For my week off in Australia, I worked at a bed and breakfast farm in Cow Bay, located within the isolated Daintree rainforest. Travelers are welcome to work there in exchange for housing and food, an arrangement similar to the “wwoofing” experience. The B&B and farm where I worked, The Epiphyte, is about three hours north of Cairns, so I had to travel up the coast from the Cairns airport. The owner, Matt, was swamped with work from the latest cyclone that passed by the area, so he wasn’t able to pick me up or arrange for transport.
My only option turned out to be finding rides along the road. I found my way to the highway, and, before too long, a guy named Jake offered to take me about halfway, up to a small town called Mossman. He turned out to be a classic Australian working dude in his late twenties, full of crude humor, ending most sentences with “Deadly, Mate!” and a crack up of laughter. After he dropped me off and sped off to his next ranch job, I almost immediately got another ride from a nice woman named Penelope. Like me, she was from Southern California, so we quickly became friends and talked the rest of the way to Cow Bay. I gave some attention to her dog, Mia, while she drove us along dirt roads and through narrow rainforest tunnels.
I finally arrived at The Epiphyte. Penelope dropped me off, and, since no one was at the property when I arrived, I took a quick look around. It was a great cabin surrounded by the rainforest with trails that sprouted from its sides and led into the bush. A couple hundred meters from the cabin, I found Matt’s horse, Betsy. After I got a good sense of where I was, I decided to read while I waited for Matt. I sat down on some steps, but, as I maneuvered myself into place, a yellow and black snake slowly slithered by, clearly aware that I was near enough to be considered a threat. I knew then that I had arrived in the kind of isolated rainforest I was looking for.
Matt arrived soon after and introduced me to the place. He showed me the room where I would be staying, and he told me about the work I would be doing. I ended up painting and refurbishing a lot of the interior of the cabin as well as cleaning and performing maintenance on other parts of the property. When I wasn’t working, Matt and I had long conversations about everything from travelling to the environment. He had earned his Master’s degree in sustainable development, and he had travelled the world for years sleeping in a tent or on the side of the road. His life story was incredible. He built the entire bed and breakfast himself, while raising his three kids, and travelling the world as an English teacher. Conversing with him definitely expanded my horizons. When I wasn’t working or learning life lessons, I hiked around the area searching for new spots on the beach (just off the Great Barrier Reef) and for cassowaries, huge, ancient birds who leave tracks like the ones the movie Jurassic Park attributes to dinosaurs. Overall, the experience of living and working in an isolated rainforest near the northern tip of Australia turned out to be more than I could have hoped for. I would like to return one day and renew my conversations with Matt, providing he hasn’t inspired me to camp my way through the Middle East.