When we first arrived in Tully, we couldn’t really imagine ourselves living here. How were we gonna endure 3 months – or more – in this small town!? After living in Sydney and loving life there, moving to a town this small wasn’t really at the top of our plans.

So… why are we here?

We’re doing the necessary regional work in order to get our second year visas. A few months in Sydney were enough for us to fall in love with Australia, and we don’t want to leave just yet. Exploring the East Coast in a campervan only made us love this country even more. A few months ago, our visas got the opportunity to get extended to a second year if we do regional work (in our case, farm work, hospitality work or other types of work – above the Tropic of Capricorn). We were meant to go work in Airlie Beach, next to Whitsunday Islands (aka paradise) but Cyclone Debbie hit and our flight got cancelled last minute. So we decided to go try our luck in Cairns.

We spent 4 days in Cairns, 2 of them looking for jobs (unsuccessfully) and freaking the fuck out, 1 relaxing and thinking about what plan B (or C in this case) would be, and another out and exploring the Great Barrier Reef.

*The Golden Gumboot is Tully’s main attraction: a 7.9 meter high boot which represents the record annual rainfall of 7,900mm in 1950.*

We decided the best choice was to go do our farm work. The very dreaded farm work. We had been very excited about finding jobs in hospitality if possible, but the timing wasn’t right. So… Tully it was! My friend Rita had done her farm work there and had made some amazing friends and saved a lot of money. It was only 2 hours away from Cairns, so on Monday April 3rd, we arrived in Tully, not sure what to expect.

Pablo had called the working hostel ahead of time and they had told him they had a job for him. When we arrived at the hostel they immediately told him he started his job the next day, which was GREAT considering Pabs is the wooorst when he doesn’t have a job haha. I was put on a waitlist and told it would take 2-3 weeks to land a job, which I was ok with. I spent those two weeks going out of my mind, looking for wifi (there’s no free wifi in the hostel), and cursing the insane amount of rain there was (fun fact: Tully is the wettest town in Australia). Truth be told, the first week in Tully I felt lonelier than I had felt in all my time in Australia. I found myself questioning what i’m even doing here. But luckily, after two weeks I finally got a job. I started working at the same banana farm as Pabs, which is great, we got pretty lucky.

It’s been one month in Tully, and it’s already been a life changing experience. We’ve been pushed out of our comfort zones and we’ve learned a great deal about ourselves. So here’s what our experience in a small town in Australia has been like so far:

Hostel Life

We chose to live in Banana Barracks, a working hostel, aka a hostel where you live and they find you a job. On our first day at the hostel, the receptionist told us “Give it two weeks. Some people learn to love it, and some people give up”. So we started living there and tried to stay positive with our living situation for as long as we could. We were living in a small cubicle in a room with 8 other people, the only furniture was a bed, they gave us two boxes to store our clothes, and two boxes with kitchen utensils, which we kept in lockers in the kitchen. The cubicle was one of four cubicles in the couples room (with an extra bunk bed for two other people), and the tops of the cubicles don’t reach the ceiling – so there’s a space – which means we could all hear each other’s farts and sneezes and (very loud) shows & movies 😑 Wonderful. We all shared a bathroom (though the shower, toilet and sink are all in separate spaces).

The living situation in the hostel wasn’t ideal. Laundry costs $4. There’s no free wifi. The kitchen is a mess (there’s about 100 people living in the hostel) and you barely have a small square of space in the fridge.

You wake up in the middle of the night because there’s drunk people shouting & walking into your room at 3am looking for drugs, or wake up in the morning to a couple in another cubicle fighting. And there was always this feeling like we were in some sort of prison 😅

*sunsets from prison were alright (ok fine it’s a hostel haha)*

We could definitely see the appeal some people found in the hostel. If you’re single and love partying and want to find a home away from home, this hostel can perfectly become that. Everyone is in the same situation, working at farms in the morning and drinking their asses off in the evening. But we weren’t those types of people anymore. Being in a couple, it’s a lot harder to meet people, and most of the time we just wanted to get home and be with each other and watch Game of Thrones haha. We do occasionally enjoy going to the pub and having a few beers. We’re not 100% hermits hahah buuut we prefer buying a case of beers and drinking them by ourselves, at a park, having conversations instead of small talk.

*talking bout life and the future and the uncertainty of it all*

3 weeks into our life in Tully, we went to dinner at a friend’s share house. We got to see how people outside of the hostel lived, and it changed everything. She had an epic view from her balcony, a room to herself, a kitchen she only shared with a few people, and FREE WIFI!! So after leaving her house that night, we decided we needed to move out of the hostel, ASAP. We found a place a few days later and it was actually $50 cheaper than the hostel, with free wifi & free laundry. Needless to say, our lives changed.

When you arrive at the hostel, you pay for a week’s rent ($150 pp per week) and a $300 bond, which assures you they’ll find you a job. If you leave the hostel and you keep your job, they keep your bond. This meant we both lost $300, but considering we would be living somewhere cheaper with free wifi and free laundry, it was a no brainer.

