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Going home

6 July, 2014 by Vicki Leave a Comment

We’re going back to Perth! To live! Yay!

Most people are not aware of just what a… challenge… this last 2½ years have been for me and I still feel no need to dwell on that. It’s enough for now that I’m going home.

I am looking around the house, Frogmore, with a kind of detachment. It is choc-a-bloc with packing boxes and littered with rubbish to take to the tip. I’m contemplating what to do with all the yummy goodness in the fridge and freezer that I’ve prepared with so much love — and time. (My bone broth! My ferments! My sauces! Sob.)

I’m listening to the birds, and I look outside to see them flitting about. It’s an amazing, beautiful, sunny day today and the property is at its best.

View of the rainforest with a blue sky overhead

Taking in the view from the balcony during our last few days at Frogmore.

I’m remembering a time when we intended to stay here for the foreseeable future, and the plans we had for renovations and landscaping and furnishings. It seems so far in the distant past! I remember looking out on the beautiful view and getting a buzz from the sheer privilege of living amongst it. It was a time of hope, but I can only look back and see the journey I’ve undertaken unfold, like a story in a book, and marvel that it happened to me.

Well, back to packing — this time next week we’ll be home.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: FNQ, Frogmore, moving interstate, Perth, Queensland

All God’s creatures

18 April, 2013 by Vicki 2 Comments

I’m sure none of my (few, remaining) esteemed readers will be particularly surprised that it is so long since I last wrote. In fact, it’s been uncommonly fast when compared to my last couple of efforts. While I’d like to say that the delay is because I have been super busy and having a fantastic time, the reality is that life has been plodding along pretty slowly for the most part.

Still, it’s been an eventful few months in its way. Getting used to our new house has been both wonderful and… not so wonderful. Take our first night in the place, for example.

We were fortunate, given that most of our belongings were on the other side of the country, that the house was sold to us furnished. While there was a fair bit that was destined for the rubbish dump, it did at least mean we had a bed in which to sleep. Therefore, two days after settlement, there we were on our big adventure, moving into a beautiful new home.

A new house always feels strange at first and this one was so different to any in which I’ve previously lived, that it was very strange indeed. It looked strange, especially with the unfamiliar furniture. It sounded strange and even smelled strange. (Substitute “musty” for “strange” and you’ll begin to get an idea.) One thing for sure, though — we were very happy to be there, in our OWN HOME.

At some point, around about the time we were thinking of retiring to our strange, new, second-hand bed, I turned on the light at the top of the stairs. (Another strange thing about a new house was learning the locations of the light switches and, furthermore, remembering them for future use.) I was about to head down to the kitchen when something, yes, strange, glimpsed from the corner of my eye caused me to stop and look twice.

“Darling,” I called, casually. “We have a snake.”

Dohn emerged from the bedroom, resplendent in his shining knight’s armour (ok, so, not really) and together we surveyed the strange, thin, curvy, writhing black creature on the floorboards near the (unhinged) doors to the boiler room.

The snake surveyed us back, flicked his strangely snake-like forked tongue at us a few times, decided he didn’t want to be friends, and retreated into the boiler room through a gap in the doors. Fascinated, we watched him disappear from sight, smoothly and silently.

Dohn peered through the glass in the doors but by the time I was game enough to peek too, there was no sign of him. There were, however, a great many shed snake skins left behind at which we could marvel to our hearts’ content.

In due course (which wasn’t very long really as there was very little choice) I made an executive decision. I decreed that, for tonight at least, we would peacefully coexist with our house guest. He didn’t seem to want to be around us any more than we wanted to be around him, and if he kept out of our way then all would surely be good.

The following morning, Dohn opened his emails and found a friendly missive from the previous owners of the house. It was full of the most helpful advice. One of the pearls of wisdom on offer involved the torches they had kindly left for us on the bedside tables. “Do not,” they advised, “open those double doors off the upstairs passageway. An Eastern Small-Eyed Snake dwells within. We used the torches beside the bed if we needed to go to the bathroom in the night.”

Thanks for letting us know before we bought the house! But I’m afraid the reason for the bedside torches had already become painfully obvious.

(There have, as you can imagine, been other occasions but you will be pleased to know that on at least one we were able to courteously escort our undesirable guest through the front door. “I’m sorry, but you’ve outstayed your welcome,” Dohn firmly but respectfully explained. We then barricaded the door with all the downstairs furniture. But that’s another story.)

And so we settled into our strange, new, shared accommodation.

Don’t go outside when it’s wet (which is all the time)

Snakes are by no means the only creatures to cause concern in the rainforest. I had my first encounter with a leech on the day we took possession of the house. We’d met with the previous owners for a kind of handover, and they showed us where our weir (which is our water supply) was located, near the top of our 1km long driveway. We talked for about fifteen minutes there in the rainforest before they headed off on the long, long road trip to their home in Victoria. Dohn and I headed into Millaa Millaa to see our real estate agent, Pat, and pick up the full set of house keys. (Yay!)

I was chatting away with Dohn and Pat when I became aware of a sensation of wetness on my right calf. I looked down to discover that the inside of my trouser leg had soaked through with blood. To say I was alarmed would be a considerable understatement. Trying to disguise my urgency (after all, I was clearly haemorrhaging or miscarrying or something equally traumatic and life-threatening), I asked Pat if I could avail myself of the Ladies room. Closer inspection revealed a small round sore on the inside of my knee, and a lot of blood. Which kept flowing. And flowing. Knowing that leeches, when they bite, release an anticoagulant in their saliva, it was now that I started to think “Aha! Leech…”

I’m unsure exactly how successful I was in my attempt to avoid drawing attention to what would have looked, to the casual observer, as if my heavily pregnant waters had broken in a vicious and bloody gush. (Of course, I am not pregnant, and it was hardly gushing — but never let the truth get in the way of a good story.) My trousers were undeniably stained with the fresh blood running down the inside of my leg.

