IMG_7863

IMG_7863
Ursprünglich hochgeladen von Paleontour

thats what I mean with intense atmosphere ...

Boredom in New Norfolk and thrills on the way

Well, after some extremely boring days in New Norfolk due to lack of work two Germans came by and I took the opportunity for the lift. At first we made an interesting day tour around some magnificient lakes (Lake Gordon and Lake Pedder). I still don't know if I should be annoyed about the fact that it was raining all day or happy because the rain gave the whole area such an intense atmosphere!

The next day we went up north and more or less crossed Tasmania from South to North. It's amazing how many different landscapes can fit on an island. There is everything from barren tundra to thick, wet rainforests and pastoral countryside. Our driver is unfortunately some kind of maniac doing Australia commando-style. His driving style is sometimes just insane! Going around a sharp turn on a gravel road by use of the handbrake with the abyss just beside can scare the shit out of you, believe me. You don't see much landscape when the inner eye starts rewinding your life for a comprehensive recollection short before you hit the ground.

I'm happy that I survived and now I'm in Launceston, which is the second biggest town in Tassy and actually quite beautiful. The hostel I'm staying in is fantastic. It's an old colonial style house with a huge balcony (studded with comfy couches) just in front of our room and all amenities a hostel could have. They even rent out outdoor gear ...

Today I'm just looking for work to get some money in. Wish me luck

Cherries, a rolling pile of shit and loads of boredom

That is about everything I could say about staying here as there isn't much more in New Norfolk. At least we managed to solve the problem of getting to work, ... sort of. The hostel “manager” (a little man at the estimated age of about 150) told us to go to the local car dealer and to see what we can do. After around 10 minutes of talking to the dealer we had the keys to a '95 Toyota Camry for $250/week and felt enormously grateful. That was last sunday (funnily enough nothing opens here on a Sunday save the oversized supermarket with a carpark the size of the rest of the town and the car dealer.

After 4 days of using the car, half a bottle of brake fluid, ruined suspensors, an almost flat tyre and a cooling system that almost blew up on us we started wondering if we probably did the dealer a favor and not the other way around. We will see ...

Work starts 6.30 in the morning, which means getting up at 5 (how I hate that)! The goal of our daily adventure tour through 3-house townships with the names like Plenty is the orchard of the Tasmanian Cherry Company about 30 km away. It should be relatively obvious what we are doing there: picking cherries. Cherries are nasty little fuckers which distribute pleasure on the steepest possible gradient between consumer and picker. You could philosophically ask what happens when the picker consumes the cherries while picking them. The less philosophical answer: Nothing, it still sucks. The work isn't particularly hard but extremely annoying. You go through the same movements again and again. In the morning it's freezing cold and during the day you are grilling in the sun (we all freeze our drinking water overnight so that we have cool water the next afternoon). And then there are these quality requirements, which make this work such a pain in the arse: the cherries have to be of a certain size and firmness, they need to be shiny and free of bird pecks, with the stem attached and in singles. I tell you: That sucks! You also have to do at least 80 kg with a with a cherry weighing about 5-10g ...

Wednesday was a particularly shitty day with trees almost free of cherries, the announcement that there is no picking from Friday to Tuesday (next variety not ripe yet), which means no work and therefore no money. And our engine almost blew up on the way back. By the way: we get $17,81/hour less tax, which comes out at about 100 a day.

Backpackers and Africans (loads of them) seem to be the Australian version of the German vegetable-Poles (Polish people). Today is Australia Day and as I bought a carton of beer the other day I got an Australian flag with it ...

New Norfolk

Yesterday I made my way up to New Norfolk, which is a tiny town north of Hobart. There is work rumoured to be found here and indeed there is some. There just is the problem that it is quite difficult to get to the work and the work for sure won't come to you. A cherry orchard 30km outside town is looking for workers but how the hell do we (me and some other victims of lacking proximity in the hostel) get out there?

Somehow you get the impression that Tasmanians like hostels. During 3 days in the Hobart Hostel I talked to about 10 people of which 8 are Aussies. Out of these 8 about 5 are Tassys and 3 are from Hobart and surroundings. Why the hell would you stay in a hostel in your home town? Aussies are crazy, but well, that's no news. They even start tennis matches at midnight and let these poor bastards work their asses off until 4.30 in the morning. Quite convenient for Europeans watching it, though.

In the background I'm currently uploading pictures to flickr and it loads, and loads, and loads. And then it loads some more. Argh! I hate that. (yeah, 81% after just 1h 15mins, 82%) Well, in the German blog I wrote that I'm going to write the English blog entry to bridge the time, so what do I do when I finished that?

