How would we describe the farm experience? HARD BLOODY WORK! We arrived on the farm on Monday 28th March not knowing what to expect. We stopped off in Talwood where we would meet up with some folks who we would follow up to the farm and managed to squeeze in a couple of cold beers beforehand in the Outback bar. After getting lost a few times and driving the long way round, we finally made it to the site of cotton picking HQ. Dan and Danielle had been joking about saying that it would be just like Wolf Creek, the farm was called Worral Creek and luckily we lived to tell the tale. We didn't actually get to meet Jan until later that evening as he was down in the paddocks setting up to equipment. There was quite a few people here for the job in hand and two farmers running two different teams. There was me and Ash, Danny, Gabriel and Parke working for Jan, Brian, Andy, Dave and Hayden working for the other farmer Mike. Jan and Mike both have farms next to each other where they come from and class each other as next door neighbours. They would usually be harvesting their own cotton at this time of year but due to the flooding in Queensland the majority of their crop was ruined and with the water damage the crop will not be ready until next month. So as they have bills to pay they have became contractors for the first time to make some cash. The first evening was spent just setting up camp with food made by Sarah, Danny's other half. She would be working in the camp making lunch that she would bring down to the paddocks for us and make dinner on the night so it would be waiting on the table as soon as we rocked up. The toilet and shower facilities in camp were a lot to be desired. We were sharing the shower with frogs, giant crickets and mosquitoes. I had a quick number one in one of the toilets and as I flushed, frogs came into the toilet from the cistern. Something I had never seen before a toilet that flushes frogs. One morning I was brushing my teeth and as I went to spit I noticed 6 little eyes looking up at me, it took a minute to realise what it was. It was three little frogs heads looking up at me in between the gaps in the plug hole, where ever you looked there would be a little green or grey frog. Needless to say, Ashleigh really loved those showers and toilets.

