Posts tagged East Coast
‘ride ‘em cowboy…’
The Oz experience is a pretty good way to get you up (or down) the East Coast of Australia. It’s a hop-on-hop-off service, meaning that you can get off wherever you want and stay there for however long you want, calling them up the day before you want to leave to get on the next bus out (of course do this sooner in high season or you might be trapped for a while.
All of the people on the bus are like minded travellers, and the drivers try and make this as enjoyable as they can. Included in the price of the bus ticket (which varies depending on the kind of package that you buy) are several activities you can do as you go like surfing, lawn bowels (!) and the Kroombit Cattle Station.
If anyone has watched any kind of cowboy film, then you will know what I am talking about. Kroombit is in the middle of nowhere (so remote in fact that in 1995 they found a downed WW2 plane that had been ‘missing’ since 1946 - it was apparently not in any way hidden, it was just that no one walked past it in almost 50 years) and the people who work on this farm (made up of both locals and backpackers working for accommodation… as a cowboy!) spend their days moving goats around the enormous expanse of land they own and cracking whips.
When you come here, you get to share in that experience. I can now say that I can ride a horse!
There are so many different things you can do at this place. Quad biking, Horse riding, Goat Mustering, Shooting and there is something called a goat rodeo, that everyone gets involved in at the end of the day, which constitutes of dragging a goat out of its pen, lifting and turning it over and simulating the branding on their arses (of course we were only using a rod painted red at the end). It’s a lot of fun!
Then the winners of the goat rodeo (depending on the time it took you to brand your goat) choose either ‘the circle of love’ or ‘the ring of fire’. For us it was ‘the ring of fire’, which turned out to be all twenty of us standing in a circle holding hands while our guide stuck a cattle prod into someone on the other side of the circle, sending 11,000 volts (apparently) through us all. I find myself wanting to know what ‘the circle of love’ may have included. He then asked for volunteers to have the rod put directly on them. Being who I am, I stepped up and he promptly stuck the rod on my bare stomach. Poor cows.
In the evening, there’s a buffet dinner (there’s a lot of these up the East Coast), whip cracking lessons and a Bucking Bronco. It’s hard to believe that just over a week ago I was in the concrete jungle of Sydney.
It’s starting to get hotter as well, and yet this is still winter over here. I can’t imagine what summer is like.
Matt M
