Relaxing

I’ve heard lots of people say that staying on the farm where you are working is a bad idea, it seems like you are at work all the time and after a while it feels like prison. On this farm with about 160 people working and staying there, the air conditioned cabins, free laundry and common area with a TV and table tennis table it felt like anything but a prison.

I said that I’d give the food a chance to see what it was like, how big the potions etc. First night at dinner the menu had three choices – vegetarian pasta bake, steak, or chicken with jelly and custard for desert. The portions were decent and the quality surprisingly good and when I asked for seconds they said sure as long as everyone else was served first. From then on it became an all you can eat buffet for me. After about 2 days Cooky had it sussed that if he didn’t put extra on the plate I’d bug him until he did. For the scrawniest person there I was packing away twice the food of anyone else. The first night after polishing off two full plates of dinner, a bowl of jelly and custard I noticed some of the people sitting with me were looking at me funny. They couldn’t figure where I put it.

Breakfast was another feast, a fry to start followed by 2-4 bowls of cereal then some toast, fruit and tea. Every meal I polished off almost obscene quantities of food but I was hungry. Since I started this little adventure of mine I’ve developed quite the appetite and devour ludicrous quantities of food every day. After a few days of seeing how much I eat nobody asked anymore the “Where do you put it?” questions etc.

There are so many people that even after a week I only got to know about half the people there but it was a bloody good laugh. There were people from all over working, Kiwis, Aussies, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, Poms, lots of Germans, even a few Irish. Working in the heat was tough and quite a few people there only lasted a day or two, there was a few there from the start but most people like me were only there for a few weeks before moving on again.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 10:07 pm by Ross and is filed under Australia, Northern Territory, Tropics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.