The first Morning we were up at 6am for a 7am start. We were driven the 25km or so down to a small paddock to be shown the machines that we would be using. As we said before, me and Ash didn't really have a clue what jobs Jan had lined up for us. We were going to be working on the module builders, a 40foot tanker attached to the rear of a tractor with a high pressure compactor fitted to the top of it. We were given a crash course in how it works, use these levers to make the compressor move back and forward and up and down, this lever is for the back door and this one is for the wheels to raise the module builder off the ground. Simple. Now onto the tractors, Ash seemed to get the better end of the deal here as her tractor was an automatic and quite straight forward to drive. Jan took Ash up into the tractor and gave her a go and she was driving it no problems at all. We left Ash to get familiar with her new toys as Jan took me over to my tractor and module builder. "Now your tractor Peter is a bit different to drive, but I'm sure you will be fine" Jan said instantly making me think 'Oh dear'. Now this was the quickest driving lesson I have ever had. I sat down on a 1980's John Deere tractor looking at all the levers and pedals in wonder. Jan started to point out what did what, the different types of gears to use and what for and finished off by saying "...so now I'm going to drive Ashleigh's tractor and module builder down to the paddock about 20km away and you follow me 30 foot behind in yours." Alarm bells were defiantly ringing now and my arse was taking photographs, no test drives or anything like that just straight into it. I thought it was crazy, it is like a driving instructor saying "Well here is the accelerator, brake and clutch, here is your gear box and that's your steering wheel, now jump in start her up and follow me in the car in front" Jan pulled away and I started up my tractor and slowly moved off behind him. It took a few minutes to master the controls and once we were on the road I was loving it. I couldn't stop thinking 'Ne way, I'm driving a bloody tractor!' We were driving in convoy with Jan at the front, me behind , followed by Danny and Parke in the other tractor and picker. All was going great and we turned into the entrance of the paddock we needed to be in. The distance you have to swing out to take a corner in a tractor pulling a 40 foot module builder is crazy, I'm sure I drove past my house just to take the corner. As we made our way up the dirt track to the paddock we drove over a small yet steep hill. My tractor started to struggle and cut out. Slowly it started to roll backwards and I couldn't stop it. Panic was rushing through me as I don't know how many tones of machinery was rolling backwards out of my control. I was pushing my foot on the break like it was going out of fashion and all I could do was steer to the left to try to slow the tractor down. I could not see what was behind me as the module builders are are about 20 feet high until I heard and felt an almighty bang. I was finally at a stand still and I hopped off the tractor to take a look at what I had rolled into. It was Danny's tractor and I had taken the front tyre off the wheel. At first I thought that I had burst or ripped the tyre which would have been a nightmare as you don't really have space to carry a spare due to there size. Luckily the impact had just knocked the tyre off the rim releasing the air making it look a lot worse than it was. Each tyre costs $2000 so I was pleased that I hadn't ruined it as it would most likely have been coming out of my pay if I had. I felt horrible and wanted the ground to open up and swallow me. But I suppose that's what happens when you are given a two minute tractor driving lesson, literally a crash course. Danny came straight up to me and said "Don't worry about it, they shouldn't have put you on a tractor with no brakes, bloody thing hasn't had any for a while now. I was driving to close behind too, I should have been 20 odd foot away. You did well to steer it though cause if you didn't this tractor would have been a goner!" No wonder it wouldn't stop, it had no brakes. It sort of made me feel better but I still felt like a bit of a tit for a few hours. It took about 30 minutes to get the tractor jacked up, the tyre back on the rim and pumped up then we were on the move again down towards the paddock. What a first day of work. We eventually got to where we needed to be and set up the gear for a test run. We picked a module of cotton taking around two hours to do once everything was set up and running. How it is done is like this, the cotton picker drives through the paddock stripping the cotton plant of its cotton. Once full it tips it's load into a bail buggy that drive to the module builder and tip the cotton into that. Each tip is about 2 tones. Once the cotton was tipped into the module builder it was our job to level the cotton out and compress it again and again. It gets quiet repetitive and it is hard work as the module gets fuller you have to jump inside and throw the sides of the module into the middle to keep the module level. It took it out of the arms and in the heat it didn't take long to build up a raging thirst. We have actually experienced the real cotton mouth after having to jump into the modules, all the little fibres of cotton make your mouth is as dry as sticks in seconds. After 3-4 tips into your module builder you have to jump in to lay ropes throughout the module that will be used to tie down the tarp once the module is complete. Ropes in, you take another 5-6 tips and keep compacting each one as much as you can before you can open the back door and raise the module builder off the ground. Once that is done you jump in your tractor and drive forward leaving the module where you built it .Your not finished yet though, now you have to grab a ladder and climb up your module and unwrap a tarp to cover the top of the module. These have fitted corners and these tarps have to cover a module that is 10-11foot hight by 40foot long. If a little bit of wind got under the tarp it would cause the tarp to take off practically. Once you had the corners on you had somebody helping you to tie it down with the rope you had laid in the module previously. The knots we had to use changed nearly every day as the big boss kept changing how he wanted the tarps tied down. So that's the work that goes into building a module and you don't get one minute to stop. This is what we were doing for 12 hours a day.

The next day we were given jobs to do each morning before we could start picking the cotton. Ashleigh had to make the ropes that would go into the modules for each builder, 66 ropes each for that days use and I was made fuel man. I had to refuel all the tractors, pickers and module builders using a fuel tanker and a hand wound pump. Each revolution was a litre and these were big machines. The pickers alone would take nearly 500 turns of the pump to fill one tank. Your arm starts to ache after 300 turns and I still had all the other machine to fuel up afterwards. You sharp get used to it though and it was a good work out. After refuelling I had to drive the tanker 30km away to another fuel tanker to have it refilled for the next days fuel. This farm was massive and very easy to get lost in. Thankfully though I didn't. A 60km round trip just for fuel gives you an idea of how big this farm was. It was a 50 km round trip just to get from the camp to the paddocks we were working in and that was just a small section of the farm. Jan told me how big the farm was and it was something crazy like 30 km wide by 150 km long. Now these jobs we were doing were all done before we had even started picking the cotton but we only get paid from the moment the pickers start picking the cotton till they stop. So for the first two hours of the day we earned exactly $0. That was rather annoying but it was the same deal for everybody. The farmers see it like they are only making money once they start picking so that's when they pay from. Some days we would work 16 hours and we would only get paid for 11 of them due to when the picker starts and stops. But we just had to except it and get on with the job in hand.

