Servas: Atherton Tablelands

We stayed with our first Servas hosts on August 20^th. Servas is an international peace organization that has a network of host families willing to take in wayward travelers for a few nights. For the hosts they get to “travel” without leaving home, and for travelers you get to actually meet and talk with some locals.

Our first hosts were a retired geologist and a psychologist (doing work with Australian Vietnam vets) living on 100 acres in the Atherton Tablelands. Not really a farm, but they were impressively self sufficient with various fruit trees (grapefruit, mandarins, lemons, plums), 3 one megaliter tanks for storing rainwater, a wood-burning stove for cooking and heating, and solar panels were just starting to be installed.

David had also just recently gotten a horse who seemed to serve as both transportation and lawnmower.

To the untrained (American) eye these are chickens, but in reality they are chooks (shockingly this word is also in my spell checker’s dictionary).

Over the two days we had lots of discussions about geology, some politics, non-violence movements, and climate change. There is too much to summarize here, but definitely a great experience.