Day 14 – Thursday 18th November - “The property itself was a nightmare, there was me thinking that we were just going to be just pulling up some weeds and planting some flowers”

Had to get up at 5:30am!!! So unbelievably early, didn’t even bother to have a shower because I’d just be getting dirty gardening again anyway. I’d also forgotten to make a lunch as well, I was so unprepared and I still wasn’t even positive about my journey over to North Sydney. Turns out I got there early in the end anyway, I suppose that’s a good thing though.

I thought it was just going to be me but there were 3 other boys in the car as well when I got there. The bloke we were working for (Peter) was an interesting man, very social. Because we had such a long journey ahead of us before we got to the place we were working, he was keen to hear about all of our back-stories. Out of a pure coincidence all 4 of us were a very multiculturally spread workforce. One was from California, one from Botswana and the other from Sweden.

Peter equally had quite a story himself as well. He had been a Vet for 20 years and had travelled a lot in his life; I suppose he did earn quite a lot of money though. Funnily enough he’d even lived in Newport Pagnell for a year.

The View

When we finally got to the site, it was right out in the sticks on the Newport Peninsula, about 45 minutes North of Sydney near Whale Beach. The views from the house were amazing and it was so quiet. The quietest yet considering I’ve been living in the heart of the city.

The property itself was a nightmare, there was me thinking that we were just going to be just pulling up some weeds and planting some flowers. I couldn’t have been any more wrong. Landscaping would have been a better description of what we were doing rather than gardening. The land around the house was huge and so overgrown. Between all of us we had to cut down like a million trees, bushes and stubborn weeds. The 30-degree temperatures really weren’t helping the fact that I’d never worked or sweat so hard in my whole life.

Piling Up

Half way through the day, productivity was already dieing off and we were thinking that Peter was probably going to call it a day. He asked us what we wanted to do. We were all keen to carry on just because it was a one off. Although I was one for, I saw the money and thought it was better to stay out when I’m already out. Because of this consensus he then moved us around to the back of the land (I’m going to call it land because there is no way that it could be considered to be a garden) to carry on with more back breaking work.

Whilst I was working really hard on my own in a particular area of the clearance process, suddenly, out of nowhere I felt a shooting pain in my ankle, I’d been bitten by something. I hadn’t seen what it was but when I looked down to see what it was I saw a spider nearby on one side of my foot and a red ant on the other. I had no idea what had bitten me but it really hurt, I’d never really looked into insects or read up about what ones you should avoid and what they look like.

Crazy Spider which I punched to death

I hobbled to the house with plenty of haste and the tenant was out in his garage. I told him what had happened and he went to get some Insect bite cream, he didn’t seem massively worried. I was the contrary, for all I knew at the time I could have been dieing and was pretty worried. I put some of the cream on it and he said to keep an eye on it. It hadn’t done anything bad yet and wasn’t swelling up or changing colour, which was a good thing.

It was a schoolboy in the first place to have worn shorts, but the fact that I thought I was actually only going to be gardening, I had no reason to believe I would need jeans. Especially when you associate working in the Australian heat, you assume you’re going to be hot and sweating to death.

Clearing out Palms from a hill

Luckily, I’ve survived and have been able to write this now so I am still alive, so don’t worry. If you actually was?

I’ve learnt from mistakes, but it still was the hardest day of my working life. Even near the end of the day we were still dragging branches as big as the world down the road and piling them up.

I find it really hard to come to terms with making good money by working as hard as I did.  This is mainly because I used to make similar money just by sitting on my arse all day pushing a mouse. Not a real mouse!

It was Beck’s birthday today so when I got home we all went out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant just down the road. It was the first time I’d ever had Japanese food. The prices were reasonable but the food was weird. I had a tray of about 6 different bowls of various stuff, and it literally was stuff. Tofu? Mussels, Soup, Teriyaki, Raw Fish and Salad with Wasabi.

I blew my head off when I accidentally ate all the Wasabi sauce in one sitting. I hadn’t even realised it was there because it was hidden. It was like eating a whole pot of Horseradish in one go, everybody laughed at me for ages. Put me off for life.

One other issue. Chopsticks. Why did they take the knife and fork, which is an advanced culinary technology and make it worse. It wasn’t broken so why fix it? Which they didn’t

Went to the pub afterwards for some drinks. The video below is a incredible moment where a drunk bloke is not able to walk.