Stokes Bay’s incred­ible “hid­den” beach

Kangaroo Island is my favour­ite place out of the whole of Aus­tralia.  That this holds true after our exper­i­ence of WWOOF­ing here just goes to show that the beauty of this island is unsur­passed by any­thing else OZ has to offer, and that, on the other hand, our exper­i­ence wasn’t really as bad as all that.

WWOOF stands for Will­ing Work­ers On Organic Farms and is a way of get­ting around the fact that one may not have a work visa.  The nature of the whole enter­prise is “exchange”, where the “will­ing” “exchange” their “work” for free board and food.  That is a lot of high con­cepts for WWOOF to hold up, so per­haps it is bet­ter to say that while WWOOF­ers aren’t sup­posed to have any spe­cific skills they are also not sup­posed to use their host for free accom­mod­a­tion.  Free­load­ing, the WWOOF­ing guide says, is not in the spirit of the adven­ture.  To become a WWOOFer one simply pur­chases a mem­ber­ship book for AUS$25, which acts as mem­ber­ship card, list of hosts in that coun­try and a set of guidelines for the scheme.

The main guideline is simple.  Half a days work for a full days board.

Pick­ing a host is actu­ally quite hard.  All the hosts have to sell them­selves is a single para­graph out­line of their farm coupled with a quick list­ing of tasks they may ask you to per­form.  This pro­duces WWOOF­ing entries that are not dis­sim­ilar to lonely-hearts adverts in that the host will often try and soften the work, while talk­ing up the accom­mod­a­tion and extras (eg fish­ing).  When read­ing the guides one keeps in mind that many of the hosts are in the back end of lit­er­ally nowhere and you will be all alone and reli­ant on the host for trans­port.  Bad hosts do exist and back­pack­ers all have tales to tell each other about their darkest exper­i­ence.  We heard a few as we made our way up the coast to Cairns.  Stor­ies of back­break­ing work for spider infes­ted cara­vans.  They sat in the back of our minds while per­us­ing the adds, until even­tu­ally I hit on a mod­ern solu­tion; we would only con­sider hosts with a web­site.  No one with a good web­site would be the type of “local” found in “Deliv­er­ance” surely?

Even­tu­ally we had the list down to two and after the first claimed simply, “they had used all their budget for WWOOF­ers”, we were down to a choice of one; Paul’s Place.  We rang Paul and he soun­ded like a nice bloke, so we set a date to be in King­scote and left it at that.  I think 90% of our prob­lems would have been avoided if we had simply gone into a bit more detail in those phone con­ver­sa­tions, we asked all the obvi­ous things of course, but I think I should have asked simply “exactly how many hours will we be working?”

I will def­in­itely ask next time.

Our ferry over from the Adelaide hills was a rough affair but the weather couldn’t dampen my mood.  I really wanted to make a top go of this.  KI was awash with rain. We were picked up on the other side by a small bus which raced us through the night to King­scote at speeds far in excess of R17.

“R is a velo­city meas­ure, defined as a reas­on­able speed of travel that is con­sist­ent with phys­ical health, men­tal well­being and not being more than about five minutes late. It is there­fore clearly an almost infin­itely vari­able fig­ure accord­ing to cir­cum­stances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed taken as an abso­lute, but also with aware­ness of the third factor. Unless handled with tran­quil­lity this equa­tion can res­ult in con­sid­er­able stress, ulcers and even death. R17 is not a fixed velo­city, but it is clearly far too fast.”

Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

It turned out that the bus driver was full of the new news regard­ing Paul’s Place and while I clutched to my seat in ter­ror he filled us in on the gos­sip.  Paul had been vis­ited by a few WWOOF­ers recently and one young girl had been a bit put off by the whole thing.  This pricked my ears up.  What had happened?  Appar­ently she had hated it and said she had to go home.  “Had to go home” is the WWOOFer code ones uses to a host when one wants to leave imme­di­ately.  It is basic­ally the best, most invi­ol­ate, excuse you can make.

