I have been doing B&B for about 21 years now, and it’s great.  I live in a beautiful place, people come here, give me money, and leave with nothing except the experience.  Many to return again.  What a brilliant way to earn a living.  My thanks to all those who keep me in the luxury to which I have become accustomed.  Not that luxury includes a substantial income, as I haven’t troubled the taxman in years.  My luxuries include beautiful environment, no alarm clock, no commuting, freedom to order my own time, time to potter about with things that don’t produce any return, and a general contentment that comes with lack of ambition.  I feel a little like Tom Bombadil from LOTR, mostly untroubled by the rest of the world.

But I do like greeting guests.  Many are returning from having stayed here before and it is like greeting friends.  How comfortable is that.  They have voted with their feet that they like they place, and know exactly what to expect.  I can relax knowing they will be satisfied.  It won’t be just the same as their last visit as the weather and wildlife can be vastly different, but the general experience they appreciate.  I especially like greeting guests who have never been here because Possum Valley is a bit on the wild side and not as predictable as a motel in Bowra.  Some are shell shocked and ashen-faced from the gravel road in and gripping the steering-wheel with white knuckles.  Some say what a beautiful drive in.  Then I get to show them a cottage which were built for a family to live in rather than for tourist accommodation.  There is a delicate balance between what guests get and what they expect.  The expectations are built up from previous experiences of accommodation and levels of amenities, my advertising and responses to inquiries, my website and pictures, the tariff, and a dash of the guests imagination.  The complex calculation of all those factors to determine pass/fail is reached within 10 seconds of being shown through the door.  The gestalt impression is very quick.  I am pleased to say, if I say it myself, that I nearly always get a pass.

And my impression of guests is equally quick.  I have had over 20,000 guests by now, which is a statistically viable sample of the population on which to make draw some conclusions.  In the brief time when I am showing guests around the cottages, I find I really like you and pleasure in the meeting.  A tiny percentage I fail to make any connection with, usually because they are so tight, I can not detect any sense of humour.   Sorry, I just cannot seem to connect with people without a sense of humour.  I am sure out of 20,000 people, there has been nobody I actively disliked.  This gives me great faith in the general good nature of people.

I especially like kids having a good time here.  For them to be exposed to what I consider the ‘real’ world.  Though I have to admit that now most of the world’s population now lives in cities, what is the normal reality is up for debate.  I like to think ‘real’ is where trees grow with reckless abandon, and the animals roam doing their own thing.  Kids are some of my best customers and drag their parents back here, I hope not kicking and screaming.  It is very satisfying being a B&B operator.

 

 

The rainforest is a dynamic living environment with a multitude of life forms, plant and animal, trying to make a living.  They have been at it for millions of years and I have recently intruded into their space to live here.  Blessed with abundant sun energy and water, a rainforest is life in the fast lane.  I have to accept and deal with the consequences.

I went up to the top cottage this morning to clean the windows and upon opening the door was greeted by the most awful stench.  Hmmm… expecting guests in a few hours, this will not do.  I checked in the cottage, but no obvious culprit, so I knew I had to grovel round in the roof space.  Please, please let it be a possum and not a python.  You see a possum can be ‘collected’ with a plastic bag using the supermarket deli technique of picking it up with hand in bag and inverting the bag thereby not touching the stinking remains.  The skin and fur retain the rapidly liquifying remains.  For some reason, snakes decay at an accelerated rate and the skin is not strong enough to contain the contents.  The roof space consists of rafters and battens with the ceiling of thin cement sheets.  Can only progress on hands and knees only putting weight on the woodwork.  Oh no! its a snake, right at the edge of the roof where I can only just get to it crawling in there lying down.  I retreat for dustpan and brush, so I can scoop it up.  I also have a bucket of detergent as I know I will not be able to scoop cleanly.  With all this equipment plus a headlight for illumination, I crawl, like a snake, into the tiny space which is the last place on earth I’d rather be.  The stench is overwhelming, I have 300mm headroom and my nose almost above the liquified remains.  A multitude of inch long black beetles are already at work and I flail at them to deter them from coming in my direction. That is too much information already probably, so I will spare you the bits about fluids splashing in all directions, oops, I said I would spare you that.  Many accommodation providers boast about going the extra mile to look after their guests.  That was the extra light-year.  By the time the guests had arrived, the stench had abated greatly.  In fact I couldn’t tell if it was even detectable. My olfactory overload still had me smelling the corrupt remains, interspersed with flashbacks of ‘spice’ fragrant oil which I put around the cottage.  As I showed the arriving guests around the cottage, I decided to ‘fess up’ in case they could detect any lingering smell, so I could assure them the problem had been dealt with and any odour would decrease rather than increase.  Honesty still remains the best policy, even if economics and politics have abandoned it.  My wonderfully tolerant guests expressed an interest in returning again.

