If we just sat in the tent at each destination, I'm sure these journal entries would be just as cynical and bitchy. Thankfully we occasionally do something stupid, and my moaning can be cranked up to record levels. Ladies and gentleman, I give you - working on a pearling ship.
We managed to find work pretty quickly - the local employment agency has regular positions to inflict upon willing or unwilling employees, I guess we were somewhere inbetween - we need the work, but no one wants to smell of fish all day. Well, I guess there must be someone, but a quick verbal check can confirm that it's neither of us.
Our first morning starts at 4.45am. Apparently there is a 4.45am, I'm amazed too. A quick and miserable breakfast at a picnic table in the traditional sea breeze (gale) with the stars still in the sky (it's not a real job until you beat the sunrise), then we wander off to the company shed, about 20 minutes up the road.
There we meet a couple of our fellow victims, spanning the globe - Germany, Taiwan, Japan, Italy, Korea, and good old Blighty make up most of the crew, with a few sacrificial Aussies - most of them aren't stupid enough to do this for a living.
We are then driven off in a 4x4 by Gaf. Gaf has been doing this delivery service for years. The 4x4 has a collection of seatbelts, but really they're just for show - you simply say a quick prayer and clamp yourself to the edge of your seat as best you can, whilst Gaf heads off on the main road at 120kph. We're not sure how far we're going, but to our surprise we are soon off the tarred road and onto dirt tracks. More surprisingly, Gaf has not dropped below 120kph, and the effect is like kicking yourself repeatedly in the head and groin for 20 minutes.
Then the road gets smaller and we are hurtling along what is just 2 furrows between thick trees on either side, mercifully below 80kph. Then the road stops, and we're on sand. Then the sand stops, and we hit an impressive rock face (Gaf has to engage the 4x4 for this). Then we're on the beach, and just as I'm convinced that Gaf is simply gonna go for it and hit that ocean-looking thing at full pelt, he pulls up, and there we are, stranded in the middle of nowhere. There is a distant sound, and a boat appears at the edge of the bay. We take off our shoes and socks, and prepare to board the dinghy.
At this point, anyone with an imagination will be expecting one of three things:
1. I am whisked off to HMS Classy, where I am briefed by M, given a whole swathe of gadgets by Q, and sent off to fight Communists, whilst surrounded by nubile women.
2. I am hit over the head, bundled into a sack, and wake up in Vietnam, spending the next 30 years of my life saying "Me love you long time" to a series of short businessmen.
3. We are taken to a pearling ship and made to smell of fish.
Sadly, option 3 is correct, though I guess it would be better than option 2. The journey out to the ship is rather a wet experience, and I haven't brought waterproofs with me, so my T-shirt gets rather chilly.
When we arrive, we meet the more permanent crew - Mick, who runs the deck, and Tommy, the skipper. Both are good blokes, Tommy being unquestionably the nicest human to ever walk the earth (we hear later that some of the other skippers are morons). We are then set to work on the human conveyor belt that will occupy us for the next 7 days -
1. Break open the clam shell. Hurt hands.
2. Remove guts (often from still living creature), leaving succulent and expensive meat in shell. Hurt hands.
3. Carefully remove meat and put into basket for further cleaning. Hurt hands.
4. Scrape off remaining crud from shell. Hurt hands.
5. Crack the edge off of the shell by crushing it onto a wooden board and rolling it at the same time. Really sore on hands.
6. Scrub the shell to remove excess meat, ready for packing. Agony on hands.
7. Sort shells into size (small/medium) and side (round or flat) ready for packing.
8. Someone gets to clean off the meat with a blunt knife, then put it into a hand-spinner to dry off, then bag it and box it.
At any point of the procedure you might find a pearl - those that are farmed here are artificially produced within the shell, but the clam has other ideas, and often produces extra pearls naturally, which are worth less than the manufactured ones - crazy, huh?
I cannot impress upon you enough the hand-aching misery of this process. We're supposed to swap jobs regularly, but for some reason a couple of the guys (i.e. me) are stuck at the cracking/scrubbing end of the process for a lot of the day, and it's a crappy place to work, let me assure you. By the end of each day, I have a claw that would make an army of gigantic crabs envious.
The misery is offset by two things. (a) The rest of the crew are a really decent bunch, and it's a goods laugh chatting to our international friends whilst waiting for the next shells to be brought over from the other boat. (b) the food.
Each boat has its own cook, and we are stopped dead in our tracks at 8am by Mick when he points a finger in our general direction and says "Breakfast!". I don't understand, but we're pointed towards the galley, where cooked breakfast is awaiting us. It's not like me to cry in public, but the stream of joyful tears flooding out of the galley onto the deck prompted several crewmen to abandon ship in fear for their lives. Breakfast is good. And unexpected breakfast is the greatest gift of all.
Lunch is even better, each day a new and delightful food I didn't think I'd see before our return to the UK is dished up - tacos, homemade soups, quiches, and pizzas, spag bol, and enough salad and fresh bread to choke a camel.
Undeniably, it's a tough 7 days, and rather repetitive, though Cat and I did get whisked over to another boat to give them a hand when they were short of crew. They were chipping the shells on the outside, then removing them from their plastic panels (which they are put in before being dunked in the ocean for 2 years at a time). The chipping process consists of hacking at the outside of the shell with the back edge of a meat cleaver, taking off all the barnacles and other crud that gets on them and upsets our clammy friends. It also consists of me shredding my fingers above the knuckles. Barnacles are sharp - bloody sharp in fact(I've already had one run in with them which has left an impressive gash on my finger). Still, it's something of a relief for the claw, if nothing else.
The end of the day consists of the departure from the boat by dinghy, then the long run home across various grades of sand and road. This is the educational part of the trip, where our international friends drill us on the finer parts of their respective vocabulary. So now we can say 'How are you?' in Cantonese, 'I have good dreams' in Japanese, and 'I smell of fish' in German, all of which will make for a quite remarkable world tour once we are finished in Australia.
The beginning of each subsequent day starts with the joy of putting on the smelliest and crustiest clothing known to man - stained and solidified by the slop from the clam shells and the sea water we use to clean them - by the third day, my T-shirt retains its shape even when I take it off, and I'm quite sure that with a little sellotape holding my T-shirt to my trousers and boots, my clothing could go into work without me, and no one would notice. Amazingly, we appear to have got both stains and smell out of the clothing after having finished for the week, though the Voodoo (and stain remover) required is so great that several hundred local residents are now dead.
We are both glad to be finished with pearling. And now we are waiting to hear if we can go on the next trip, resulting in us being stuck out at sea for 10 days, and working an extra 2.5 hours a day for the same wage. This is the sort of stupidity that got us to Australia in the first place.
