Day Three - Dungog

Saturday 9th Jan

While driving around today, we stopped at an airstrip to check how much it would be for Christ to fly in an ex-fighter jet: it wasn't even near in our budget unfortunately but it made Chris' day to get to look around them all the same.

Today I began to feel far more despondent as we drove around to more and more vineyards. We were learning quickly that we would need a working holiday visa. Yesterday, it hadn’t crossed our minds and we were positive every time we left a vineyard having put our name on their pickers-lists that the work would be cash-in-hand and ideal for backpackers. Today we found out that the tax men will come after us if we even attempt it! Apparently they make regular checks here in the Hunter Valley during picking season these days, making sure no-one is working illegally.

We don’t regret not applying for a working visa however - I stand by my initial feeling that I don’t want to waste my once in a lifetime one-year working visa for a maximum of 6 weeks work. If it means we have to just volunteer for a few weeks (and holiday the rest) to ensure we can save our visas for a potential future trip, then so be it.

The current situation though was that we’d now spent two whole days driving around vineyards giving our names and numbers and we wouldn’t even be able to work anyway. This made me a little glum and I was eager to just set up camp for the night.

We still don’t really have an idea where we should be heading to camp but since speaking to Di at Cessnock last night, we know that there are ‘free camp’ options around - we just don’t know where to find them. The people at a motel/small information centre directed us to a village called Dungog where they knew of a ‘free camp’ ground. After heading for free wifi at McDonalds to pick up our emails, off we set.

On arrival at this tiny, historic village, Christophe quoted: “I tell you, Australia is somewhat stuck in time”. We'd been driving along the ‘convict trail’ this morning, through quaint little towns like this: Dungog hasn’t changed much since 1820 when the first settlers founded it, it seems! The old bridges don’t look like they’ve been updated and some of the village buildings date back to this time. We soon found the camp ground we were looking for, located right next to a river and with a free tap and toilets. In all honesty, we found out that you were supposed to pay a small fee for this camp ground (at the local Shell garage?!) and this would gain you access also to the showers. But, we didn’t need those…

During our 2008 camping adventure to Corsica and Sardinia, Chris had surprised me daily with a new camping ‘gadget’, one of which was a geeky ‘pocket’ shower which made an appearance again this afternoon! Excellent! Chris filled it with river water and we took turns showering ‘au sauvage’.

We greeted a number of visitors at our new patch - mainly dog walkers and people going fishing in the river below. One character we’ll remember for a while was a tall, muscular, grey haired and bearded Yoga instructor who’d stopped off for an ice-cream and a swim in the river! People are so friendly here, it’s untrue.

Tonight for tea I cooked rice with some tinned beef stew from Aldi which neither of us much liked. A few hundred metres away were some fatty Australians using the free BBQing facilities and blaring Celine Dion’s greatest hits from their car. Amazing…

After dinner, we went on a lovely walk through the surrounding area to walk off that horrid tinned stew...