Welcome to Paradise

For those of you who don't know WWOOF stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms you work for 4-6 hrs a day in exchange for room and board, and this is one way Lindsay and I hope to travel around Australia and save some money, but also we hope to get away from the party scene of backpacking and hostels and meet some "real" Australians. We decided on the two weeks we first wanted to give WWOOFing a try, we emailed about 20 people and right away got an enthusiastic response from a woman named Sandra. The description of her property sounded wonderful, 157 acres with orchards and horses and landscaped gardens and the final line of her description read "come enjoy a little piece of our paradise". She also told me in the email that she has a swimming pool and that Lindsay and I would have our own "self contained cottage" which for all I know could have meant a shack, and her description sounded lovely but really anyone could write anything they wanted and a farm is still a farm right? WRONG a farm is not just a farm. The place we are having our first WWOOF experience actually is paradise!!

We arranged to meet Sandra (our WWOOF host) at the bus stop at 1:25 pm on June 30th. At 3 pm when she still wasn't there we began to fear that perhaps we had been stranded in the tiny town of Cooroy where we didn't know anyone and had nowhere to stay. A woman at the bus stop was really kind and after telling us WWOOF horror stories of people never getting picked up by their hosts she gave us her phone number and address and said we could stay with her if we needed to. Thankfully within 30 minutes Sandra arrived in a really nice SUV and she was also really nice which was quite a relief. It was about a ten minute drive from the bus stop to their property, we turned off the main road onto a long, steep, winding driveway. Along the driveway Sandra pointed out where they had done the rainforest reforestation, and where their horses graze. When we pulled up to the house I can honestly say I was completely blown away, their whole property is absolutely stunning!! Sandra drove Lindsay and I down to our cottage which certainly is not a shack. The cottage has a veranda that wraps around, a living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. Once again Lindsay and I are sharing a double bed because Sandra thought Lindsay was a bloke and we were couple. To Lindsay's dismay we were also informed of the 10 ft python that lives at our cottage (for those of you that don't know Lindsay has a bit of a snake phobia).

After dropping our bags off at the cottage Lindsay and I had our first test as WWOOFers, carrying a large dining table from our cottage up to the main house. Our cottage is about 100 yards from the house and we had to carry it uphill mind you. We passed the test and got to enjoy fresh squeezed orange juice on the veranda that we actually squeezed from citrus that grows on the property. While sitting on the veranda drinking fresh squeezed orange juice and admiring the views of rolling hills, forests and a mountain I realized that I can probably never WWOOF again because it will never be this good.

As evening approached it became time to feed the colt (that's a baby horse for you city folk). As we were walking up to the paddock we actually saw two kangaroo grazing in a nearby field. This was our first kangaroo sighting in the wild and we were so excited, Sandra sent us to get our cameras and we were so worried they would be gone by the time we got back. We ran to get our cameras and when we were approaching again the kangaroos spotted us and froze, we were sure they were about to bolt, but they didn't hop away, they actually started boxing!!! I didn't know kangaroos really boxed, but I can assure they full on box and also kick a little.

It was such a perfect first impression of where we would be spending the next two weeks, and we finished the day off by helping Sandra make roast pumpkin soup for the next days lunch (with a pumpkin picked from the garden), we also incidentally got the reputation for burning onions, but we were able to redeem ourselves in the days to come. Dinner was a delicious spaghetti bologenese (sp) and we were in bed by ten pm because we had to be up and ready to work by 8 am. If it continues on like this I don't think I will ever want to leave.

Cheers,
Laura