I have to apologize for my inactivity in blog; though this time I have a good excuse :D which is fruitpicking and packing, in particular mangoes and required me to wake up at 5 am and got home only around 7pm. There's no time for me - as sleepy as I am - to update after work.
After cairns I drove through curvy kuranda hills to mareeba to atherton and found tolga lodge which provided work. However the rent is determined by the hours you work and usually you pay the highest rent, 240 dollars per week! Also they have 300 dollars deposit. In my opinion there were couple of things wrong: too high rent for a backpacker regardless of work and the owner (woman) didn't seem to be very friendly when things were not going well. So I left after a week.
I worked for a week in a mango farm mainly de-sapping mangoes. That means you stand in front of a line taking stems off the mangoes throughout the day. Mango sap is also quite acidic and if not washed off soon enough, it developes burn and rash which usually becomes more or less itchy. I thought that I'm not getting anything but no way! In the second day I had a good burn on my finger =) luckily they had rubber gloves to prevent further dmg. I made fast calculations and found out we produced about 15000 mangoes per day and for one sapper it makes 7500 mangoes. No wonder why you mit get rash. The other nasty things is that at some point your back becomes sore because the movement is all the time same.
