11th of May 2008

Been living with Steve and his son, Steve, the last 10 days at his place, 3 Waters.
Steve is 72 year old man who has lived a very adventurous and eventful life and has the most amazing stories to tell. He has quite a piece of land northwest of Glen Innes up on the great divide (about 1000 meters up) and now he is trying to get a holiday ranch running here. He has built the house and everything else on the land himself. At age 30 he rode his first horse and now he is a proper “cowboy”, amazing with horses and used to do 6 day pubcrawls on horse and similar stuff to make a living.
It’s a beautiful countryside surrounded by a couple of creeks and a smaller mountain with plenty of wildlife. Lots of wild Fallow Deers and Roos running around on the land, just this morning I saw 20 different Deers while taking the dogs for a morning walk! Sadly I never got a good picture of them, one day I even saw a bunch of Deers standing just next to a couple of Roos and horses grazing but of course I didn’t have my camera with me!
He also has about 10 horses roaming around on his land which he brings in whenever he feels like going for a ride. The place is also blessed with two lovely Red Australian Kelpies.
The weather has been awesome since I came here with sunny but not to hot days and chilly nights which I spent inside the house with a warming fireplace.
I’ve mainly been chopping wood, doing fencing and getting poles and firewood with Steve the time I’ve been here which is much needed physical work for me! Steve has also been giving me a couple of riding lessons during the week and we’ve been going for 2-3 hour long trail rides, so I’m starting to get the basics of riding and have a good balance and mastered the trot, but still working on the canter. Steve is a very knowledgeable man and a great teacher but with a little to short fuse sometimes. His youngest son Mark lives on the land next to 3 Waters and he rode his first horse already when he was 4 years and nowadays he works as a horse breaker, we went over there a few times to have a look while he was breaking in some horses and it was amazing and interesting to learn how the horses think and act.





Tomorrow I'm leaving 3 Waters and will try to get a ride to Nimbin where I’m heading into another Woofer place (the last one for a while, really need to cover some distances soon!).
Nimbin is what you can call the Christiania of Australia. And for you who don’t know what Christiania is you could call Nimbin the hippie capital of Australia, with lots of communities and drugs and stuff being sold in the open. I’m going there to live in one of Australia’s largest communities with over 300 people, going to be a very interesting experience to say the least.