WWOOFing at WELUV Alpacas

Hello again to everybody all around the world! As you probably know, our first attempt at working here in Australia failed rather miserably and we consequently decided to try out the WWOOFing (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) system in order to relief our travel budget a little bit. So here goes our second attempt at trying to pause our travellers' life for a while:

The farm: WELUV Alpacas (nice wordplay) in Gympie, about 250km North-West of Brisbane, inhabited by 22 funny looking alpacas (I forgot all the names), 10 very shy cows, a dog, Apollo, that rather looks like a sheep and won't walk more than 20 meters per day for fear of overexertion (Ueberanstrengung), 10 very stupid chicken, a baby possum named India who loves to climb Ian's tummy, a cockatoo named Harlin who definitely prefers to sit on a girl's shoulder and loves to pick David, two baby wallabies, Missy and Limpy, who only slept all day long, and, most importantly one sheep, Lambert, who was the cutest of all!


The hosts: Ian and Laurelle, both about the age of our parents, and who finally grew sick of working 24/7 in the city and retired to a calmer country life. However, they have not yet managed to live off the farm and so Ian is out moving lawns for other people most of the time while Laurelle is busy cleaning the farm house over and over again or feeding her baby animals.



The WWOOFers: Angela, Frankfurt city girl, not very accustomed to farm life with animals and everything, not very practical as most of you know, but very inclined to like sheep!; and David, a Vendome country boy, much more experienced in farm and country life, very practical but not very convinced about sheep!


So, you wonder what this mixture ended up to be? Well, we have to admitt that we started out our week there more enthusiastically than we ended it but that is a long story. First, we were very surprised to find a farmhouse so very clean and orderly, it almost looked like nobody was living there at all. It was an amazing thing and nothing we would have expected. The farm itself was beautifully located near a dam, amonst soft hills, and surrounded by stretches of rain forest. I always loved to get up in the morning (around 6) and take my breakfast tea enjoying the view over this calm country and watching the numerous birds of all colors that came to be fed by our hosts.

Our work was not too bad either, even though we ended up working all day long and not just 4 hours as it should have been, which was very frustrating but also our fault because we did not complain. The everyday task was to get together the pu (kaka) of the alpacas and suck it up with a pu-machine. Of course that was not the nicest thing to do after breakfast but usually it turned out to be fun and not difficult at all. Other than that, our big project was to build a fence around a new pasture for the alpacas. This could have been quite exciting, the only problem was that Ian never trusted anybody but himself to do work well and so we only got the boring subworkers' tasks (Handlanger). I also hated the fact that he seemed to think that women are no good for hard work and should rather stay inside. Of course, I didn't stay inside but his attitude made me furious a couple of times; moreover, as it turned out that he was even less practical than I !!! and David usually ended up explaining to him how things worked!

In general, however, Ian was a fun guy and when he had woken up a little bit was usually all right to hang around with. Laurelle, for her part, took it rather badly that we did not agree on her definition of animals being not animals but human beings and that we wouldn't do all the "hutsy-tutsi-toos" that she did when talking to them and handling them. I think she probably started despising me when I refused to continue feeding the baby wallaby after having done it for a day or two. Although I really liked the cute little thing, I just couldn't get myself to talk to it like "oh, what a good girl, what a fine girl, how are we this morning, oh yes, you'll get your milk in a second, oh yes you are drinking like a good girl today, oh, don't you want to make some pipi, see how my good girl is growing, oh give those beautiful legs a long stretch....." aaaaaaaaahhhh! It just drove me nuts and so I fled the house to be out in the sun and do some work in the gardens, like weeding.

We also had some problems with differences in opinion which, after a couple of days made conversation in general a little difficult. Can you imagine me in a household where people consider books (or anything related to culture) a waste of time?!? Yeah, you are right, that just couldn't work out! But seriously, Ian told us that we spent too much time reading and that we were wasting our lives with that!!! Of course, watching 5 hours of highly intellectual TV every night (like RTL news, soap operas, game shows, sensational murder discoveries...) is much better, we have to admitt that! Moreover, the problem was that David and I just would not understand what a chance we had to have come to Australia because that's just the best country in the world and Europe (although our two hosts have never left Australia in their life) is just really, really bad. Why? No idea, but that's just the way it is. We were also very ungrateful as we did not quite value that our hosts gave us the opportunity to see the most beautiful and unique landscape on earth (not that the whole Southern France kinda looks like where we lived, but we'll skip that fact).

Well, what can I tell you? Over time we grew quite tired of listening to the most stupid opinions and conversations you can imagine, to do work that was mostly unuseful because they just couldn't accept us being occupied with reading, writing letters... etc., or eating their terrible food (Laurelle could not cook at all!!!). The worst, however, was that we soon found out that our hosts very truly alcoholics. They started drinking beer out of cans (Ian) and wine (Laurelle) around 10-11 in the morning, kept going all day long (I don't think they know that water is actually drinkable) and in the afternoon around 5 o'clock, they would start drinking their own homebrewed whiskey, wodka, etc. Sometimes, in the evenings Laurelle would not be able to speak clearly anymore and their conversations just got worse and worse.

We ended up doing as much work away from the house and the two of them as possible. We spent the evenings quietly reading or playing cards in our room, and during the few free hours of the day we amused ourselves with dear Lambert, the sheep, who actually even convinced David that sheep can be a lot of fun even though they stink, or on the quad!!! That was truly the most fun, to take the quad and ride through the hills and have the wind blow into your face. Wonderful!

In the end, we did not spent neither a very agreeable, nor a totally terrible time at WELUV but we were very, very happy to get going again and to leave this farm behind! And on we went to Brisbane!