saying that though he did supply us with plenty of film watching opportunities on his nice big laptop, although heaven help you if you touched it or it got a speck of dust on it, he literally treated it and called it his baby. If we didn't have his laptop and the dvd's from Leanne I'm not sure how long we would have lasted living like gypsies!

We managed to build up a good little nest egg whilst working and managed to buy a few new luxuries for ourselves. A car, namely a V6 Holden Belina, a pure Ozzie muscle car!! And a new laptop that we got a nice bit of discount with. Woo hoo we have our own wheels and can even surf the web whilst driving if we want too! It felt amazing to have our own freedom again. It was getting a bit tiresome relying on someone else to drive you about, especially when she had about a million things to do before she took you back to the van. One of the first trips we made was up to the Coonawarra Wine Region and tried our first ever Sparkling Shiraz. The Ozzies seems to love it but we're not too sure sparkling red really works?! I'm sure we'll give it plenty more tries before we decide! Generally at weekends we'd have at least one of the days off so we made the regular trip into Mt Gambier, eating yummy pizza at Fasta Pasta for my 27th birthday, drinking coffee at Starks and staying away from Julian and the caravan for as long as possible. It's just a shame that Mt Gambier doesn't really have anything going for it other than a cool new library, oh and yummy drive through coffees at Starks! Dean will disagree with me and say it also had Neds going for it, the equivalent of Poundies, he's definitely got an inner thrifty old women dying to get out!!

Because of the weather really taking a turn for the worst (the car was actually frosted over in the mornings!) the harvesting was taking a lot longer than planned. We wanted to get our butts to Sydney! Being the kind human beings we are we didn't want to leave Greg in the lurch so gave him a few weeks' notice to either get his ass in gear and start working more or look for some other backpackers. He did move into about third gear and we got a good few days but Chris being Chris and never working and Greg working in the other paddock with Julian gave us a fair few more days doing nothing. Greg knew we wanted to work, one to make as much money as possible, and two to get our visa days signed off, so he arranged for us to work with another guy, Ben Potato. Now this was no ordinary spud harvesting, this was spud harvesting golden oldies style! We actually had to pick them out of the ground with our hands. Man was my body in agony after that day's work! It was a good experience though and Ben was the perfect employer, giving us plenty of breaks and even getting his hands dirty and helping out with the picking.

It was finally time to leave Mt Gambier and it couldn't have come at a better time, it was freezing. Wakening up and having to go outside for the loo when it's below 0 isn't too much fun! We packed up our new, big boot and we're off to Sydney. I'm hoping when I get there my face starts to look like me again, I swear being weather beaten every day has made me look like I'm 47 rather than 27!

Lots of Love

Chelle & Dean xxxx