The driver per­haps sensed my unease and said, “I hope you like snakes mate!  He has a big snake!”

I smiled in return, “Sure I love snakes.… I just hope he hasn’t got any spiders!”

We sped on into the night and our ren­dez­vous with Paul.  Kangaroo Island has zero night life of the human kind so we were dropped off in an empty street.  The driver tried to make up for wind­ing us up earlier by point­ing out the nearest pub if Paul should not arrive and wished us luck.  He turned his bus around and made the jump into light speed leav­ing us alone in the rain and dark.

This wasn’t too bad as Paul arrived 1 minute later.

Every­one drives fast on Kangaroo island and Paul was no excep­tion.  His car was warm and clean and I star­ted to relax.  I was sure we would do ok here.  We stopped at one point to dig up a “white ants” nest (Ter­mites) with which to feed the Ech­idna’s.  This was the first of many new things I learned from Paul.  He explained the situ­ation thus: his fam­ily were cur­rently on the main­land due to a very ill rel­at­ive, but he needed to get on with the busi­nesses and so he still needed us.  He had stopped using WWOOF­ers a few years a go but had star­ted the whole enter­prise back up after he had nearly been killed by a very nasty snake bite.  The recov­ery of the bite was long and he found him­self weaker and more tired than before.

I have remarked since that if this is the case then he must have been bloody Super­man previously.

We arrived at our home for the next two weeks and all wor­ries about the qual­ity of the accom­mod­a­tion van­ished away.  The Waves and Wild­life huts are simply stun­ning.  The loc­a­tion is top class and the qual­ity of the huts is best described as bril­liant.  They con­sist of a stu­dio style room with a com­bined kit­chen and sit­ting room that led off into a very nice bath­room and also to a well appoin­ted bed­room with a good double bed.  After two months of back­pack­ing around I was simply unable to speak through joy and just stopped to smile at Cesca.  Paul smiled and told us he would pick us up at 10:30 in the morning.

We slept peace­fully that night and I dreamed of home.

Morn­ing wel­comed us awake.  The view from the Waves and Wild­life is over the cliffs above Stokes Bay and out to the sea.  This lends itself to an amaz­ing view of the sea between KI and the main­land.  Slow mov­ing weather fronts gift the pho­to­grapher the most amaz­ing vis­tas to cap­ture and Cesca didn’t hes­it­ate to par­take with her Canon cam­era.  The other spe­cial thing about these huts are the afore­men­tioned wild­life.  The entire grounds are fes­tooned with Kangaroos.  On the first morn­ing I coun­ted two score eas­ily. Bliss.

Paul picked us up and we trav­elled over to his place about 4K along the road.  The typ­ic­ally ter­rible KI roads win­ded up the hill until we turned into his long drive and down along the pub­lic area of the farm towards the large house over­look­ing the grounds and indeed the stun­ning view along the coast­line.  Paul’s Place has been a life’s work for Paul.  Every single stone in the hun­dreds of meters of wall have been placed by Paul him­self.  Fur­ther all the work on the half fin­ished house is being done by hand.  His hand.  The size of the pro­jects he takes on is daunt­ing.  Just the house alone would take years and has indeed done so to get to this stage.  This is des­pite some nasty set­backs such as some fall­ing trees and roof dam­age.  The upshot is that, mag­ni­fi­cent as the house will be one day, that day is nowhere in sight.

