After Tasmania, we took a ferry to the state of Victoria (mainland Australia) where we spent the two weeks before Christmas. We spent a few days in a beach town on the Melbourne harbor, a week at a Workaway in Melbourne’s surrounding mountains, and of course some sightseeing in Melbourne itself!

Seaford

While in Australia, a number of generous friends and second-degree connections opened up their home to us, and that all started in Seaford with John’s friend, Mark! About an hour from Melbourne on the coast, Mark graciously let us crash on his air mattress in his living room for the weekend. John met Mark at a hostel in Japan in 2019 while they were both traveling solo, and this was the first time they had seen each other since. It was really cool that they were able to have a reunion after all that time (and that they let me crash it).

Seaford is a sleepy little beach town with a beautiful coastline. Mark emphasized that there’s not much to do there, but we found a delicious gelato shop and a pretty nature reserve to walk around so we were happy! We spent a day on Phillip Island, which is famous for its nightly “penguin walk” as the local penguins go out to the sea. We didn’t actually stay late enough to watch the penguins, but I hear it’s very cute! Instead, we spent the day at the wildlife park on the island feeding Kangaroos and running away from the emus (they’re terrifying). We also spent a nice afternoon at the Phillip Island Winery where we got some delicious red wine to match our sunburns.

On our last night with Mark, he drove us back to Melbourne and we met up with some of his friends at a bar in the Fitzroy neighborhood. We really enjoyed spending time with people that lived in the area, although they had a few spider stories that didn’t exactly ease our minds about Australian spider encounters. We’re hoping the several beers that preceded the stories were to blame for some of the details.

Melbourne

Since my mom and I had just been to Melbourne a few months back, I had already seen most of the tourist sites. We revisited many of them, but when I asked John what his favorite part of the city was he said “that one weird bar we went to”, so it seems most of it didn’t make an impression. My favorite part this time around was the night market at Queen Victoria market. It was Christmas themed and had music, lots of gift shopping and food vendors.

I’d like to say the weather was better on this visit (it is summer now, afterall) but other than being a bit warmer I have to say the weather in Melbourne is just bad! It would start off sunny then be pouring down rain and cold then have a windstorm then rain some more. Some locals told us it’s been an especially rainy year, but in general this is just typical Melbourne. Sounds a bit too much like Seattle weather to us!

Olinda

After spending an expensive few days in Melbourne, we realized we still had about a week before we needed to be up north for Christmas. With our budget on our minds, we figured it would be the perfect opportunity for our next Workaway! Luckily even with our incredibly last minute planning, we found a lady willing to host us for a week starting the next day. We took the train out of Melbourne to the nearby town of Olinda where we met our host Vita. Olinda is planted on the side of Mount Dandenong, which overlooks Melbourne and the harbor. Vita lives on a ~7 acre property that she calls her “garden”, but the work felt more like slash-and-burn agriculture than the calming flower planting the word garden evokes. But for 5 hours each day we gardened as hard as we could in exchange for free accommodation and all of our meals. “Make sure your hosts show plenty of pictures of their garden so you know what you’re getting yourselves into,” Vita told us unironically.

Our accommodation was pretty unique – we stayed in Vita’s uncle’s house (he now lives in a retirement home) which was about a 10 minute walk from her house, so we had the entire place to ourselves. In theory that was very nice, but the house itself was honestly kind of scary. It was huge for one thing, but most of the rooms just had boxes and old furniture so we didn’t really venture into them. It was cold, overgrown with bushes and vines, covered in black mold, decorated with torn horror movie curtains, smelling of Vita’s uncle, and potentially haunted. “Make sure your host has pictures and describes the accommodation you’ll be staying in. Some of them are pretty scary,” Vita told us unironically.

As for the work, Vita definitely got her money’s worth out of us –

• Day 1 – Christine spent her five hours mulching while John weeded and carried debris to a large pile to be burned. 
• Day 2 – a full day of burning. The property creates so much yard waste that Vita has to burn it because the city won’t pick it up (a fact that she repeatedly told us she hates but feels like she has no choice). So we burned a rather incredible amount of yard waste while we were there, most days having more than one giant burn pile going at a time. Whenever we made an especially large pile Vita would say “yep that’ll go up like a sausage sizzle!”, our favorite of her catchphrases.
• Day 3 – we had the luxurious job of going through a giant wood pile, transferring the wood up a hill, using a hydraulic saw to split the logs, then stacking them in nice piles. We (thankfully) didn’t find any snakes, but we saw enough spiders and scorpions to hold us over for a while.
• Day 4 – Vita had an arborist come to trim back some trees, so we went along with him to pick up branches and debris then carried them to the fire. 
• Day 5 – We were each given lawn mowers and we spent four hours (so eight hours combined) mowing her insanely large property. It was my first time using a push mower, but I think I got my fill!

She let us end an hour early on the last day, we think mostly because she was tired herself. That is one thing we can’t deny – as much as we were working, Vita was right there beside us working just as hard. “Wow, everyday you’ve been here has been really hard work, usually I at least throw in one easy day for the volunteers!” said Vita to us while laughing.

She really did feed us well though – all three meals so huge that I think I actually gained weight that week despite all of the exercise. Our favorite food memories will be using the hot ash piles from our daily burn piles to cook. We wrapped potatoes in foil and put them in the hot ash for about an hour until they were nice and cooked! John also took this opportunity to cook tomatoes on the hot ash in order to make salsa – something Vita had never tried but she became a huge fan and asked John to make it several more times. Our typical lunch was ham and cheese sandwiches, which we found ironic because Vita says she can’t eat pork, dairy, or gluten. “I can’t host volunteers with dietary restrictions anymore, it’s just too hard when people can’t eat things” Vita told us unironically.

Our week, while challenging, was honestly fun and we really did enjoy getting to know Vita. She definitely has her quirks, but she was so warm and kind and made every day more entertaining. She is also the first Australian we’ve met that uses “crikey” in sentences unironically, which will never get old. But most importantly she taught us that we never want to own a large piece of land, because crikey it’s a lot of work!

Christine