After clearing our first paddock we had a few days off as the other paddocks crops were not ready to be picked. So we had a super long weekend starting from the Thursday until Monday when we would start picking again. Jan and Mike had things to do on their farms back home so they went home for a few days and everybody else did also only leaving me, Ash, Brian and Andy staying at the camp. This time off was great as me and Ash sat around the camp just chatting and reading whilst Brian and Andy had work to do on Mike's machine's. There were other guests in the camp too and they had big appetites, the little cheeky mice. One day Ash went to get a carton of milk to make a cup of tea out of the storage box. There was milk all over the floor. The little b*****s had chewed through 12 cartons of milk, 4 cartons of custard and 12 small cartons of juice. Stuff was leaking all over the place and it took us some time to clean it all up. What the mice had got through was supposed to last the duration of everybody's stay in camp. So we had to put a call into Jan and Mike to let them know what damage had been done. The days of the mice were numbered. They were cunning little things, one afternoon we watched them climbing up the electrical wires and jump into the toaster so they could eat the crumbs at the bottom. After bait had been put down for them we started to feel a little sorry for the mice so we started leaving crackers on the floor for them so they could have one last meal before they snuffed it. A few days later there wasn't a live mouse in sight, just ones lying on the ground, they weren't dead though, they were "dust sun bathing" according to Ashleigh. We also took a drive out to one of the near towns of Goondiwindi for a look about, some fish and chips and we treat ourselves to a portable DVD player and some DVD's for the camper van too. We are right little flashpacker's. We went for a walk up the road one day and as we did cows started to appear from nowhere and ran towards us. In the matter of minutes there was about 200 cows all just standing there staring at us. If we walked up the path they would follow, if we walked down the path they would follow. It is quite spooky all those cows following you about in the middle of nowhere just staring at you. After about 20 minutes Ash got freaked out by the cows and we retreated back to camp for a cuppa.

Everybody came back to camp on the Sunday night ready to start work the next morning at 6.30am. Jan had brought a bloke called John down also to act as the third man for me to throw in the sides for the modules and put the tarp on and so forth. We started work, Ash done her ropes, I refuelled the machines then we started to build the modules. John is a great bloke but he was too old for the job, everything he done had to be re done by me. It wasn't for the want of trying bless him but he couldn't do it. This was doubling up on the amount of work that I had to do. After working with John for a day I was knackered and I had to bring the issue up with Jan the next morning. The fact is that there was nobody else to do the job so I had to stick with it. So my work load had increased by another 100% and I was doing two peoples jobs at once. I had hurt my shoulder doing the extra work and didn't want to do any long tern damage to it. I lasted till Wednesday and after a talk with Ash we decided to throw the towel in. We had hoped to be able to see the job through earning enough cash so that we didn't have to work again throughout our travels but this just wasn't worth it. We were both miserable and exhausted after working 16 hour days for the past few days. It had been a particularly bad day for Jan, first of all two hydraulic pipes burst on Ashleigh's module builder then Danny had set fire to his bail buggy using an angle grinder mending it. Some sparks hit some cotton and it went up. Then two hydraulic pipes burst on my module builder and then we tell him that we had had enough and were leaving the next day. We felt bad on him because he is a great bloke and we were giving him more problems to add to his list. The thought of having to do this work for another three maybe four weeks was just too much for us. We gave it our best shot and it was still a good experience, even though were were totally done in by it. Andy from Mike's team had had enough and quit the day before us just jumping off his module builder at 3pm and saying " That's it, I quit, I'm going home!" so at least we finished out the day for Jan. Ash had agreed to do another half day for Jan to help the bloke out but I could do no more with my bad arm.

