TO SOUTH AUSTRALIA After leaving tassie I was broke. I was so broke that I was desperate enough to give the pokies a try on the ferry back. I limited myself to a loss of two dollars and managed to win thirty. For once, my desperation and foolishness had paid off just a little. I dragged my tired self and bicycle back to my Aunt's to decide where and what I was going to do next. It was good to be back on the mainland. After two months on the island, I was feeling a little confined. Tassie is big but there is something confining about knowing that you're not on a huge landmass. The subtle differance in the flora almost shocked me when I got off the boat.Maybe it was the lack of a proper diet the few days before. Perhaps man really can't just live on bread alone. My plan was to find some harvest work with a working hostel somewhere in the countryside and bring up my funds again. I found such a place after a few days of slacking off and spending time with my Aunt and Uncle. In my two months absence, my Aunt had given birth to a healthy young boy by the name of Liam. He was a cute little thing but it was a little awkward living around a baby again. It had been ten years since my younger brother had been born and I was surprised on how fresh the memories were in my mind. There was something wonderfull about seeing the way my Uncle looked at his first child just a month old. My Aunt seemed to be settling into motherhood well. They told me that they were going to take the baby to Holland in a few months to meet his grandparents. It all seemed well. He wasn't very loud or very smelly and overall he was well behaved for a new born. His head was a little misshaped from birth. Somehow small horns had formed on the back of his head instead of the usually cone shape. Everyone had been assured that they were normal and would go away with time. Other than that, he seemed to be a perfect baby. I found a work hostel advertisement in a some flyers that I collected earlier. With some help I was able to get myself there by the end of the week. Traveling there took the better part of a day. I left on a public transport train to the border of South Australia and Victoria. There wasn't anything unusual about that. The transfer I took was a little odd. It was a kind of courier service that doubled as a transport service. It was a small white tour bus with a trailer on the back. The shocks had long since gone on this little thing. It was one of the bumpiest rides I have taken yet. I had picked up a new book while I was waiting for the transfer and I was doing my best to read it. It was damn near impossible do to all the jarring I endured on the ride. Every mile or so, the van would come to a screeching halt as the driver would jump out and deliver one package after another. I was feeling a bit sick. We were traveling through flat ground (everything but the road) that stretched for ages. However giant rock formations would seem to pop out of nowhere. Years of erosion had left everything but the toughest rock rising high and bald in the landscape. It would rain every now and then in different areas of the landscape. It was a good scenic drive. I arrived at the hostel at around 4:30. There wasn�t anything fantastic about the place. It was a cramped smelly hostel situated in the middle of a small town. The best part about it was its location. In Tasmania, every hostel was a good walk away from the grocery stores and town. This hostel was right next to everything. The grocery store was literal right behind the hostel and the pubs were almost as close. I say pubs because there was about five of them in close proximity to each other. Pubs in Australia have a tendency to look like they came right out of Clint Eastwood movie. They�re all big tall buildings with a wide balcony on the second floor and the roof ornately decorated with the year of construction prominently displayed. These were no exception. I looked around and thought that this place would do for now. VINES AND RAIN I am not afraid to say that it was boring as hell the first week I spent in Naracoorte. I arrived at the time when everyone was leaving . When I had callled on the phone, the manager of the hostel had assurred me that work was starting the next day. This was a lie work did not start the next day or the day after that. The place had dried up as far as work went. This was a small town and there was little to do without some money. Drinking seemed to be the main activitey for the locals and God did they know how to drink. The bars were pretty rough and there was no such thing as going out for a quiet drink. I have to say the town itself was one of the better small towns I have stayed in and the location of the hostel just couldn't be beat. Nevertheless, there was something erie about the place. Much akin to the feeling that I felt when visiting Queenstown in Tasmania. The backpackers was a business. For the area it was a multipurpous Labour hire for the local farms. The reaon why there wasn't any work available when I arrived was supposedly because a refrigerater was broken in one of the farms. The work was to be cutting lenghths of vines that were approxiamately a forearm in lengh. The refrigerator was needed to store the vines we were ment to cut. It was also raining every other day. The result of all these things was backpackers full of disgruntled broke backpackers that were continueously being told that work would start the next day. It wasn't very much fun. The only thing that got us through the boredom was the vcr and the local rental store. It took a week for everything to get started. It was before sunrise when the bus left for the vineyard. The flat Australian landscape was gradualy became visable and revieled miles apon miles of expanses of vinyards. Years before, when Australian wine was becoming popular with the rest of the world. Some genius had figured out that the region was much better