Days 471-477! Wow… in a month I’ll be on a flight heading to the US! And this week I’m finishing up my 88 days of farm work!! Time freaking flys! I also got plenty of studio time in and made good progress on the EP I’ve been working on. Andddd I was visited by a familiar face at the start of the week too!

I started my morning on Thursday, April 17th with a great surprise! The schedule for the music festival Bonnaroo finally came out! The lineup of the festival is incredible and I knew that there’d be conflicts between artists I want to see… which is the only downside to music festivals.

Thankfully there weren’t too many and in just a couple months I’ll be in Manchester, Tennessee with groop Flavortown having a blast!!

I couldn’t take a super long look at the schedule, as I needed to get to work. This week I’d be working a lot by myself again, since the farmers and their family were on vacation (or holiday as they call it here).

When I arrived, the farm was still pretty flooded! Last week, Glen had worked on pumping the water out of the farm before they left and I had to go on a round about task to get a smaller pump working because the water came right back. But it did appear to be ever so slowly going down!

I spent the day continuing supporting trees throughout the farm, mentally and physically of course. I’ve actually made good progress throughout the entire farm and had started up on the last two sections that needed the screw support system!

…which means I’ve screwed about 5-6 thousand trees so far to the metal support wire. Quite a few…

After work I stopped by the grocery store and then hurried home because I had a couple visitors coming into town today!

My friend Sammy, who I stayed with his family in Melbourne (and he’d visited me before), came into town to hang and also brought along his girlfriend Mia this time too!

They were on a roadtrip for the holidays and heading up towards Byron Bay, so they stopped through Yamba for the evening and night.

We went to Convent Beach for a nice swim and bodysurfing! And then we met up with my friend Max at BRGR Spot for dinner. Max and I already had plans to hang out tonight so it worked out great!

After dinner, we went across the street to the pub to have a couple beers and play pool! While we waited for the pool table, we played a card game using Spanish cards. The only other time I’ve used Spanish cards was in Koh Tao and my friend Hector introduced them to me! They have different suits than regular playing cards that resemble taro cards and also the decks don’t have as many cards as well.

What’s kind of wild, is that it’s been pretty much a year since Sammy and I met in Thailand! It really doesn’t feel that long ago, but I’m glad we’ve stayed in touch! It was a really fun night and I’m glad I got to hang with Sammy one more time before I left Austrslia. But, I had to go to bed on the early side since I still had work in the morning!

Friday, April 18th was another lonely day on the farm. I started the day screwing in the support wire to the trees, but I got a call midway through the morning from my boss suggesting I switch over to picking up nuts since there were storms incoming. So, I hitched the mobile nut hopper to the Ute and took it out to the farm.

I took it to the (hopefully) driest section of the farm, section K. There were soooo many nuts to pick up, it was taking me forever to get through the rows. Not only were there so many nuts, there were A TON of mosquitos.

While collecting the nuts, I noticed that the inside of some of the shells looked really cool! They looked like a piece of art, like a painting.

I thought they were very pretty!

I spent the rest of the day (post work) relaxing and playing guitar. I wanted to get ready for my upcoming studio session and make sure it would be a productive one!

Also, I had to of course get up early for another workday.

Saturday, April 19th was a beautiful fall day out on the farm! It was nice and sunny with a crisp breeze, the perfect working conditions to continue collecting nuts.

I got through another couple of rows and then mowed the ones I had finished up. While mowing, I saw my first snake on the farm! I didn’t get a good picture of it, but it was an all slim black one around 2-3 feet long! It wasn’t very thrilled about the mower and went slithering off into another row.

Only a few more days left of farming and then I’ll be able to check off the box that I did my 88 days for my second WHV! If I so choose to come back.

The afternoon was another windy one which meant no surfing… I hope I can get at least one more surf session in before my time in Yamba is done! But if not, I have some surfing to look forward to this summer (hopefully)!

I woke up on Sunday, April 20th to a very drizzly, foggy morning. It made me a little concerned I might not be able to work, but I drove to the farm anyways just in case!

The fog wall disappeared on my drive as I neared the farm and I was met with another sunny day!

I again spent the work day collecting nuts and by this point, the hopper was already over halfway full! There were so many nuts to be picked up and the process was taking forever. But it is part of the job as a macadamia farmer!

