Rural vegan life...

I am writing this from a little shack on the eastern slopes of Mount Kaputar in New South Wales, Australia. N and I are on a field trip, finishing up N's vegetation surveys and doing some fixing-up, weeding, and general mending of my ongoing competition experiment (even further west of here). Basically, you couldn't find us if you tried. Doug is at the kennel with all of his fellow abandoned friends. He is probably sitting in his little shack having flash-backs to his pound-puppy-past. I wish he had a mobile phone, I'd text him and say goodnight. (This is me in the present: we picked up Doug and he was having a whale of a time. We are watching him sleep it all off now.) 

Anyway, back to us (N and me). We've actually had a fun trip so far. This is new for me because I usually hate field work. The weather has been mild (present me: just moments after I wrote this a wild electrical storm hit the farm we were staying at. I didn't sleep because the farmer had just told us horror stories of people being struck by lightning on the hill we were staying on. BEST. STORM. EVER. all the same - we had to leave early the next morning (today)). Yesterday was a tough slog but we finished everything at my sites before the rains (predicted, then happened: 27mm in 1 hour), so I don't have to come out again for a month! N's work is much more interesting because we get to hang out on farms all over the slopes and plains, with pretty views, flowers, quad bikes (yes quad bikes), and lambs with long fluffy tails. Did you know that sheep are supposed to have long luxurious tails? It's sad that when we imagine sheep we don't see tails. That's some ingrained mutilation. And the calves! So happy, so energetic, as if they haven't figured out that they only exist to be eaten. 

The main point of this post was to walk you through what it's like to be vegan in very rural Australia. REALLY rural. Not like Dandenong or other peri-urban centres. These towns are inhabited by hillbilly folk who wear big hats (like in cartoons), and go to rodeos and ute musters for fun! Food is an issue for us. We try to cook most of our meals but sometimes that's not possible. This trip included some interesting examples of 'eating out' in really tiny towns. Have a geez:

Chips, potato cake, corn jack, vegie dim sim from "The Chip-In" - Gunnedah

The innards of the vegie dim sim (they rock)

Home brand corn flakes, OJ and Oat milk for b-fast before a HUGE day at my field sites

This was fairly gross, it's curried veg at the Chinese restaurant in Wee Waa (which is inside the RSL)

Vegie singapore noodles from the same place (N liked it but I thought it tasted like arm-pits)

Satay vegie thing at the shack; with a nice view of the brewing storm