Ozzie Diary... November 2002

We also had a look through nature's window and did some rock climbing (see the index photo!). Are we cool or what eh??! Here's a picture of me hanging thousands of feet up a cliff with no safety ropes, no climbing gear and NO FEAR!!

The other thing Kalbarri is famous for is these things...

... a Thorny Devil!! This one we found trying the green cross code rule of "If you can't see me, you can't run me over."

Following from Kalbarri (which is a lovely wee town by the way), we took the coast road down to the fmaous "Pinnacles". A load of spires of rock, jutting out of the desert. They look weird. Like rotting stone pillars from a by-gone civilization, but in fact it's just a bit of erosion, over a few million years. Great spot.

We'd also picked up a passenger at Kalbarri... Giles. He went abseiling with us and needed a cheap lift to Perth, so we obliged. That first night night though, the heavens opened and the wind roared. The poor guy hadn;t actually thought about this and had earlier decided to sleep under a open shelter. As the wind ripped through dragging litres of water with it, we decided to be nice and he slept in the upstairs apartment of Toby.

BUt More importantly... it RAINED!! I mean, whats going on??! I didn;t come to Oz to be cold, wet and rained upon! This going south for the summer was turning itno a nightmare. I just haven;t got the warm clothes for it.

Date: 21^st November
Text by: Anna

PERTH............

Home to a friend of Carl's and therefore a beautiful big proper bed in a building that had four walls made of brick - with kitchen, t.v., bathroom and all those luxuries you non-travelers take for granted!!
Upon arrival the city felt a little daunting. Perth was by far the biggest city either of us had come to in Australia and after the small town life of the North west we felt lost on all the highways, by-ways, and by-passes that equate to more than one road in and out which we had become so accustomed to! But we eventually found Rochelle, and the home which was to become our base for the week.

There is really little else to tell you about Perth other than to thank Rocky for her hospitality. Despite spending a whole week there and frequenting the very pleasant city centre of Perth a couple of times, and viewing the inside of everybar in Freemantle none of this was for pleasure!!
Our original plan was to get ourselves jobs in Perth and top up those bank accounts which unfortunately are not a bottomless pit! We visited "op shops" for some smart attire, printed out several versions of our cvs, went to agencies, checked the job papers, and dished the cvs out whilst treading the streets of Perth and Freemantle in our very uncomfortable but presentable clothes. We even went as far as to find ourselves a nice room to rent near the sea in Freemantle. But alas, it was not to be and despite a couple of job offers, we decided to restart that engine and trundle another 300km south to the Bridge Town Blues Festival.

BRIDGETOWN BLUES

Deep in the country side of the south west lies a number of beautiful little towns and villages. Presently coming towards the end of spring everything is green and alive with colourful wild flowers adding to the beauty of it all.

And once a year Bridgtown hosts a Blues festival where the drinking begins on a friday afternoon and doesn't end until the Sunday (or Monday if you're a traveller!). There we spent a glorious four days enjoying the sunshine, the day time drinking, the sounds of different blues bands floating through the air, and of course the food from all the take away joints. Carl had a particularly good time finding himself surrounded by 7 women on a saturday night. All too much for him to handle he had to leave the gaggle of girls for a jacket potato and some fire twirlers!!!

In order to see most of the blues players you needed one of those extorionatelly priced wrist bands which we decided was not worth its weight in beer. Thus we will extend our kind regards to "Scotts" bar where most of our hard earned dollars were spent, I was i.d.'ed on several occasions, and where "Blues to Burn" (or "Spencer Tracey" as they are now known) kept the girls entertained and gawping on both Friday and Saturday nights!!!

After leaving Bridgetown we went bush for a couple of days where we exploited some free camping and healthy living which included swimming in the Blackwood river and taking an "extended" (we got lost) wild flower walk!

Then it was on to Busselton, a family holiday sea side resort famous for its very long jetty. We were only going to spend a night here in order to get a shower, stock-up and do some washing. But a walk in the early afternoon lead us to a dive shop where the staff were waiting with baited breath to give you their sales pitch and suck you in like lambs to the slaughter!

They did indeed wind up taking our money and had convinced us to do our advanced diving course thus giving us the opportunity to dive on the jetty by day and night, and a couple of dives on the H.M.A.S. Swan just off the coast of Dunsborough. So we watched videos (PADI teaching videos makes for some really good viewing when you haven't seen t.v. for a while), did our homework and went out to do some amazing diving.

