slips all the way

Owning a car has advantages and disadvantages. I've already enjoyed the advantages and it's time for the worse part: renewing registration aka. Rego. Finding required information to renew registration could take hours of surfing between websites. To make things more complex, I have to do everything interstate - registered in nsw, car in qld - and as long as nsw and qld doesn't have common register for cars I can't do it locally.

Secondary, prices are quite expensive: annual ctp policy is around 850$ and motor vehicle tax ~300$. Fortunately I need it only for half a year which lowers the price to half. In my opinion it's worth it though.

past week

Couple of days ago I finally got rid of propably worst rash ever, mango rash. I had a few different treatment methods but only one worked.

You may try protective silica gel, antihistamines and long sleeves to protect developing mangorash and it's good idea. However if you are unfortunatr enough or not careful, don't spend a fortune for pills. I tried antihistamines, hot water and 1% hydrocortisone but neither really helped. Instead, buy soapless wash for less than 10$ from local farmacy and use it with cold showers. It took only 4 days for me after switching to this treatment =)

pictures of mango picking

Prime ripe Kensington pride and R2E2 -varieties, to be eaten :p

Yummy, unless you eat heaps daily...

(De)sapping spot. 7500 mangoes per person×2=15000 per day =)

Packing lines.

Mangoesmangoesmangoes

Past week: 

5:50 am - wake up, brekky and pack lunch and apply hydrocortisone for iiitchy rash

6:35 am - pick up 4 workmates and drive to farm, 20 mins drive

7 am      -  day begins: picking mangoes, 20 mins break at 9 am

12 am    - lunchbreak, 1 hour

1 pm      - sorting mangoes in a shed (1st picture)

4 pm      - break, 20 mins

6 / 6:15 pm - day ends

6:40pm - (groceryshopping)shower, start preparing lunch for the next day

~7:40 pm - dinner, freeze waterbottles and relax

~9pm - more hydrocortisone, go sleep

Sorting mangoes:1st, 2nd class, juice and 

At the end of the day, the results are thousands of mangoes

Fruitpicking

 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.