The Elusive Ahuacatl

The above is an Aztec word meaning both "the fruit of the avocado tree" and "testicle". It is the former that I am currently finding so hard to get my hands on. I'm supposed to be picking the damn things, getting paid and getting the hell out of Bundaberg. For nine days my plan has been sabotaged by the weather and, to a lesser degree, by a famous religious holiday commemorating a grisly death.

My bus from Coffs Harbour was expected to take 18 hours, including a stop in Brisbane and a 1 hour change to Queensland time. Although the driver had to take an alternative route at Noosa because of flooding the bus arrived on time: 11pm at Bundaberg bus station. The route of the bus at first appeared quite exciting (Byron Bay, Surfer’s Paradise, Rainbow Beach) but it soon became evident that I wasn’t going to see anything because of the rain which was consistently heavy until it became dark. The only thing of note, sadly, was a big prawn in Ballina, NSW.

After a night in a motel, which set me back $85, I checked into Cellblock Backpackers, which had one bed available. People told me I was lucky to get the bed.

Flame Lilies outside my motel

Cellblock - used to be a cop shop

My linen

I’ve neglected to write anything for a while so now I have to deal with muddled tenses, as usual. Bundaberg is now past tense. So are avocado pears, which is amusing because they concern the title of this post, and I never did pick one in the end!

Bundaberg is a small city with its centre on the south bank of the Burnett River. There is a golf course, a school and botanical gardens on the north but the “CBD” is on the south side. It is, like Horsham before it in my travels, divided into neat, wide grids. It is prettier than Horsham though and has lots of different kinds of trees lining its streets. A lot of the backpackers I met there agreed that it is not a particularly interesting city, but I can imagine living there. It reminded me of Gweru in a way: one cinema, one golf course, one semi-interesting thoroughfare which is gone after a three minute walk. Everybody wonders why Bundaberg is a city at all, which is also the same as Gweru.

The park near the civic centre

The Bundy town hall

Bundaberg has great skies. At the beginning and end of each day the most magnificent array of colours fills the horizon, especially if it has just been raining or if rain is on the horizon. Australia, in general has the best skies I’ve seen, but Bundaberg, perhaps because the city itself is so mediocre, has the most magnificent I’ve seen so far.

Sunset over the Burnett

Burt Hinker, near the bridge

Sunrise on my last day in Bundaberg

The same morning over the Burnett

Every evening fruit bats set off across the sky from their daytime home on the tree-lined north bank of the Burnet. There are tens of thousands of them and apparently they cause the farmers problems. I went down to have a look at them one day (the only day I crossed the river). Although they are inactive in the daytime they are very restless and noisy; like birds, one bat will decide to move to another tree in the mangrove and this sets off a an explosion of bats following suite, screeching as they move. With my shit camera they were impossible to capture.

While the bats flock over the city at sunset in search of fruit, Lorikeets fill the trees of the city centre. Every evening the city is filled with the high-pitched din of a million birds playing in amongst the palms that line the streets.

Not far from the hostel is Alexandria Zoo. It has a strange mixture of domesticated animals and wild ones; turkeys and ducks share the kangaroo pen and a rooster and some goats live with the ostrich. The emus were alone but were locked out of view for some reason.

Aside from doing almost nothing for two and a half weeks I occasionally went for a walk. I crossed the bridge to see the botanical garden soon after I arrived.

Bundaberg's main bridge, built around 1910

Marvelled at the spiders and their prey...

The botanical garden had a stupid little train going round it.

This real one, about to cross the Burnett, had about 80 carriages

Another walk took me to East Bundaberg where the light industries are located; the famous Bundaberg rum distillery especially.

Where the distilling gets done, I suppose.

From what I gathered in my two and a half weeks there, Bundaberg is a hub that serves a vast agricultural community. They seem to grow everything in the area: sugar cane, lemons, avocados, tomatoes, ginger, chillies, cucumbers, watermelons, teak, macadamia nuts and probably lots of other things. There are about eleven hostels in the city and all of them have deals with different farms to supply casual labour. It is a small industry borne of the government’s working holiday visa protocol, which states that a working holiday visa holder must do harvesting work for three months before they can extend their visa for another year.