Back in the car, I informed Dohn of my findings and when we got out again at the Post Office just around the corner, I duly tipped the fat, bloody little slug I found on the floor mat onto the hot concrete. Call it cruelty to one of God’s living creatures if you will. I harboured a secret desire for it to die, die, DIE! When we emerged from the Post Office a few minutes later, however, it was nowhere to be seen so it may actually have lived to tell the tale. There are, after all, two sides to every story.

We continued on our way and an hour or so after that, I stopped bleeding.

Later, after I had recounted an abridged version of this story to Chris, a visiting geologist at the mine, he merely remarked, “And it’s not even the Wet, yet.”

Sigh.

If you want to get really freaked out, do a Google Images search on leeches. Otherwise, just take my word for it that they are some of the least fun things about living in this part of the world — nevertheless they are not so much of an inconvenience as to stop it from being very, very worth it.

Speaking of which, I suppose this is a good opportunity to mention all the wondrous things we see every day, along the driveway and from the balcony. Along with the natural beauty there is amazing wildlife — cassowaries, birds, frogs, tree kangaroos, pademelons, bandicoots, quolls. As I type, a pademelon (the rainforest’s only wallaby) stares up at me from below the balcony. It’s a true wonderland, and the sights and sounds are nothing short of magical.

What? You don’t believe me? Why on earth not? ;-)

Filed Under: Life, Vapour Tagged With: FNQ, Frogmore, leeches, Queensland, snakes, Wet Tropics, Wet Tropics World Heritage Area

A new home in the rainforest

16 November, 2012 by Vicki 8 Comments

It has finally happened. We have found our new home and will be moving in next week.

Whew.

And woo!

It was SUCH a hairy wait for finance. Despite having finance pre-approval, when it came time to finalise the loan there was an amazing drama when the bank (one of the Big 4… grrr) came back to us and said it had come to their attention that Dohn is a director of the company and was therefore self-employed, and had mis-represented his loan application.

This, of course, is the most utter BS ever.

Dohn was absolutely furious at both the bank’s idiocy and the slur on his integrity, but it turned out there was nothing to be done. The bank had declined and refused to look at it again. So it then became a race to find another bank to finance us in the limited time we had left before the property contract became unconditional. We made it, and settlement is 21st November, 2012.

That is next Wednesday! Yay!

Let me tell you about the property. (After all, it is my favourite subject at the moment.) It is 68 acres of pristine rainforest between Ravenshoe and Millaa Millaa, on the beautiful Beatrice River. The third of three waterfalls that make up Beatrice Falls is on our property, and there is a delightful waterhole for swimming, too.

Waterhole

The swimming pool. The other side of the river is Wet Tropics World Heritage Area.

The previous owner is an ecology professor from Victoria who came up for 3 months every year to study a particular type of bower bird, but from all we’ve heard, the list of wildlife the property boasts appears to be boundless. There are turtles and platypus and tree kangaroos and cassowaries amongst many other rainforest creatures.

The property is sandwiched between Wet Tropics World Heritage Area and Tully Gorge National Park, and is classified as “Essential Habitat for the Southern Cassowary”. We were thrilled to see at least two different cassowaries when we took my parents to view the property a couple of weeks ago when they were visiting from Perth. Such magic to be within a few metres of such a magnificent bird! One just sat there and watched while we took photos, then followed us warily at a distance as we moved on, and the other was running down the driveway ahead of the car — so funny and amazing. According to some sources there are as few as 900 cassowaries left in Australia, though no one really knows. What we do know is that at least two are on our property.

House from North East

Our rainforest house.

The house has just two bedrooms but all the rooms are spacious, except the kitchen. The kitchen is enough to make any lover of food and cooking weep — and not for joy. Not that I’ve wept over it. Yet. The house is solid as a rock (the building inspector asked if it was built by a German!) but the whole thing is unfinished (bar one of the bathrooms) and needs a heckuva lot of work. Still, we are confident it will be lovely in time as it’s quite unusual in many ways.

Unusual walls and ceilings in the large master bedroom

The master bedroom is huge and just a little bit different to the average bedroom.

Plus, I’ve always wanted a house with a balcony and with this house I will finally achieve my dream.

Rainforest view

View across the rainforest from the balcony. Just ignore the palm tree and other rubbish in the foreground — that will go.

Aside from renovation challenges, there will be lifestyle ones too. We’ve never lived in rainforest before and haven’t yet experienced a Wet season in the tropics. We’ve been warned about vast amounts of precipitation, and the impossibility of keeping the damp out of the house. We’re told our clothes and furniture will go mouldy. Yay.

The house is fully solar powered, so we will also need to adjust to power limitations. It’s already been quite a Learning Experience to even begin to come to grips with that. There is no possibility of running an air conditioner, and the solar man tells us that while appliances such as toasters or hair dryers are no problem, it’s the constantly-running ones such as relatively low-powered fans that actually drain the batteries. I’m a person who doesn’t cope with heat too well, so I am just hoping it’s not as bad as I fear… but if so, there’s always the waterhole for some temporary relief.

Though we’ve also been warned about leeches…

The water supply to the house is from one of the three creeks on the property (aside from the river) and is gravity-fed. I’m expecting living with that to be “interesting” too.

It is all so exciting!

The most wonderful thing about all this, however, is that now life in Far North Queensland will really and truly begin. I will have my own home again, live a good hour closer to civilisation, and finally be in a position to create an enriching new life for myself.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: FNQ, Queensland, rainforest, solar power, Wet Tropics, Wet Tropics World Heritage Area

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