suited to the grape than the sheep. Consequently, land prices soared, sheep found themselves unwanted and wine empires rose and fell and rose again. As far as I could tell, everything was still going strong. Thwine industry of Australia grows every year it gains more respect in the world market. What we were doing was creating cuttings for new vines so that the new vinyards could be made or current ones could be expanded. No one really cared about this, they just wanted to make some money so that they could get out of the place. After a series of gates, we arrived at the correct vinyard. The owner of the hostel jumped out and explained what we were to do. "You each get a row of vines to make cuttings from. The cuttings are to be a forearm in length or the lenghth of to cutters on top of each other. Cut one end flat and the other end at a forty-five degree angle. Make a bundle of a hundred and tie it up. If you cut about 2000 individual cuttings, you should come back with a hundred dollars for today. Good luck, I'll see you later" The "rows" were impossibly long and stretched out as far you could see. You could make out the giant eucylyptus trees at the end of the row but the lanes of rows ran into each other so you couldn't judge the distance. It was a long way. We were left with a supervisor under the pay of the hostel. She explained in a little more detail what was to be expected of us. The cuttings also had to be a certain width. If the cutting was too thin it would die fast or not grow as fast as the rest. The vine had to be as straight as possible. The straight requierment turned out to be the most troublesome. These vines were anything but. What made matters worse was the fact that it was starting to rain every now and then. The rain was everything from a light sprinkle to a torrential downpour. This was not fun. It went on like this all week. NEW CUTTINGS, PIZZA Work was available now so, the hostel was becoming busy. The old people were slowly leaving and the new were pouring in like cockroaches. The amount of movies watched was increasing. We were watching things like, Amelie, Donnie Darko, Fight Club, the Animatrix, Adaptation.. anything that could be aquired from the video store. The owner had had an epithany and bought a DVD player for the Hostel. The amount of things we watched drasticaly increased. I got a membership at the video store and started to spearheaded the movie rentals. I would wander around the hostel with a jar collecting loose change so we could see something new instead of crappy Australian television. A nice thing about the place was that it had a fire pit in the backyard. If you were tired of the TV you could sit around the fire and have a conversation with the group out there. Somehow, I started maintaining the fire most of the time. I'd light in when we got back and break up enough wood to last the night. The wood that was available was a huge collection of planks from a previous job. Most of them were to big to place in the pit by themselves so they had to be broken in half. I found that if the wood wasn't broken up beforehand, people would pile on the big planks and most the fire would be outside the pit threating to burn down the town. I selflessly took it apon myself to keept the fire burning and under contro;l. The real reason was that I ust liked to watch things burn. I also hater watching crap movies. I am convinced of two things. Nobody has any taste in movies but me and no one knows how to light a fire.. Everyone is stupid but me! <--sarcasm...duh...moron Back on track.. The co-owner of the place came in one day and made an anouncement. "we wil be starting a new project on Monday! All the guys will be moved onto this project.. all the girls can keep making cuttings. Ge on the bus fifteen minutes earlier than ususal and you'll be right." The new project was actual pruning vines. Many vineyards in the area did all their work with machines. We found a yard that shunned them and used gullible backpackers instead. The vines were thick and hard to cut through. It was our job to cut the branches off the wire to about two inches and two buds from the main vine. This sounds easy. I assure you it is not. The rows were near endless and we had to finish one took near forever. Making money was hard work. Of course the weather was shit too. I made it throught the week without finding a reason to skip work. Things began to change. BATMAN....in Naracoorte The people at the hostel were pretty cool most of the time. we were a ll in the same boat and we had nothing to do. I have to say my favorite source of creativity was from a SDcottish girl named Natalie. She was one of the very very few girls at Naracoorte. She had been there for a bit longer than everyone else and spent most of her time on a couch in the Tv room eating noodles. On one weekend a few of us were taken down to a bit larger city. It was better because it had a McDonalds and two Supermarkets and a K-mart. After about three hours we were bored. A few of the girls had gone off to the pub almost right away and were well in to the drink . I was wandering around the town looking at the same places when i ran into Natalie and a Swedish guy named Sam. The lackluster of the small big town of Mt. Gambier had sunk in. Natalie came up with a wonderful idea to killl somew time. Almost out of nowhere she said "Do you want to play a SuperMarket game?" The game she devised was incredibly simple. Everyone was to walk around the supermarket and pick twenty items and write down the name and the brand on a piece of paper, we would then trade lists and collect the items as fast as possible in a ten minute time slot. Points were given for speed an accuracy. I have to say it was a pretty good way to kill time. We ended up joining the other girls in the pub after a single round due to fear of being kicked out by security ( we put everything back but we didn't buy anything)