Btw: Here in Tassy I managed to get my first sunburn in Australia and it's a hefty one. Oh, it wasn't like that the sun was glaring down on me and grilling everything around. It was a cloudy day and which European puts on sunscreen when the sun isn't even shining? Unfortunately the ozon layer here more or less only exists as a memory of better times. I'm currently living right under the hole in the sky and that is recognisable. Outch!

Hobart

After a short journey relatively free of complications I arrived in Hobart (Tasmania's capital). On the flight here I could already see what awaits me here" phenomenal nature!
Hobart itself appears incredibly provincial (which it probably is) after 3 months in Sydney. Around 7pm i took a walk down to the harbour and the streets where almost empty. Nothing on here it seems. But well, I had plenty of that in Sydney and that's not what I came here for.
As Internet is really expensive here ($2 for 30 mins) that will be it for the moment. I will keep you updated.

Greetings from Tassy

Tassy, I'm coming

Well, I have enough of Sydney and decided to go to Tasmania for a while (7 weeks). Over there I'll finally do the one absolute backpacking-thing - fruitpicking! It's strawberry season. I booked today and will leave next week tuesday.

P.S.: In reality I'm just trying to hide from persecution by marxists or homeland security, but PSSCHT!

Revolution in Sydney!

They DO still exist: Genuine marxist idealists! And I found them. Why does Stephan find socialist idealists in Sydney as opposed to traveling around the country? Well, that’s how it happened:

In the last few days I saw a poster hanging around my area promoting a presentation with the following title: „The Trial of Oscar Wilde and the Rise of Homophobia“. Sounded somewhat interesting, was free and I didn’t have anything better to do, so I went.

This presentation then revealed ist nature as a meeting of a group called „ Socialist Alternative”. That was when I started asking myself what I’ve gotten myself into. Anyway, the presentation was awful in structure and argumentation but presented with loads of pathos. I didn’t think it would be possible to garnish a presentation about the oppression of homosexuals with the word “capital” to such an extent. The following discussion, in which I amazingly didn’t take part, increased all this and condemned the current system as root of all evil. Actually, the term "discussion" doesn't really fit here, rather than "collective argumentative construction of consent". It was really interesting to note the argumentative and intellectual advantage of the elder members, which differentiated themselves from the otherwise typical “Yeah, against” and “The capital ist the fundamental problem“ to an astonishing degree. Maybe age DOES mean wisdom. I also heard the word “Bourgeois” for the first time in ages in an actual discussion. Almost lovable in their anachronism, this bunch is.

Naturally the outcome of it all was that the capital is guilty of the suppression of homosexuals and of anything else anyway. I witnessed the rhetorical fraternization of homosexuals, communists and all other minorities into a single mob, which rises against the oppression of the imperialistic capital, taking the “amazing achievements of the Russian (October)Revolution” as an example ... or something along these lines. There are certain gay, liberal politicians who’s opinion about that I would really like to hear.

After I skimmed through their party organ with the creative name “„Socialist Alternative“ I started to sincerely worry about being observed by Australian Homeland Security after visiting this event.

The following lines are taken from their motives and aims:

„We are for a society in which ordinary people control every aspect of life“ (Erm, kennen wir schon)

“A successful revolution will involve the workers taking control of their workplace, dismantling existing state institutions (parliaments, courts, the armed forces and police) and replacing them with genuinely democratic ones.”

Outch! Should you not hear of me for a while you can assume that I either got arrested by the Secret Service for conspiracy against the state organs of Australia or that I was silenced by the Socialist Alternative for presumably being a spy of the imperialist-capitalist powers – completely democratically of course.

Chaotic times

and when I say that it means quite something.
Here are some pictures to show what I'm talking about:











And she needed just about 3 hours ... Respect!
By the way: Nothing of this belongs to Emilia (my flatmate) or me.

Unexpected meetings

This morning I woke up from some heavy knocking on my door and an unfamiliar voice! As I sleepily said "yeah?" my former room inhabitant (an asian girl) stormed in, grabbed a towel and disappeared again. Huh, what the hell is going on? I thought she's in New York. Well, she obviously isn't. Fact is now that she's staying in our living room for 3 days before she leaves for Melbourne. After just 3 hours it already looked like someone ransacked our flat. I begin to understand the frustration of my flatmate who had to live with that for about a year ...

Comments

Just in case someone wanted to comment and was asked to register, I changed it now so that you can happily comment away ... ;)

Chow Mein á la Stephen King

As I tried to grab something to eat on new years day my fridge greeted me with barren emptiness. Surprise, surprise! So I decided to go out eating for a change and as celebration of the new year. Humble as my backpackers budget is I went for the Subway at central station to get a wonderful footlong of Subway Melt. My order got interrupted by the information that they don't have bread but could offer me a wrap. Wait a second: WHAT?!? SUBWAY DOESN'T HAVE BREAD?!? That is like a computer store running out of computers and offering you a playstation instead ...

