← PreviousA quiet exploration: snorkelling, white sand and relaxationWWOOFing was an excellent idea to begin with. In exchange for a few hours' work, your host gave you food and board. It was the perfect compromise to buy time without losing too much money. But like all good ideas at the outset, we'd later discover it was widely misused for exploitation. With these thoughts, we arrived in Townsville and saw from afar the huge rock that dominates the town's landscape.
So we drove up the aptly named Mount Stuart and treated ourselves to a superb sunset over the whole town. After a fairly simple meal in an overly noisy pub, we found a dimly lit lane to park our bed on wheels and try to get a good night's sleep. We continued our mad dash north, more precisely towards Cairns, our goal. The next day we left the coast road to see a waterfall — and not just any waterfall, but the highest in Australia. With a 268-metre drop, it roared impressively and seemed never to stop falling. Located at the head of a gorge, the waterfall fed the river below.
We were surprised to see so few visitors at such a beautiful place. A few Australian couples were strolling slowly, but there were no young people like us around. Australia lost its appeal as soon as you moved a little away from the coast. Pushing further north into Queensland, we plunged into farming country. Banana and mango farms spread over entire hectares, so much so that dedicated railway lines criss-crossed the biggest plantations.
We knocked on every door, but the verdict was always the same: "Sorry, we're not looking for anyone at the moment; we're full." Big fences surrounded every farm, probably a sign of the owners' exasperation with backpackers. Every year Australian airports pour out more than 330,000 young internationals aged 18 to 30 on the same visa as us. The overwhelming majority stay on the east coast and crowd into the sunny areas suited to harvests. You could see the result in the big menacing signs at the entrance to some farms citing a biosecurity risk so as not to let you in.
Even on the phone, we could feel the people we spoke to were fed up, and the answers were very often curt. So we seriously fell back on WWOOFing and looked for something on the road to Cairns. A woman quickly got in touch and offered us the chance to help with the jackfruit harvest in Tully Heads. We arranged to come five days later and, with our minds more at ease, arrived in North Queensland's biggest city.
After the small metropolises of Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, we'd expected a city of the same calibre. But Cairns had only dull, grey buildings to offer, worn by time and pollution. The weather didn't help, as the tropical rains had decided to pour down on the region, and it was under grey clouds that I celebrated my thirtieth birthday.