The hostels seem to have it good. They dictate ludicrous prices because there is a never-ending supply of backpackers. Some backpackers are crooked and pay a crooked farmer to cook the books but because most backpackers are poor (I’m guessing a lot, including me, would be crooked given the chance) they go down the lawful route. It seems to me that the hostels, despite providing some good services like decent pubs, parties and providing the means for travellers to meet and have a good time, are really the crooked ones. Cellblock was charging me $815 a month for a small rectangular room with two bunk beds in it. I was paying $540 in Erskineville. They also charged $30 a week for transport to the farms (granted you worked 5 days).

$7 jugs between 5 and 6

So at minimum wage ($17 an hour or so) it is difficult to save any money. It’s even more difficult if work never materialises at all. Initially I appeared lucky: a day after handing in my paperwork and paying the $50 workers deposit (another opportunistic tax courtesy of Cellblock) I was on the work list and due to start picking avocados. When I told Alexandria, an Italian architect picking macadamias, that I was to pick avocados he said “fuck you” on account of that being the best job in the place in his opinion.

I dutifully woke up at 4:40am, put on my luminous orange work shirt and presented myself in the bar area where everyone is instructed to wait in the morning. I began eating my bran flakes and noticed that John, the work manager, received a phone call. “Cancelled,” he said blandly to the person on the other side and promptly began scribbling on the page in front of him. My group at Simpson’s was not needed that day.

The next morning unfolded in an identical fashion. We were told then that it was too wet to operate the cherry pickers and we were not needed until after the Easter weekend.

Easter was slow and mostly dull. Reading, playing cards, wasting time on the internet at the hotspot in the little park down the road from Cellblock, wandering around Bundaberg, taking photos, watching TV, sleeping and then all those things repeated again and again. A fancy dress party on Saturday was good fun, however. It rained a lot as well which was obviously worrying.

Appropriately for Easter I was reading the Power and the Glory which is the sort of book you really are sad to finish because you know the next one is never going to be as good. The main character in the story leads an utterly squalid existence throughout, which was useful for keeping things in perspective.

Tuesday came and went: too wet. Wednesday was the same. Thursday (now approaching 2 weeks in Cellblock) seemed to be more hopeful: the list was up and I was expected out in the forecourt at 5am. The sun had been shining the last couple of days so Stella – another Italian, on my team at Simpson’s – and I were slightly optimistic.

Thursday really was the day that I would see the avocado fields for we all boarded the minibus and drove out of Bundaberg into the surrounding farms as the sun began to appear dimly on the horizon. We pulled into Simpson’s. At last I saw the place, and it wasn’t at all what I imagined – it was a rather grim place with a dirty shed with big plastic crates lying in a pile in one corner. Everyone on the bus apart from me had been at the farm before and so they all drearily wandered off the bus into the shed towards a book lying on a stand. A farmer driving a forklift seemed surprised to see us and, exclaiming “fucking Jesus” as he got out of the forklift, rushed towards the minibus and ordered the driver to stop. It transpired that we weren’t working at all – still too wet – and the farmer was alarmed that he might end up with 8 backpackers stuck on his farm if the bus went. The farmer had apparently called the hostel the night before to let them know that we weren’t working but the message had been lost somewhere.

The next day I didn’t expect to work and I worked. I picked chillies for five hours with two French guys (one called Greg), a French girl called Marie, an Irish guy called Des and two other girls, one English and one German, from another backpacker called East Bundy Backpackers. The two Frenchmen talked constantly, mostly in French much to amazement of everyone else simply because no-one knew what anyone could possibly be talking about for five solid hours.

It was satisfying to work at last but this was dull stuff. Chillies take on a surreal form when you handle thousands upon thousands of them.

At the end of the day the bus didn’t pick us up and we were left sitting on the grass by the field for over an hour until our picking supervisor kindly took us home. Happy to have worked at last I had some beers at the bar, which probably cost as much as I had earned that day.

Another weekend had then arrived and another weeks rent was paid. It occurred to me that I was never going to be able to save enough money here to travel to New Zealand and the US. It also occurred to me that I would have to get a loan when I got back to the UK to pay for my tax and for my accountant. So I decided that weekend to get a loan there and then and to stop fucking around in Cellblock. And thankfully it was agreed and on the following Tuesday after much deliberation as to where I should go I left Cellblock. I was due to pick cucumbers on that morning but I never got round to seeing them in their multitude. I also didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to my Belgian friend Daphne.