Broncos & Berries

This won't be a long one- library internet time again, and also a very patronising baptist is going to condescend to give us sausages soon.  More on that later.

So, we stopped by Prince George again and spent a lovely evening chilling with our host and friends, and then the next day hitched down the road to Williams Lake.  We were there on the weekend of the William's Lake Stampede, the biggest rodeo in BC which had been recommended to us by our trucker friend, and which J couldn't resist exploring.  The campsite there was cheap as well, so we set up camp there and were about to start looking around when we were greeted randomly by some very friendly and half-cut Wild Horse Racers (they attempt to saddle and then race wild horses.  No really.  No one's sure why.).  They plied us with booze and loads of interesting rodeo chat til the small hours, and the next day we saw them get hauled around the ring and bucked off to much cheering.

The next day was Sunday, and we bought our tickets which were pretty cheap for the whole afternoon.  J won't bore everyone here with thoughts on the horsey side of things- some of you have had that already and anyone interested will one day!  It will never be something either of us are really into, but it certainly was a spectacle.  Despite the show including bull riding (another sport there appears to be NO REASON FOR) no one actually got seriously hurt as far as we know (though one bull made a good effort to gore everything he came into contact with).  Except one person who broke their neck dancing on a table on the Saturday night.  How embarrasing.

After the show was over, we hitched south towards the Okanagan valley- the warmest part of Canada, full of orchards and vineyards and containing Canada's only desert, because we had be told it was pretty easy to get fruit picking work.

We didn't have much luck with this the first day.  We tried asking around a couple of towns, heading further south as we did so.  The scenery down here is AMAZING- well worth a visit anyway, and a lot of the towns are next to huge freshwater lakes, complete with beaches.  Lots of lovely swimming and paddling.

The area has had a very wet summer, which has delayed the cherry picking season by a couple of weeks.  We kept moving south, through Penticton and Oliver to Osoyoos, right on the U.S. border.  It is more importantly also in the shadow of Anarchist Mountain.

Anarchist Mountain! Who says anarchist achieve nothing?  It's even got a population of Red-winged Blackbirds living in the area.

While in town, we came across a poster offering free food and a shower for this week for seasonal workers.  Free food, thinks we, hmm, they're not gonna CHECK we're fruit pickers.  So we went along to the local Baptist Church, to find a festival atmosphere and about four hundred people chilling in the sun and waiting for food to be served by very smiley (some borderline creepy smiley, but most very nice) volunteers.  Here we got chatting to someone who introduced us to the farmer where he was working.  We've been camping in his orchard

and picking cherries for two days, and will do one more day before we head to Vancouver on Saturday.  The money isn't much (about 25 cents a pound (silly imperial weight)) but the farmers get only 60c, so it makes me wonder why cherries cost $4 a lb in the supermarket.  It's almost like the large supermarkets are fleecing everyone, including their customers and telling those customers bold-faced lies about what a deal they are getting in the process.  Also, we've heard from lots of people about how much cheaper the States is (some people go there for their groceries). Canada seems to have controlled growing supplies and distribution by government regulators.  Which would be dandy, but there is little to no controls on American imports (thanks to NAFTA).  So it seems it isn't just south of the U.S. border small farmers and industries are being driven to the wall by cheap subsidised imports from the U.S., while remain unable to gain access to the American market.   

So, off for now for another Baptist dinner.  It really is only the head pastor who is a smug git.  He even gave everyone Tim Horton's gift cards, not for them, he kept saying, but to give to townspeople to thank them for us being here. As though any "difficulties" in the relationship between the town and pickers (whom he keeps generalising as being all from Quebec and making hackle-raising remarks about) were the sole fault of those who have come to do the seasonal work.  However, most people are nice...