Australia house-sitting and house-swapping travel journal: Want to taste some dirt?
Introduction: An Alternative Life on the Other Side of the Equator
When you hear "Australia," besides the Sydney Opera House, kangaroos, lanolin, and working holidays, what else do you imagine? Australia is also one of the top destinations for WWOOFing (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), having developed WWOOFing for more than twenty years, and it is also the birthplace of permaculture. What follows will be a series of shared articles in which the author tells you about an alternative way of life on the other side of the equator.
Denmark, Western Australia
After leaving the hippie settlement, I arrived at another WWOOFing host spot in Denmark. This was the home of a couple; the house was designed by Basil himself, a social activist, and the hostess was Nikki, a highly talented printmaking artist. Both of them are Jewish. The residents of this community are also a group of people who care about environmental protection, and at a fixed time every week they need to go to the community vegetable garden to tend the plots together with everyone else. Just inside the main door, on the right-hand side, was a long counter, and on the other side of the counter was an open kitchen. Meals were eaten at the dining table next to the kitchen. One evening at dinnertime, the two hosts had already finished eating and left the table, watching TV on the sofa to the right front of the dining table, leaving only me still sitting at the table, continuing to eat.
Suddenly, the main door was opened, and I saw a man walk in carrying a bowl of soup. He asked Basil and Nikki whether they had eaten enough, then went straight to heat the soup on the gas stove. Then he sat down in front of me and greeted me. From the moment he entered the door to the moment he sat down in front of me, it was like a film scene with no cuts, everything flowing smoothly. He was Tim, a freelance writer who cared about environmental protection and knew Italian, Indonesian, German, English, and a little Chinese.
Would You Like to Taste Some Soil?
The first sentence he said to me in Chinese was: "I don’t understand Chinese people." What he meant was that China was investing in mining in Papua New Guinea and needed an environment-related consultant, so they approached him, and during the process of negotiating with the Chinese, he had this thought. Hearing that I came from Taiwan, China, he was very excited and asked about Taiwan, China, and also said that twenty years earlier he had traveled by bicycle in Hualien and Taitung. I thought to myself, this really is a Western cultural country where backpacking became popular very early; twenty years ago this guy had already set out from Australia to travel around Asia. He was full of curiosity about many things in Taiwan, China, and we chatted very congenially. Tim thought for a moment and then directly invited me to visit his garden the next day; he had many interesting things he wanted to show me.
When the appointed time came, he drove over to pick me up and take me to his home. Before I had even stepped through the entrance, in the front yard I noticed a metal bowl-shaped container that could absorb the sun’s heat energy through refraction; putting a kettle on it could even boil water! Then he led me to see a homemade human-powered bicycle washing machine, explained a heat-circulation water heater, and in the garden there was a worm farm he had designed himself, full of earthworms and fertile black soil.
Tim was very excited and asked me to smell it, and said it was rich in minerals and that I could try eating some! I smelled it, and sure enough it was full of the fragrant scent of soil, but I politely declined his invitation. Thinking that this fertile soil came from earthworms digesting rotting kitchen scraps, I simply could not persuade myself to eat it. He, on the other hand, ate it with great relish.
A Romantic and Creative Way of Life
With one-eighth Italian blood, he was romantic and easygoing, surprising me on a whim; he casually picked an orange from the garden and stuffed it into my arms, telling me to take it back to share with the others! And his house was full of surprises too. The mosaic tiles stretching across the floor had been laid with the help of an artist friend, and in the walkway in front of the bathroom there was a large refrigerator, decorated on the outside with a green plate with white letters reading "Gourmet Bar." He happily told me that he had found this secondhand refrigerator at a tip shop and after modifying it, it became a bathtub with excellent heat retention. Seeing such an interesting refrigerator, no, bathtub, I got playful and asked him to lie inside so I could take a photo as a keepsake.
As lunchtime approached, he took out a bowl of food that looked very familiar — noodles, and then apologized to me, saying this was last night’s dinner. He usually did not cook at noon and would eat food left over from the night before. Actually, after traveling for a long time and being a guest everywhere, usually whatever the host serves, you just eat together. I would rather they be more relaxed and not go to great trouble. So I happily said, whatever you eat, I’ll just eat the same, and it had been a while since I’d had Asian food anyway.
Using the chopsticks he had thoughtfully prepared, I picked up some noodles and put them in my mouth -- incredible, it was exactly the same taste as the noodles my mother stir-fried at home. I could not help silently admiring him: this guy was not only deft with his hands, able to modify all kinds of mechanical devices, but his sense of taste was very keen as well. A native Australian being able to cook Asian flavors, truly admirable!
