Perth, Australia

With 12 days of farm work completed, and 76 more days of painfully isolated labour required later in the year, I will be spending the next 7 weeks travelling. It feels like an age since touching down in Melbourne Airport last December, bringing an end to 14 weeks of travel around South America and New Zealand, and no matter how much I adore living in the sporting capital of Australia, there has always been a case of my feet itching to get away again for awhile. The first stop in this odyssey around Western Australia, Northern Territory, and South Korea (I appreciate how random that combination of places is) is Perth.

Perth, the capital of Western Australia, has a population of approximately 1.7 million people, and is the second most isolated city in the world (after Honolulu). In terms of cities with more than one million people, it ranks as number one. Perth is geographically closer to Jakarta, in Indonesia, than it is to Sydney and Brisbane. Quite an astonishing fact. Many people who have never been to Australia are unable to comprehend just how enormous this landmass is. My flight from Melbourne took four hours, the amount of time it would take to reach Riga from Dublin!

However, that is where the fascinating facts about Perth come to and end. The city is incredibly unremarkable and did very little to excite me. Even by Australian standards, the city has very little old buildings symbolising its past. Most were torn down in the mid twentieth century and replaced by soulless ugly apartment blocks and more modern establishments. In addition, the city is incredibly quiet during weekdays, and the centre of town has absolutely no buzz whatsoever, unlike Melbourne where there always seems to be something happening on it's city streets.

There were a few things however that caught my interest. Firstly, the beautiful King's Park, the largest inner city park in the world, containing grassed parkland, botanical gardens, and natural bushland, which stands tall above the city's skyline offering impressive views. Another area of interest is the nearby coastal city of Fremantle, which with its relaxed cute streets offered more of a small town feel than neighbouring Perth. The main attraction here is Fremantle Prison, which was recently classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, due to its role as a convict site in the 1850s and 1860s. The tour of the prison was good value and offered an interesting insight into life as a prisoner back in the early days of the mid 19th century right up until 1991, when it closed. It still amazes me when I hear about how harmless some of the crimes were that were committed by the convicts from the UK all those years ago. It does not seem fair that somebody should be sent to a far away barren land, on effectively a life sentence (due to the high costs to return home) for stealing some bread from a local baker!

What Perth proudly possesses however, are the world's strictest bouncers. Anytime (and I mean ANY time) one would like to enter a bar or nightclub establishment a passport must be presented at the door. With the exception of an Australian drivers licence, no other identification meets these punters' high standards. It doesn't matter if you are meeting a few friends at 1pm for a Sunday roast, or Tuesday afternoon for coffee, the rule remains - no passport, no entry. To make matters worse, quite often once you present your passport you then go through a process which seems extremely over the top. Firstly your passport is scanned. Then you are led over towards a camera where the necessary mugshot is formed. Worse still, the bouncers here like to take the law into their own hands, and boot people out of their premises for "offences" that would not lead to any eyelids being batted back in Ireland. If you think the bulky, power-trip seeking gentlemen outside pubs in Dublin are bad, then you haven't seen anything yet!

I very much enjoyed my 6 nights in Perth, but mostly due to getting the opportunity to catch up with friends and cousins from home. As a tourist destination the city doesn't offer a great deal, and lags far behind Melbourne, Sydney, and even Adelaide in my humble opinion.

Tomorrow I set off on a 21 day odyssey with Adventure Tours Australia, which will take me up the isolated wonderland of the West Coast and Top End, to faraway Darwin. The camera batteries are fully charged and raring to go. From what I've been told about Western Australia, I'll be snapping non-stop!

Take it easy.

Farm work in Dunkeld and Alexandra, Australia

After living in the buzzing metropolis of Melbourne for slightly over six months, and getting to know lots of new people, I have made the decision that I would like to apply for a second year working holiday visa, which will give me the opportunity to live in Australia until December 2012. I have had a fantastic time in Melbourne and am not close to being ready to say goodbye to this magnificent city permanently. There is however, one barrier between myself and this rather appealing idea, and that is a reluctant, but necessary personal debut into the world of manual labour!

Yes, the Department of Immigration have set down rules that apply to working holiday visa holders like myself, in which one can apply for a second year working holiday visa, if, and only if, the candidate completes three months (88 days) of regional specified work by the time the first working holiday visa expires. To put that into simple English, it means that in order to stay in Australia for another year, I need to relocate to the sticks and work on a farm in extreme temperatures until my back is broken!