In nearly 20 years of B&B, this was the most difficult to reach and the most unpleasant to deal with.  It is not the norm and I have only had to deal with 4 or 5 such incidents in the 20 years. Hopefully the next incident is years in the future.

 

 

I recently sent an e-mail to an old friend in the UK about a possum which had raided my house over a decade, and been virtually adopted by my kids.  He remarked ” I can see the attractions with the rainforest, you probably have a very close relationship with it that would be hard to beat in the developed world.”  Well yes.  My first ten years were in a big city which is virtually sterile except for pigeons crapping on the statues.  Then I moved to a country town (if that is not an oxymoron).  There was a variety of birds and a few rabbits and I used to watch little trout staying in place in a fast stream.  Now I live in a tropical rainforest bursting with life.

I think I should tell you that it is always beautiful and enriching, but not always convenient.  I long ago gave up on growing a vegie garden because of the long list of villains lining up to get a piece of the action before the produce got to a stage I would call ripe.  First hurdle would be fungi and insects.  There could be a million species of each within a hundred meters of where I plant the first tender seedling.  Then there are the birds and animals. Amongst them are some of the most expert burrowers and climbers on the planet.  It needs fortifications resembling Fort Knox to keep them out.  After a few years of end-to-end disasters, I now get my vegies at the supermarket.

Then there is the issue of home invasion.  Yes, not only is there a vast array of critters out there, some of them want to move in with you.  I can roughly divide them into two categories.  Those that want to raid, and those that want permanent residence.

Those that raid include the possums and Lewin’s Honeyeaters.  Sometimes they forget I am there at all as they scrap in a turf war over territory.  Those that want to move in include the normal imported rodents, your everyday mice and rats, plus the native species such as melomys which are a protected native species.  I can either politely ask them to leave, which hasn’t worked in the past, or I can engage with Parks and Wildlife in two years of paperwork to ‘relocate’ them.   Interestingly, I had an invasion in my workshop.  I went to change speeds in my pillar drill and found a nest and a pygmy possum staring at me with its rather pop-out eyes.  It is about the size of a mouse but with an extraordinarily long tail.  I gently closed the cover and decided the Black and Decker could do the job.

A couple of days ago I passed an unused bedroom and spotted 2 slender long turds on the bed.  A little tentative prodding in the dust pan revealed they were mostly feathers.  Confirmation of the suspect was found on top of the cupboards.  More turds and a 2m long snake skin.  Almost certainly from a red-bellied black snake.  It is the most common snake round here and by Australian standards only mildly venomous.  If bitten, you’d be out of hospital in a couple of weeks and regained most of your organ’s capacity in a couple years.  The good news is that they have about the same desire to seek my company as I have to seek theirs.

I share my bedroom with a bat.  In the tropics it is normal to leave windows open.  The bat will have a permanent roost cave, but seeks a temporary roost cave for rests during its foraging at night.  My bedroom and the entrance corridor serve that purpose.  As it flies around my bedroom it makes a sound rather like flapping a tea-towel.  Fortunately, it hangs in the corner of the room and not above the bed.  For those biologically interested, I can report that bat poo is very much like mouse poo , but twisted and bent.

Then there are occasional invasions like from cicadas.  This is a huge and beautiful insect seemingly designed to make noise.  Rather similar to a chainsaw in your living room.  So many decibels from such a small creature.

Recently, the world passed a milestone where more than half the population now lives in cities.  A denuded and almost sterile environment.  Except for microbes and viruses of course, as they can’t be excluded from any environment.  I accept these minor inconveniences caused me by my fellow critters, all trying to earn a living as I am doing.

Through the blogospere I was asked by the web master of World voices to write my life story.  He seemed to be interested in the way I had largely avoided the rat race without an inheritance or other great fortune, so I made that the focus.  I thought I may as well put it on my own blog , so see below.

 

Alternative Economics

I was born in Manchester England in 1950. My mother a housewife, my father a salesman in an engineering company but steadily rose to high management. He was quite conservative but could entertain any idea and judge its merits, and he liked to debate. He was quite willing to be devil’s advocate and make a spirited defense of ideas he didn’t adhere to. That was when I began to question just about everything and started my career as a rebel.