The sanc­tu­ary area in front of the house and lead­ing up it is in bet­ter con­di­tion.  6 or more very large caged areas and avi­ar­ies sur­round a cent­ral view­ing court­yard with benches.  The view was only slightly ruined by the recent storm dam­age, which had over­turned three trees in the yard.  In fact clear­ing up after this was much of the work we per­formed for the first few days.  Start­ing with raking/sweeping the yard.  I actu­ally quite like sweep­ing, it is mind numb­ing work and leaves me plenty of time to think about things.  Sure, the most com­mon thought is “I wish this would end”, but none the less.  This was to pre­pare for tour­ists or “tours” as Paul calls them.  He has a dif­fer­ent voice for these.  A kind of higher pitched chirpy bon­homie, which cap­tiv­ates the tour­ists, but I know it is not his real voice, his real feelings.

The pro­ced­ure for Paul’s Place depends on which day of the week it is.  On altern­ate days he opened the farm to the pub­lic for two hours.  This small and nar­row timetable seemed to do noth­ing to dimin­ish the vis­it­ors.  Even though it was “winter” there were 15+ on most days await­ing a tour.

Set­ting up for these tours involved bring­ing in the anim­als from the main pen.  Such furry friends as kangaroos, sheep, a calf and an alpaca.  This par­tic­u­lar alpaca beast, and beasts they are, imme­di­ately hated me on sight.  As I shooed him towards the gate, with everything else all hop­ping; trot­ting and mov­ing nicely, he just stood his ground.  “Com­mon!” I shouted.  He didn’t move.  “Move it!” I motioned.  The alpaca moved towards me men­acingly and raised to his full height of 6 feet tall.  He then spat at me aggress­ively.  I reeled and ducked.  I had seen a Camel spit at someone once; a mag­ni­fi­cently fired vol­ley of grass the size of a golf ball that smacked the offend­ing per­son straight in the eye almost knock­ing them off their feet.  How­ever, the alpaca’s spit never made con­tact it was just a loud sound.  In fact over the next two weeks I was spat at every day (just like being back in Lon­don then) until even­tu­ally the alpaca gave up with spit­ting and tried to eat me.  It was a hate hate relationship.

Jenna, Paul’s young­est and most play­ful dog.  More like half gazelle if you ask me.

Once all the anim­als were present Paul would bring in the tour­ists and let them feed the hoard who would all swamp all over them to get to the proffered buck­ets of grain.  This was always highly funny to watch.  Then he would lead them around the enclos­ures to show them the other anim­als on the pens and finally back to the main yard for the two spe­cial items; the snake and the pos­sum.  The snake in ques­tion was a 6 foot long Car­pet Python, com­mon to Aus­tralia, and like all pythons non-venomous.  He was a mag­ni­fi­cent ser­pent and I loved hand­ling him and see­ing the reac­tions of the guests as Paul dumped him onto their shoulders.  Soon it became my job to fetch the fel­low each visit. The pos­sum was a cute but quite tough little blighter that was coddled up in a soft cloth so his claws didn’t scratch any­one.  He was fed almonds and munched hap­pily away while the cus­tom­ers cooed over him appreciably.

Another nemesis, this par­rot hated all men.

All in all Paul had all sorts of anim­als for the tours includ­ing:  kangaroos, sheep, calves, pigs, ponies, many types of ducks, deer, emu, pea­cocks, par­rots, a snake, a pos­sum, two koalas, two ech­idna and a kooka­burra (which laughed when promp­ted).  Some of the anim­als had par­tic­u­lar­it­ies like the alpaca.  Some didn’t like men and when I went near one of the par­rots it would go mad, oth­ers like the galah par­rot hated Cesca on sight.  When this bird spot­ted her in its enclos­ure it would very slowly climb down from its perch and waddle after her.  Like a feathered zom­bie the large white bird would, small step by small step, chase her around attack­ing whenever she got in range.  Even­tu­ally she had to leave the avi­ary and the bird would climb the door to a jib where it would guard from her return.  I found all this very funny until another par­rot took a dis­like to me and I almost got torn to shreds.