It hasn't all been bad though and certain things were great. On the plus side, we both know how to drive a tractor now (and crash them) and some of the sights were beautiful. The sight of a cotton paddock in the sunshine with the brilliant white of the cotton stretching into the distance as far as the eye can see is really something. The sunsets were some of the best we have ever seen too, it was just a shame we couldn't watch them together as we were working on separate module builders. The most amazing and beautiful thing we saw had to be the stars. The sky was so clear and so big out there in the outback with nothing to get in the way of the sparkling view. I wish we could have took pictures of the things I'm describing but we didn't even have time to do anything else but work, we only have photographs from the few days we had off. But they are sights that we will never forget. One thing I know for sure is that we wont look at cotton wool the same again.

So we packed up our things, said our goodbyes and hit the road again on the Thursday. It was like a weight being lifted off our shoulders. We decided to drive to Warwick taking around four and a half hours just for somewhere to go on route to our destination of Byron Bay. The drive was crazy, driving along roads that were pitch black even with your full beam on so after 300 odd km we were more then happy to see the sign saying "Welcome to Warwick!". We treat ourselves to a pizza and pulled up in the camp site to enjoy a movie night on our snazzy new doovde player. With a few glasses of red wine, a belly full of pizza and a good movie we were as happy as Larry. The next day we made our way to Nimbin, on route again to Byron Bay. Now in the New Testament (Lonely Planet's Australia guide) this is what it says about Nimbin...this strange little place, a hangover from an experimental 'Aquarius Festival' in the 70s, still feels like a social experiment where anything goes. Reefers included. But it's not all dreadlocks and tie-dye. A day our two here will reveal a growing community, a New Age culture and welcoming locals. Now they could have saved time here by just saying Nimbin....Full of Hippies. It is a great little place though consisting of one main street about 400 meters long that is packed with little gems of places like the Nimbin Museum, the Hemp Embassy and The Nimbin Artists Gallery, not forgetting the retro clothes shops. The streets were awash with old school hippies in there late 70's with long beards, pony tails and tie-dye smocks still talking about free love and loving the child within yourself. Mixed in with the hippies were the crazies, the people who have obviously had one trip too many and are just....well crazy! You cant hide those crazy eyes. The Nimbin Museum was great, wacky and wonderful. It pays homage to all things Nimbin, mainly the story of the Aquarius festival whilst preaching the message of 'legalise don't criminalise' and 'fight America's war on drugs'. At the entrance are a couple of hippies with about five teeth between them beaconing you in. One of them looked like Cat Weasel and the other looked like Wurzel Gumage. It was full of little bits and pieces of all sorts of things and we loved it. It reminded me of what my old bedroom used to be like years ago with the walls and ceilings adorned with all sorts. Across the street is the Hemp Embassy that features none too subtle displays about hemp and marijuana, they even have a petition station willing people to sign it in the fight to legalise marijuana. They have a great art gallery that is packed with work by local artists. There are some great pieces in there, our favourites being works done in florescent paints that looked almost three dimensional under the florescent lighting. We were originally planning to stay for a couple of days but after a few hours we had walked the length and breadth of Nimbin and decided that a day and night spent with the hippies and crazies would be enough for us.

Today we plan to drive to Byron Bay and we are relieved to be back on the road again with the thoughts of 16 hour days picking cotton being wiped from our agendas once and for all. Not sure what we shall be doing when we get to Byron Bay but that is the great thing about a road trip, we will just find out when we get there.

Love Peter and Ashleigh x