I set my alarm for 4.45 as the pick up time was 5.15, the main reason you start so early is that the heat builds upto a max temperature at 4pm so they try to get you to work as much as possible before the sun and heat is at its worst so they can get the best out if their workers.

The bus picks you up outside the hostel, 5 dollars for transport each day which is a rip off if you do onions because you only earn 40 dollars a day but at least me and tony didn't pay 10 dollars each for shears as some of the Italians loaned us them for the day.

The bus ride only lasts about 10 mins but its nice to see the sun rise along the fields which is probably the only pleasant part of this experience. We get dropped off and without being told anything the driver is off, there's already a load of other pickers, some maybe from another hostel but quite a few we're families, like old Italian men, Taiwan families, some with their kids doing the work too, and Indians also working. I was expecting just backpackers but you don't realise the amount of different migrants and cultures out here as even this job could be a better way of life then back home for some people.

We got told you could probably do more than one bin but that would take a lot of practice but some people were also doing orange picking in the afternoon so we were going to finish earlier than normal, nice to know on our first day since if you spend 6 hours filling up a bin and its not complete when you finish you go home with nothing!

We found out patch to work on after trying to work out what the hell this old Italian was saying, who every time he coughed i thought he would die the way he was spitting and choking on himself, but without even being told the technique or any sort of guidance we got to work. Basically your bent over or you can sit and you pull up the onions, use the shears to take off the roots at the bottom then the long stalk thing at the top then chuck it in a bucket, apparently it takes 35 buckets to complete a bin so at least we had a rough idea of what to do.

There was about 7 of us in total but me tony and Clarissa the newbies made a school boy error and didn't have any gloves, soon enough the blisters appeared on my right hand off using the shear so I had to swap hands which made me slower cutting the onions.

The heat slowly started to build up by around 8 when the sun was out, we brought 4 litres of water between us to keep hydrated and put sun cream on and I bought a straw hat to keep the sun off my face and my baldy bonce. I had about 6 buckets to collect onions in and after my first run it didn't even look like I had hardly put any onions in my bin, I knew it was going to be a tough day but by 10am finally a nice guy came over and gave me and tony some gloves and showed us how to work quicker which was to forget about the roots and just pick a loads of onions at the same time, hold them over the bucket and cut the stalks all at once. This improved out productivity massively but time was against us as we only had one hour and a half left.

This guy called Simon who was a big but seemed a very dormant and simple guy from New Zealand finished his bin at about 10.30 and then by 11 two other girls had finished so it was just the newbies left.

With time nearly running out, tony said that rather than both trying lucky our luck at our own bins and maybe both miss out on getting any pay we should just both concentrate on one then half the money so at least we come away with a few dollars each. So we concentrated on his as his bin was closer than mine anyway. With the bus on the way, Clarissa was struggling and sat down as she nearly fainted, and with her bin nearly done, all of us used my bin to fill up her bin in an act of kindness which I thought was nice, I sacrificed my bin for two people and karma came back around a few days later as tony left without getting paid for the onions so he said I could keep receipt to get paid for it.

By time the bus came to pick us up Clarissas bin had just been finished so the boss farmer came over in his tractor thing to take away the bin, he was a Italian guy with a massive belly, wearing scruffy clothes and spoke like a fat person in a way that sounds typical with a lazy fat guy with a rough voice, he reminded me of a cross between jabba the hut and that gypsy guy Steve that I worked for at one point.

Probably a good thing we finished at that time because the heat was becoming unbearable and we were running low on water, this heat is going to take some getting use to!

The bus driver this time was mark from the hostel who sorts work out and stuff, who told us the day earlier this is the s***test job to do but when we asked him if he had ever done it he honestly said no, and then came up with the same line that you have to keep doing the s***ty jobs to get a good job when they come available here, something he tells everyone and is a recurring them at the hostel, pack of lies though. The staff get commission for every person who does some work so they get as many people onion picking every day. Least me and tony had an excuse the next day not to do it which was the blisters which popped.