One animal I loved were the Kangaroo’s.  Every other morn­ing Paul would have us feed the wild kangaroo’s up at Stokes Bay.  They would all come hop­ping out of the woods to the line of oats we lay on the ground.  The ones at Paul’s Place were also very friendly and soft to pat.  On one occa­sion I was cold and so went and cuddled one for a few minutes to warm up.  I find it amaz­ing that this coun­try can sup­port such a large creature in the wild.  It must be due to the lack of real pred­at­ors in Australia?

When cold and wet in KI cuddle a kanga’!

It was long work that day but we put that down to it being the first.  Paul offered us a beer and then intro­duced us to his “Ute” four-by-four vehicle, which was to be our trans­port around for the next two weeks.  The pas­sen­ger side win­dow was miss­ing so we had to park close to the wall every night to keep the seats out of the rain.  The incess­ant rain was prob­ably one of the causes of our com­ing prob­lems.  Being winter the weather was basic­ally an Eng­lish sum­mer.  That is it rained on and off as the wind blew all through the day.  More than a few times we sheltered from the rain in the ute, stra­tegic­ally pla­cing it away from the winds dir­ec­tion to make up for the lack of window.

This all sounds some­what idyllic up to now and per­haps it was.  The good times were very good, but the bad were very frus­trat­ing.  The bad seemed to come along with lots of bad luck and Paul’s moods.  They star­ted in earn­est right from the begin­ning.  Paul has the mana­gerial method of pre­sum­ing that you are com­pletely use­less at everything and that whatever is your nat­ur­ally inclined approach to any prob­lem is not as good nor as obvi­ously per­fect as his.  This extends to the smal­lest level ima­gin­able such as the right way to rake a yard, how best to shovel shit (lit­er­ally) and even how to carry fallen branches.  This was micro-management on an obsess­ive level.  It was coupled with a gen­eral grumbling moan about almost everything we did.  We really tried hard to do things quickly and cleanly but noth­ing eli­cited a “thank you” or a “well done”.  By half way through the exper­i­ence this had star­ted to really drag us down and prob­ably Paul as well.  This was coupled with the hours.  We worked from 10:30 to 12:30 and 13:00 to between 18:00 & 20:00.  That is a lot more than half a days work.  It is work­ing full time.  And what work were were doing?

The good:

• Animal feed­ing (mainly a little baby lamb)
• Tour­ist help. Such as run­ning horse rides.
• Animal catch­ing.  Two emu escaped and it was fun catch­ing them.  Unfor­tu­nately we arrived back to find one had died of fright.

The OK:

• Burn­ing.  Set­ting large fires of fallen wood.
• Fen­cing.  Put­ting up curly plastic fen­cing around a new paddock.
• Chain­saw­ing.  Cut­ting up trees.  Unfor­tu­nately I not only broke the chain­saw (which I fixed I might add), but I also cut down the wrong tree limb due to a con­fu­sion about Paul’s instruction.
• Wool pack­ing.  Pack­ing wool into trans­port bags.
• Tree plant­ing.  The plant­ing of a row of trees up by Stokes Bay, which was not fun in the high and cold winds and we worked in hats and gloves with frozen hands.
• Koala leaf col­lec­tion.  The cut­ting of leaves for the furry wonders.

The Ugly:

• Stone pick­ing.  Pick­ing up stones from a field and dig­ging up the biggest ones.
• Rock mov­ing.  Mov­ing build­ing rocks from one end of the farm to the other.
• Con­crete mix­ing and car­ry­ing.  Cesca was a dab’hand at mak­ing con­crete and she cer­tainly got practice.
• Stump pick­ing.  Pick­ing up nat­ur­ally occur­ring wooden stumps from a large paddock.
• Tire chan­ging.  The ute tires were com­pletely worn and we had three punc­tures in the two weeks.

Cesca mixes con­crete under the bale­ful eye of Paul, bak­ing skill com­ing in handy!