Not having a (real) choice I went on and mysteriously ended up in a foodcourt in Chinatown. A foodcourt is a kind of sacred site for food addicts and hell on earth for weightwatchers: There is plenty of seating in the middle and around it are restaurants and then some more, and a few more. It is definitely practical for bigger groups as there is something for everyone – probably even for vegetarians.

As it is somehow traditional to eat fish on new years day (whyever that is no one could tell me by now) I decided to take a Seafood Chow Mein with chinese noodles. What I got standing in front of me 10 minutes later seemed like a good reason to become vegetarian: A tasty looking vegetarian soup and a plate of definitely non-vegetarian Chow Mein which looked like Stephen King himself wrote the recipe. There were tentacles, there was slime and there was a lidless eye, staring at me like it would eat back if I dare to pick up the fork! And chinese noodles.

After a minute of mourning silence for $8.50 I believed to be lost in the depth of an ocean of culinary terror I hesitantly started eating. About 10 seconds later I went through several stages of taste induced ecstasy. At the end I was full and bloated and my plate empty. Almost empty, that is. The eye was still there. I just couldn't make myself eat that. Especially as the tentacles were attached to it as I found out shortly after I started eating. I guess its now in some dark place spending long hours trying to scare other food leftovers. The slime was great.

How can something that looks so ghastly taste so amazing?

Under the Bridge

So, here we are now in the year 2008. As about every year I realise that it feels like the year before, and the one before that and all the others before as well. Just this time with the difference that I'm at the other end of the world. When I already prepared for bed again my folks at home were just waking up with a hangover, cursing the new year for beginning with a headache while the streets outside look like a major riot scene. Both wasn't the case here as even though I was mightily pissed the long walk home (more than an hour) sobered me down quite a lot. And fireworks here aren't available privately and something the Aussies leave to professionals who know how to go about the whole business without blowing off body parts. They rather blow off the whole fireworks factory. That's what happened just this december.

Likely you also want know what I did before walking home. Well, mostly we were killing time and alcohol. Yet it has to be mentioned that at temperatures of 30 degrees (Celsius) you are probably full before the bottle is empty. The local ambulance had quite a busy afternoon. Where did it happen?

Under the bridge ... To be precise under one of the most famous bridges of the world (the Sydney Harbour Bridge) with direct view of the most popular opera house of the world. Funnily I could have had the view of a famous opera at home as well: 24 times per case of beer.

Yet all this didn't happen without some hurdles on the way into oblivion. Some of our people got there really early by a time where I hadn't even left my bed. They weren't searched on entering the area and passed on this information to my friend and me who came a lot later. Unfortunately that wasn't the case anymore and full bag search operations were undertaken. So my friend and me stood there with a whole case of beer (24 bottles of 375ml) in front of a gate sporting signs saying: „No glass, No BYO Alcohol“. Just great! It's a tiny bit difficult to hide 24 bottles of beer in a backpack.

After one hour of sitting close to the gates we had finished 12 bottles between the two of us and then it happened: One police patrol came by saying nuthin', then another one saying nuthin' and the third one then loomed as huge shadows over us (Yeah, finally some shadow! Shit!), asking if we are aware of the fact that this is an alcohol restricted zone for about an hour by the time. Erm, no? Anyway, we had to somehow get rid of the rest of our booze as fast as possible to avoid a charge. So what did we do? We sold it to the next best group of idiots for a marginal total loss of $3. These guys must hate us now as on entering the event area we could just see how our patrol went up to them with a big smile on their faces. Such is life ...

At nine we had our first fireworks as they seem to use every kind of excuse to show off their pyrotechnics. This time it was the beginning of the new year in a time zone lucky enough to be first one to trade the 7 for an 8. Hours later I was busy spilling my wine over other people's feet during group picture posing sessions (there is brilliant footage of that *g).

Then it became very, VERY LOUD and it was officially 2008 in Sydney as well. Both the fireworks were quite nice but honestly not as amazing as I expected them to be. Possibly because of the blown off fireworks factory I mentioned earlier. Yet the people around as went absolutely nuts every time something fired off the bridge, meaning from directly above us. Loonies!

Sometime later we and thousands of other people were cattle-walked across the bridge back to our side of Sydney, which was a bit shitty. Try to enjoy a magnificient harbour view when you get an elbow in the kidneys every 10 seconds ...

Altogether it was quite a nice and fun NYE: Celebrating the new year completely shitfaced at the other end of the world right in the middle of a giant family BBQ while my friends at home are still busy rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.