My prior experience of farm related labour is limited, and not filled with much personal glory. About 8 or 9 years ago, while on holiday in South Kerry, on the south west coast of Ireland, I was given a fairly simple, yet important job to do. My dad did the challenging part and spent about an hour gathering up approximately two dozen sheep, leading them towards the gate at the bottom of the field. My task was merely to stop the sheep from escaping back up the hill, and to simply lead them out through the open gate. Frustratingly, my dad's efforts were all in vein, as I was completely caught off guard by a group of these confused animals sprinting towards me quicker than Asafa Powell on the anchor leg for the Jamaican relay team. Let's just say that within minutes the sheep were back where they started, at the top of the hill, and I had proven myself to be agriculturally useless, and have not stepped into a pair of Wellington boots since!

So with my not so stellar repertoire of farm related skills to accompany me, I arrived all bright eyed and bushy tailed into Dunkeld, a tiny, sleepy town three and a half hours west of Melbourne, where I was due to spend two weeks with a local family and help out on their large sheep farm. Everything was going smoothly to begin with. For the most part, the family seemed nice, the home cooked meals were adequate, and I got an interesting insight into life in rural Australia.

However, I found it difficult to hide the fact I was a farming novice, and my attempt to hammer nails into a wooden board was particularly comical. My main task related once again to sheep, only this time I didn't have to deal with these jittery creatures directly. Instead, I was assigned the role of shovelling sheep shit out of the wool shed, an absolutely delightful way to spend the afternoon! The other main chore which I was given involved assisting in the construction of tree guards, which are pretty ineffective wired fences designed to stop ravenous sheep from chewing away at newly planted gum trees. I couldn't help but find the entire process a waste of time. The sheep have broken through these barriers before, on numerous occasions, and devoured the helpless trees in the process. Obviously they will do so again!

Unfortunately, once the day's work was complete, rural life on this particular part of Victoria was not hugely exhilarating. To begin with, the farm is located a thirty minute drive from Hamilton, the nearest town of any sort of significance. Secondly, Vodafone deem the area not important enough to provide mobile phone reception, basically blocking off most of my contact with the outside world. And to add insult to injury, the internet connection was astonishingly slow, and the family had an incredibly low monthly download limit, resulting in a few minutes a day of facebook and email time. It is a sad state of affairs when attempting jig-saw puzzles with the entire family is seen as the highlight of the day!

However, five days into my scheduled two week stay and disaster strikes. The family informs me that they don't have any more farm work left for me as it is a very quiet time of the year. Never mind the fact that this is something they should have been able to foresee in advance, I am now put in a sticky situation with regards getting my planned two weeks of regional work done before I go travelling for seven weeks. As I will be short on time later in the year, the more farm work I can get done now, the less pressure I will have at the end of 2011 to get all 88 days completed. Thankfully I was able to find another place, on the other side of Victoria, that were willing to take me for a week, and the next morning I was out of this dull isolated wasteland as quick as my legs could carry me. Being honest, it was a blessing in disguise. I felt very much in the way of their daily life, especially with it being school holiday time.

After five monotonous days in Dunkeld, where the time dragged slower than a Lord of the Rings movie, I arrived in Alexandra with low expectations. However, the seven days I spent here was an enormous improvement on what came before. Firstly, there were a couple of other backpackers working on this particular farm, bringing a level of banter that was seriously lacking during my stint in Dunkeld. In addition to this, I was made to feel more at home by the hosts, and never once did I feel like I was interfering with their daily routine. In fact I am the 290^th person to help out on their farm, so they are well used to having people from abroad stay on their premises.

This particular place is a little different from most farms. It is more along the lines of a farm stay B&B, with a variety of animals on show in the various paddocks to keep their paying guests entertained. Among the creatures on show are chickens, roosters, ducks, cows, horses, donkeys, geese, sheep, a permanently confused goat, and a few crazy dogs that feel the need to follow you everywhere you go!

My tasks were quite varied. I was responsible for looking after the animals (feeding, locking the chickens and ducks up for the night, attempting to lead a dumb cow back into the field from which it escaped from etc) and the general maintenance of the farm (pruning trees, cleaning up cow and horse shit etc). For such a tiny horse, he excretes an astonishing amount of faeces! We also took a journey to a nearby forest to collect wood (only from trees and branches that had already fallen, so extreme environmentalists, there's no need to worry). This provided me with my first taste of operating a chainsaw. Thankfully it was a lot easier to use than I first anticipated and there are no silly stories to report.

While the last two weeks have not gone as smoothly as I had planned, I am glad to have experienced life in rural Australia and have learned a great deal in this short time. However I still have another two and a half months of farm work to endure before my second year visa is granted. A few days is one thing, but slogging away in the middle of nowhere for an extended period of time is quite a different beast indeed. However that is for another day. For now I have seven weeks of travelling to look forward to. On Saturday I fly to Perth where I will start my adventure up the West Coast and Top End of Australia to Darwin, closely followed by two weeks in South Korea. Excitement is building and I will do my best to keep you all posted on my adventures.

Bye for now.