The Ter­rible:

• Brush cut­ting.  This is the col­lect­ing and bail­ing of brush for the mak­ing of fences.  This was wet, hard work, which involved being out in the wilds of the bush and col­lect­ing as fast as pos­sible.  After a day of this and 40 bails of brush (aim­ing for one every 6 minutes) my hands were cut to shreds. After car­ry­ing them to the ute, my knee that was still strug­gling from a very nasty injury in Cairns, ached terribly.

On more than one occa­sion Cesca asked me if we could leave as she found Paul’s instruc­tions light in detail and his remon­stra­tions, when we got it wrong, very wear­ing.  I wanted to stick it out.  I felt sorry for Paul.  He was all on his own up at that, at best, half-a-house, with his fam­ily away at a deathbed of a rel­at­ive.  He had three com­pan­ies to run and only two new­bie help­ers.  He was tired, lonely, sad and moody all at the same time.  I was sure that in dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances he would be a happy fel­low and we would all get on famously.

Has it stopped rain­ing?  Back to stump pick­ing!  (right) The col­lec­ted stumps

We were determ­ined to make a good end to the exper­i­ence and we really put our backs into the brush cut­ting even­tu­ally run­ning out of day­light and hav­ing to walk out of the bush in the pitch black, which Cesca REALLY didn’t enjoy.

Alone in the bush!

As the end of the exper­i­ence drew near we had a little thing to look for­wards to as Cesca had arranged for us to bor­row the ute and go around the island for a day.  That morn­ing we were bright and happy again.  Not only would this exper­i­ence soon be over, but we felt that yes­ter­days brush effort had earned us a little in the credit column with Paul.  Cesca, hap­pily won­der­ing where we would go first, pulled the ute out of the drive and rammed the front into the hut rip­ping the gas exhaust vent clean off the wall and dent­ing the out­side panels.

The dam­age was dam­ming and Cesca was very very upset.  I could only ima­gine what Paul would say and I felt she had had enough from him over the weeks we worked so I made a silent decision.  As we drove up his drive I could see her get­ting very stressed at what he would say to the point she shook.  As we got out of the ute she stopped to take a deep breath and I took the chance to run in and tell Paul that I had caused the dam­age not Cesca.  There is not much else a hus­band could have done.  He was not happy but he didn’t shout.  I hung my head in shame, even though I hadn’t caused it myself “Team Bell” were respons­ible and our fate here was sealed.

We went around KI that day (another post per­haps as this is long) and had a great time. We even bought him a new tire for the ute to make up a little for our part in the atmosphere.

We arrived back to find Paul mel­an­choly and we all sat down and got drunk together.  He chas­tised me for my “shock­ing driv­ing, truly shock­ing!” but I was too tired to say any­thing.  By the end of the night I think we came to an under­stand­ing between us that at least the worst was behind us now and I left him a credit slip for the damage.

The next morn­ing Paul picked up and we drove back to King­scote.  He was con­cili­at­ory on the way and even apo­lo­gised for any grump­i­ness he had exhib­ited over the last few weeks.  We were more than happy to bury the hatchet and we all hugged before he left.

After he left Cesca and I hugged again.

And that was that.

Suf­fice to say, bad luck played as much of a part in all this as fate. We had really tried to get things right with Paul and put in a large effort. Had the weather been bet­ter per­haps we would have done dif­fer­ent work.  Had Paul’s fam­ily been there he may have been hap­pier.  Had I cut down the right tree…  Nev­er­the­less WWOOF­ing was not to blame here, only the humans who work within its struc­ture.  I will never WWOOF those sort of hours again.  I will not stand for it regard­less of the out­come and I will per­haps try and bury the hatchet a little earlier rather than let sim­mer­ing resent­ment fester between us and host.  .  I really did learn a lot of things from Paul, albeit some very pain­fully, and I will take those skills onwards through my life.  In that sense I don’t regret our time at Paul’s Place.

There’s WWOOF­ing for you!

Regards,

Basho

I will write another post about the amaz­ing KI and our day around the island, it was a great time.

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