The day we moved into this new place was seriously one of the happiest days of my life. I could not stop smiling ALL DAY. I was doing happy dances all over the room. This house is nothing fancy, but it has everything we need. Living in the hostal was good for one thing: making us realize how little we need to be happy:

Our own four walls: it’s great to have our own space and to be able to listen to shows without earphones and to wake up and turn the lights on without worrying about everyone else waking up.
A closet: maybe it’s the clean freak in me but I love having my shit together in a closet instead of a box or a backpack.
A clean kitchen with materials to cook: in just one week we’ve rekindled our passion for cooking and have been getting creative with our healthy meals.
Free wifi: for weeks we spent all our free time looking for wifi, until we found a coffee place, which meant we had to have coffee ($$) every time we sat there (which was way too often considering we needed to download complete seasons of Game of Thrones & then other shows and movies). Not having to worry about our data running out or spending our time searching for wifi was seriously life changing. Who knew wifi was so essential??
Some peace and quiet: going from the noisy hostel to the quiet of being surrounded by nature was one of the biggest perks. Every Friday and Saturday night, the club inside the hostel would have parties (and I would occasionally bartend for them) and the speakers were RIGHT NEXT to our room, which meant we went to sleep late on Fridays & Saturdays even though we weren’t partying. Now we go to sleep with nothing but the sound of rain, frogs and crickets, and wake up to birds and this view:

*found this lil slimy dude in our window before going to bed, he was so chill and friendly! Tully’s full of these green frogs*

Moving to this share house instantly made our lives in Tully better. After moving out of the hostel, we finally felt like we were home. The hostel made us realise we can make a home out of anywhere, buuuut we do have some standards.

Our Jobs

The dominant crops grown in the Tully area are sugar cane and bananas. Pabs and I are both working in a small banana farm (Lizzios Bananas) 20 minutes from Tully.

*only decent selfie I could take with the tractor without getting caught haha*

My job is to drive the tractor around the banana paddocks while the humpers cut the banana bunches from the trees and carry them to the trailer attached to the tractor. These bunches later get taken to the shed, where Pablo hangs them on ropes. It’s a very physical job, and the first week his back was KILLING him. He’s gotten used to it by now and actually quite enjoys it. When he sticks his hand in the banana bunch, he sometimes finds rats and their babies (gross) and he’s even grabbed some snakes (gross and scary).

Once a week, when there’s not enough bananas to take back to the shed, they send us out to the field to do stringing (girls) and de-leafing (boys). It’s pretty fun cuz you get to be out in nature and see lots of animals and listen to music and podcasts. The downside is walking through spider webs all day and sometimes getting spiders on you (I try to be cool about it but ughhhh get off meeeee).

Life in Tully

“TRAIN YOUR MIND TO SEE THE GOOD IN EVERYTHING”

When we first arrived here, we could not picture ourselves liking Tully at all. We made a list of all the things we didn’t like about this place. We found ourselves getting annoyed and feeling negative about certain things. For example:

Everyone knows each other… ugh. Living in cities all our lives, we couldn’t quite get used to everyone’s friendliness and constant smiling. Everyone at the hostel knew each other, everyone at the supermarket knew each other. Everyone smiles at each other, everywhere. Everyone mingles with each other.
There’s basically nothing to do. When we asked people around the hostel what they do in Tully, they usually said “go to the pub and drink”, or “get out of Tully and explore the areas around it”, which didn’t seem very encouraging.
We initially thought we’d work 5 days a week and get done with the farm work in 3 months, but after a few weeks only working 2-3 days a week (sooometimes 4), we started getting discouraged and realizing that we might not get all of our days done before our visas run out.
Mosquitoes. So many damn mosquitoes. I legit killed 54 mosquitoes one day while sitting on the tractor. But who’s counting, right?

After our first weeks in Tully, we started changing our point of view. We stopped pouting and getting frustrated about the things we couldn’t change. We were certain we wanted to go back to Sydney, so we needed to stay in Tully and get our farm work done. There was no point in being negative and annoyed for the next few months, so we decided we needed to start being positive and actually enjoying ourselves.

*how can I not start my day with a smile with these lightshows??*

We started thinking of all the good things about living in Tully. Once we moved out of the hostel, the list of positives grew larger. Yes, some things kept being negative but when we started looking at the positive side of them, we became a lot happier.. for example:

Everybody knows each other… and it’s actually kind of nice. We’ve become the kind of people who nod and smile at every person we see.
There’s basically nothing to do, which means for once in my life I have TIME to do the things I always say i’m gonna do (like writing this blog post). And also gives us plenty of time to relax and be couch potatoes 🙂
Being around nature: I love city life but it’s really refreshing to be away from the city, at least for a while. My job gives me the privilege of seeing a beautiful sunrise almost everyday before starting work. While i’m driving the tractor I get to see some awesome animals in their natural habitat. We go to sleep with the sound of rain and crickets, and have some little geckos living on our window, eating the bugs in the mosquito net (yassss thank you geckos).
We thought we’d work more days & get done with our visas sooner.. and we might not. But that’s ok. We can’t stress about it anymore, because if we do, we’ll go crazy 😅 So we’re “going with the flow” (Pabs hates it when I say that haha) and just seeing what happens!

*not all mornings come with epic sunrises but still so beautiful*

Living in this small town hasn’t been easy. I’ve never questioned my life more than I have this past month. There’s days where we want to quit and just go back home back to a life of comfort and things and friends and family. But we chose to live a life of adventure. We chose to be pushed out of our comfort zones and to learn about ourselves in the process. We’re building character, every single day.

Never in our lives did we think we’d be living in a small wet tropical town working at a Banana Farm as a tractor driver & a banana hanger… but here we are! This is just a small chapter in our lives and I look forward to telling my kids about this one day and them being like “you? driving a tractor? shut up mom” 😂

Our Farm Work Story (Part 1)

Hostel Life

Our Jobs

Life in Tully

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