Magnetic Island and Working on a Sugar Plantation

Location: Sydney
Weather: Warm

Spent a night in Townsville and then caught the ferry over the Magnetic Island. Stayed at THE BASE backpackers, which had it's own beach. Turned out to be probably the best beach on the island, this place wasn't bad, but not particularly impressive, I didn't even find the snorkling particularly good. The rest of the island was pretty empty as well.

After this I was supposed to get the bus to Mission Beach, but got off half an hour before at Cardwell because there was a job offer I couldn't refuse. oh yes, I ended up working on farmer John's sugar plantation! First day had to get up at 5am and eventually got to the field around 7:30am. Then worked right through till 5pm, except for an hour for lunch, sitting/standing on the back of a trailor putting sugar canes into a machine on the back of a tractor. The canes were packed into the trailor and had tons of weeds/leaves on so it could be an effort to pull the canes off and put them into the machine in time...it wasn't the easiest job. Also a lot of dust & dirt was kicked up by the tractor and combining that with having sun tan lotion on my face, I ended up being mistaken for an Aborigine when I returned to the hostel that night! My totally-black-from-the-dirt jeans and once green t-shirt weren't too appealing either, but at least I had a very good sleep that night. Farmer John, Rod (my co-worker and a real top bloke) and I took three days to plant the whole field and it was quite good to look back and see what we had done. It would be good to go back in a year and see it all fully grown and ready for harvesting, I reckon.
oh yeah, a tip for anybody who's new to doing farm work is that it isn't a good idea to go to bed later than 9pm, the reason everybody else in these working hostels goes to bed by this time, is because if you're a rebel and stay up watching a film till 10:30pm before collapsing in bed, you can end up feeling rather tired for most of the next day and planting sugar isn't like office work whereby you can just sit there and do nothing. Luckily I only did this on the last day and managed to struggle through ok!

Anyways, after this Rod and me went chilli picking...and whereas the sugar cane planting was not too bad...this was a total nightmare. It took us hours and I mean 7 hours non-stop of back-breaking, hands and knees aching work. We picked thousands of the things and still didn't finish the entire paddock - 10 rows out of 14. But at this point we both agreed enough was enough. They say banana picking is the worst, but I reckon chillis must be up there too!

Spent the weekend in Cardwell, met Rod and his family and he showed me to some of the sights such as the Cardwell waterfall.

By JamesReed on 03.11.04 @ 12:29 AM GMT