I failed the 11+, a single test at age 11 which purported to determine if a child has academic potential. Somehow, in my last couple of years at school, I got sent to an age-old part-boarding grammer school. It was super conservative and the teachers still wore gowns and mortar boards. It reeked of tradition, privilege and snobbery. This was where I honed my and hardened my rebellious streak. I was in the headmaster’s office at least once a week. At university (mech eng), I toyed with joining the Socialist Society which was the most radical group, but they said and did such silly things, so I joined the Peace Society and got to do demonstrations (peaceful of course) and started to pick up some flower-power, hippie ideals of sharing and caring, love and peace man! I began to see how unfairly money is distributed in a country and around the world. It still is, worse perhaps.

I managed to do enough work to graduate with honours, but did not want to get my nose to the grindstone of a career, so worked a couple of months in a warehouse stacking boxes and headed of on the overland hippie trail to the the antipodes. A couple of years and many adventures later I found myself in Australia. I was now an expert on living on a shoestring and out of a backpack. Suddenly, due to a genocidal maniac called Ida Amin in Uganda, the commonwealth changed all the immigration rules. By immense luck, I was entitled to be a permanent resident of Australia, just by being in the right place at the right time. It has been very difficult to come to Australia since that time.

I then put in the longest period of work by far in my life. Two whole years! Doing exploration work in central Western Australia. With one other guy, or sometimes on my own, I did 4-6 week projects in some of the most open and deserted landscape on the planet. The job paid labourer’s wages, but food and swagroll was provided, and there was nowhere to spend money. Great way to save. I spend the money to buy an empty block of land at the other end of the country. From flat, desiccated, blistering desert to hilly, lush rainforest in far north Queensland. 156 acres of cloud-forest on top of the great dividing range. Now to really become a self-sufficient hippie recluse, maybe even start a commune! No money left, no knowledge of how to build, grow, live etc, no road in, no tools …….. no problem. I invested my last few dollars in a machete so at least I could get to the place. I worked a couple of months out in the bush to buy a 1962, 3 geared Toyota landcruiser for $750. The exhaust valves were blown and many other things wrong but got it going again. I got stereoscopic aerial photos centered on my block and used skills I had acquired doing exploration to see the land around in 3D so I could spot a possible route in. 4kms long and totally unmade, it went mostly through a neighbouring farm.

I started building a house with very little money, no idea how, no plans, not even a sketch on the back of an envelope, no power and of course no council permission because it didn’t even occur to me. I used a considerable amount of discarded scraps from local saw mills, bush poles for free, secondhand doors and windows, scrap fencing from the tip to reinforce the concrete stumps, discarded 1 inch thick boards from 3 inches wide to 20 inches. They were used in two layers for the outside cladding and cost $10 per ton on average. A local planing mill sold reject packs of planed wood such as floorboards at a fraction of the retail price. So I built myself a house of 90 sq m for $1400 complete with plumbing, wood stove etc etc. A third of the cost was the tin on the roof. 35 later it is not only still standing but has not required any maintenance beyond a bit of paint. You can check it out if you like at www.possumvalley.com.au . It is now called Blackbean Cottage.

I built a hydro-electric system utilising a 20m high waterfall and knowledge I acquired at university. I built a water system to provide water to the house utilising a smaller waterfall and a ram pump to deliver what most take for granted:- water coming out of taps. I built sewerage systems to deal with the stuff most don’t even want to think about. I enjoyed all my successes at the most menial things. I love getting things to work.

I got married, have 2 daughters, started doing wood craft and carving to sell at local markets, and whenever I required money, dug spuds for the local farmers. Hard work I can tell you. Anytime the farmer looks round and sees anyone on the digger with any time to spare, he finds another gear until everybody is flat out. Tractors have a lot of gears. When I started digging, spud bags had a nominal weight of 70 kgs. They mostly weighed 75 kgs as they were packed by volume and hand sewn with twine and a 6 inch needle. It was quite a skill as they mustn’t leak spuds in all the handling on the way to market. On average they were filled, compacted, sewn and stacked in 11 seconds. I liked it though. It was satisfying. There is no product more important than a potato. There are products of equal value like an avocado or a cup of rice, but the humble spud is my personal favourite.

