Working at the Outback Resort

After three weeks of searching, I finally got a job offer as a housekeeper/waitress/hostess at a 'Luxury Outback Resort' through a backpacker job agency. The 'Bamurru Plains' are located in the middle of nowhere, three hours away from Darwin, near the Kakadu National Park. There is no paved road going there, so most guests are flown in. There is no cell phone reception or Wi-Fi.

However, the landscape is amazing and there are many animals, especially buffalos, wallabies, wild horses, cockatoos, and other birds, snakes, frogs, and toads (although I could do without the latter).

The cheapest room at the resort costs $620 per adult per night, while the most expensive one costs $1350. So it's definitely not for us... :-)

Since I had never worked as a waitress before and the woman at the job agency told me that the owners have relatively high expectations, I was quite excited and didn't know what to expect.

The colleagues there are all super nice. There are two chefs, five tour guides, and six camp assistants - one of them was me. Most of the employees are Australians, but there are also a few work and travelers from Great Britain, the USA, and France.

We always work for 14 consecutive days, and then we have 7 days off. The camp assistants always work in pairs, either in housekeeping (cleaning rooms, doing laundry/hanging/ironing, etc.) or in the lodge, where we wait tables, wash dishes, help in the kitchen, take care of the people... Waiting tables was the hardest part for me. But after a while, you know the correct order of the cutlery, how to hold the wine bottle, from which side to serve the food, which wine goes with which dish, how to address the guests correctly (in English), etc.

Overall, it's actually fun, but sometimes it's very stressful. We usually work between 9 and 10 hours a day, but sometimes it can be 11 or 12. But with good colleagues, it's bearable.

If we're lucky, we can also join one of the tours or jump into the pool when all the guests are on a tour. It's definitely an unforgettable (Australian) experience!