The Busselton jetty has some fantastic coral on it which looks good both by day and night. So whilst admiring the corals and octapus, we also managed to learn how to estimate our distance travelled under water and even passed the test of navigating a square with the use of a compass.

The following day we were taken out on the boat to do our deep dive and wreck dive.

I was fortunate enough to experience a mild dose of Nitrogen Narcosis at 30m but unfortunately it soon passed! Going deep to explore a wreck was fantastic but my advice to all is never go diving with Carl - he has a tendency to suck air!!!! On both returns, by the time we got to our safety stop his tank was supped dry and he was frantically begging me for air. Of course, I would have given him some but the instructor always had plenty more air to share than me (and secretely I think that Carl just liked gripping on to his arm!!!).

Date: 29^th November
Text by: Carlos

Ahhh... It's COLD!!! Damned COLD!! Someone turned down the sunshine and increased the clouds... it's even been raining! Anyway, enough pommy whinging about the weather, it's actually been lovely the last couple of days, which was great 'cos we did some more diving!

But first, we headed inland, away from the coast and the wineries and into the forests of Karri and Tingle. These are HUGE trees that stand majestically around the south of W.A.

So, of course, you haveto climb one of them. Luckily, there's a couple of trees just handily spiked with metal rods spaced at just the right amount for you to use as a ladder. Apparently the "Gloucester Tree" used to be a fire-watch tree, i.e. some dude would climb up there and sopt fires. Sounds pretty cool until you actually climb to the top platform at over 65m and stand above the rest of the treetops, swaying in the wind. Strangely we didn't stick around for long and headed down. I'm not the greatest person when it comes to heighs, and this tree was HIGH!

AFter days of driving through huge trees, we'd basically had enough. It was a bit drizzly, cloudy and cold. The best thing the trees could offer us was some cover from the wind and an amazing array of birdlife (good for the ornithologists, but gets a bit dull after a few days). My fave was the Fairy wren, which is tiny, but elcetric blue all over. Very pretty.
So we headed back to the coast and to lovely Albany.

Albany

This is a lovely little coastal town with, guess what? GOOD DIVING!! Of course we had to go and by our 2nd day we'd booked 2 dives out in the bay. The cool spot here is the wreck of HMAS PERTH, which was skittled in the bay just a year ago. It's cool for 2 reasons;

1) It's cold in the water here, so not many divers to annoy you.

2) It was sunk with nearly all the equipment still intact so you get to swim around the interior looking at computers overgrown with coral and weeds and, switches that used to fire guns and even one of the guns is still attached at the bow! But the best bit.. they left the loos inside! They look so bizarre underwater with little fishes swimming in and out. A really fun dive AND Anna sat in the CAptain's chair!

The other good bit was that I didn't suck my tank dry this time and actually came back with the same amopunt of air as Anna!! HAH! So, in fact, due to my larger size and heavier weighting, I'm actually a better dier than Anna now!! (That'll teach her for those remarks about my hanging onto the instructor.)

The 2nd dive (as we didn't want to hang around and have a short dive at 30m) we went out to "The Bone Yard", where the old whalers (it wa huge industry in Albany) used to dump the whale bones.

Once down there you can actually still see bones jutting out of the ocean floor and it looks really spooky. The whole place is now covered in huge plate coral, and there are literally thousands of fishes hiding underneath it. I even managed to see a "Southern Blue Devil", which I've been trying to find for ages. Very cool indeed.

There's not much else left to W.A. after Albany. The next National Park was closed for repairs (honestly!) and so we hit the next town of Esperance. It's not much of a town, so we carried on straight past to "Cape Le Grand" which is a collection of beautiful coves filled with bleached blond sand and turquoise water. If only the wind had let up for a day or 2.
But we did do some lovely walks around the park and on the final day headed up "Frenchman's Peak", the only hill we've climbed since Mt Nameless in Tom Price! A hard climb too, but great views from the top, as the weather has worn away a huge cave all the way through the peak. Looks great!

On the way north we stopped at a small town for a beer. A wee place called "Salmon Gums" (i don't know why, there's no river, no fish, no slamon?!). We sat at the empty bar and started chatting to the owner whilst watching the Ashes slide uncontrollably from our grasp in the 3rd test. Happily the barman was a brummie so there was no ridicule as per the other 2 tests.

And that concludes another month of travelling. We stayedat an abandoned township of "Dundas Rocks" that night, drinking beer in the wind and drizzle and getting spooked by ghosts of the forgotten town. I even kept the axe handy whilst I slept...