So at last, I get round to the subject in the title. Alternative economics. At 63 years of age, I can now analyze my chosen path in life for it’s economic and social benefit. I have worked for wages perhaps a total of 4-5 years. I have paid tax in only two years when I did exploration. I have also worked as a builders labourer, a carpenter building a school in Darwin (which got flattened 6 months later by cyclone Tracy), and perhaps the best was as a ski lift operator in New Zealand. Great…. the spell-check has never even heard of New Zealand. I still don’t earn enough to pay tax. I now use two houses to earn a living at B&B. It is to my great personal satisfaction that people mostly have a wild and real experience at my rainforest retreat.

I have mostly worked directly for myself, building things I need without the overheads of tax on what you earn, other taxes, fees, insurance, travel, profit and other costs which multiply when you employ someone to build your house etc. And of course interest on the mortgage you require to get started. So my strategy has been not to go into debt. If you haven’t got the money, don’t do it. I have always valued my freedom and debt is the antithesis of freedom. I have maintained my financial freedom throughout my life by being debt free which enabled me to pursue many opportunities. Of course having children is a lifetime commitment with no remission, and which I undertake gladly. So I am not free of obligation or responsibility. Please, if you escape the rat-race don’t think you will have freedom. It will just morph your responsibilities onto a different landscape. Perhaps a better landscape, where your concerns are family and friends rather than money and debt.

My income for the last twenty years has come from 2 fully self-contained cottages. I don’t provide meals so the work is servicing, maintenance and washing linen and towels. I work perhaps a few hours in the day. It is a small non-taxable income but I have no debts and few non-business payments. I have few expenses, generate my own electricity, and the biggest bill every year is the rates. So I have a small income but nearly all of it is disposable.

It had been my idea decades ago, to opt out of the money paradigm altogether, but I soon found that is not practical. Most of my life I have had very little or no money, arriving in Australia with US $11 and knowing no one. It never bothered me. I have lived on rice alone for weeks. Now I live surrounded by a beautiful tropical rainforest with the nearest neighbour 5 kms away. I stay at home and other people come here, give me money and go away again with a large percentage returning. I have plenty of time to do just what I want. I have done many interesting things in about 70 countries around the world. My alternative economics has served me well. So my message is not to do what I did, but to go directly to your own goals without the detour of having to collect money to get there.

Here is a picture taken a few years ago.  You will be glad to know this is not the track in to Possum Valley, but the main road from Kenya to Ethiopia.

I like hosting a great variety of people with a great variety of reasons for coming here. I take pride in what I do, and satisfaction from providing a good experience. People come here with their personal items, and good food and wine. They leave with their personal items and without the food and wine. My product is intangible, it does not exist in the physical world, it only exits in the mind.

I have many guests who have been here many times. Some 20 times. Of my early ‘frequent flyers’, I remember a family of 4 who lived in Cairns and spent virtually all their holiday time at Possum Valley.  4 or even 6 weeks of the year.  Their 2 children under 10, a boy and girl (the elder), used to like to come down to my house and spend time with me in the workshop which is a rambling tip of a place crammed with tools and shelves of odd bits of stuff I keep because it ‘may come in handy’.  I would help them make things out of the junk and bits of wood.  A little plaque with “love you Mum” or something.  Sometimes I would let them use a power tool. You can’t go too far wrong with an orbital sander.  Then paint them with the last remnants at the bottom of a can. I was surrogate grandpa.  They were great and intelligent kids who argued, but always seemed to be able to work it out fairly in some sort of compromise.  They should have been running the UN.

Then the father’s job took him to Brisbane.  On their last visit I was talking to the kids and saying to them they could take a bit of Possum Valley with them in their minds.  And all they had to do was think of it to be able to go back to a beautiful place. I had in mind the ‘meditation hut’ deep in the forest with a little creek flowing underneath. A magic spot for me. Think ‘Fern Gulley’. Bliss, serenity, Tao, harmony.  What the kids thought of was my tip of a workshop.  Their father was there and gave me a look and a nod. He knew what I meant.

Five years later they were traveling with other friends and came back to stay at Possum Valley.  I was delighted, but worried that the kids, now sophisticated teenagers, would be disappointed, that Possum Valley would seem so much smaller and not be so magic.  On the first day they came down to the homestead and immediately went to look for the walking sticks they had deliberately left there 5 years before.  They were still there.  They were so delighted. I had no recollection of them placing the sticks there, but because of my neglect, they found these tangible links to their childhood. Nothing is lost from the past, we just add new layers to become the people we are.

This was a precious moment for me, and one of the reasons I love to provide accommodation, services and experiences.