I took a break to FaceTime my parents! I’d been working so much, I hadn’t had a chance to call them when I wasn’t on the farm. So I took the time to do it during the work day!

As always, we caught up on life and the many adventures we’re all having! It’s nice chatting with them every week but what’ll be even nicer is spending a bunch of time with them in person in just under a month now!

I continued on collecting nuts and finally finished up work for the day.

After work, even though it was too windy to surf, I wasn’t going to avoid the beach today! I got home, threw on my swim suit, and biked to Pippi’s for a swim. The water was full of rip currents and there weren’t many waves to body surf, so I walked over to Convent Beach to test my luck there. It was pretty much the same, just less crowded. So I swam for a bit more and then just sat by the ocean as the sun set.

Monday, April 21st brought another day of nut collecting out on the farm. The days are winding down on my time on the farm and I only have a few days left! Unfortunately, they’d mostly be raining on and off while I worked.

Nonetheless, I kept chugging along picking up nuts and collecting them in the hopper… but today, one of the wheels on the mobile hopper was really flat!

It wasn’t holding air, even after I filled it up, but I was told to just keep using it since it should be fine until Glen gets home.

It was nice and rainy when I left work, so I ended up just relaxing at home again for the rest of the afternoon and evening. A pretty lowkey week post work so far!

I’d been working nonstop for the past (almost) two weeks! So I decided to take Tuesday, April 22nd off from work. That didn’t stop me from getting to work on something else though and I made my way down to Maclean to work on the EP I’ve been producing with Jack!

We continued working on the 3rd song (out of 5) of the EP and made a lot of headway on it! It’s starting to sound really cool! As with the other two songs, it’s been a really amazing process seeing the song go from acoustic to a full song with multiple instruments, harmonies, and sound effects.

I may be a bit biased, but I think the songs sounds pretty good!

We worked through the morning and then Jack was kind enough to whip us up some spaghetti bolognese for lunch! And then we kept at it in the afternoon. I went back home to relax and listen to what we created on loop so I could have notes for our following session the next day!

Wednesday, April 23rd was here, another week of traveling in the books! What I didn’t realize though, was today was going to be my last day of farming!

It was another day of on and off rain, but that meant lots of pretty rainbows!

I spent my last day on the farm supporting another handful of rows of trees. The rain was annoying, but when the breaks in the rain would come, so would the sun, so I’d dry out just in time to get hit by another rain cloud.

After lunch, I helped Aly guide the tractor’s forklift into the macadamia nut hopper and we dumped all the nuts I had collected over the past week into the truck bed where they’ll stay dry.

It kept on raining on and off in the afternoon as well. However, it brought with it a rainbow I’d never seen before! It was directly on the horizon so it looked like a sunrise/sunset rainbow! I thought it looked pretty neat.

At the end of the work day, Aly drove me and dropped me off! Which unfortunately meant I was back to being car-less… BUT I was finished with my 88 days of farming!!

I have to give a HUGE thank you to Aly and Glen. Not only did they reach out on a whim to a last minute Facebook post asking for farm work… they made sure I was able to get my work days done AND were extremely kind and welcoming! They are the reason I’ll get to come back and work in Australia again, if I want to and even though it was hard work, it was a really unique and cool experience working for them! I never thought I’d work on a farm let alone a macadamia farm in my life… but here we are!

The day wasn’t over yet. I had a studio session planned for tonight. Luckily, Jack was in Yamba with his kids, so he was able to pick me up and drive us all back to his place.

But Elie… how are you going to get back home? Great question! I was asking myself that as well. Thankfully there’s a decent public bus system that runs from Grafton to Yamba and goes through Maclean! So I was able to take the bus back home.

I’ll be using the bus for the next week to get to and from Yamba and Maclean! I’m glad this is an option so I can keep working on the EP before I leave town!

To celebrate finishing farming, I went to BRGR Spot by myself for dinner. Unfortunately, Max was out of town. But I chatted to my friends that work there and then headed over to the pub to hang out with my other friends who were working behind the bar! I actually caught a couple while they were on their break so we actually got to hang out and not just while they were working.

It was raining on and off but I was luckily able to sneak home in between the showers and fall asleep knowing I wouldn’t have to wake up early for another day of farming!

– Elie