Oz-tastic

It was another early morning when I left to go to Australia, but fortunately everything ran smoothly. I flew from Singapore to Perth on Saturday morning and finally made it through Australian Customs at around 3pm. I was going to be meeting up with Daisy in Perth but she was staying with a friend who was studying there so I had booked myself a bed in a hostel. It proved surprisingly easy to get there, I just got on a shuttle bus which dropped my off right outside the hostel. I had been to Perth once before, but we didn't spend long in the city and it was something like 15 years ago so I don't really remember any of it.

After arriving at the hostel and having a bit of a relax I met up with Daisy and her friend Margry (actually her surname, but that's what Daisy knows her as...) in Northbridge (where I was staying, and apparently where there are often fights... great...) for a couple of drinks (although it took a while 'til we actually got to the drinking part as my driving licence wasn't accepted as ID and I had cleverly left my passport at the hostel) which was a great way to end a day of travelling.

Being my usual very organised self I hadn't really done much in the way of planning for Oz and as such I had even less of a plan for Perth, so on Sunday Daisy and I met up to do some serious planning (once Daisy had finally got up and caught a bus... =P ). I also got my first proper experience of how expensive Australia is now, £7 pints and £15 salads... Nevertheless we managed to find somewhere that did relatively reasonably priced food and had a nice long lunch looking through the Lonely Planet guide and figuring out roughly what we were going to do and when. After eating our fill we wandered down to the river and walked along the waterfront. The weather was lovely and we had a great view out across the river (which Daisy had managed to mistake for the sea). That evening we had been invited to a 'barbie' at someone's house where we had a true Aussie experience of sitting outside drinking 'stubbies' and eating a colossal amount of meat (although there were a number of complaints that it was under 20 degrees and therefore far too cold to be outside) which was really good fun.

Most of Monday was spent sorting out admin things in the city like Daisy's flights and a student card before a nice lazy evening at Margry's flat. On Tuesday we got the train over to Freemantle on the coast. We went and visited the Maritime Museum which had a great photography exhibition of water-dwelling creatures like mangrove tree snails where the photographer had named and given personalities and characters to each of the creatures he photographed. We even found a snail called Daisy who had a 'happy countenance'. It was quite an interesting museum although we both agreed that it wasn't quite as well organised as other museums we had visited, there was no real clear order to the various exhibits so it seemed a little chaotic. Afterwards we headed up to the Roundhouse overlooking the water which is the oldest public building in Western Australia and saw the firing of the time gun and lowering of the time ball (which turns out to be quite a recent tradition mimicing a similar event that used to happen a long time ago). Since we were on the coast, seafood was the order of the day for lunch and we managed to find some nice fish & chips down by the water. We then headed further along the waterfront and found a brewery/pub/bar/restaurant place called Little Creatures which had an amazing atmosphere and seemed to be a great place to go for a meal or just a drink or even to buy a load to take home. Even the merchandise was impressive. After sampling what turned out to be very good beer we headed up the high street back to the train station which has some interesting colonial architecture although it did seem remarkably dead considering it was about 4:30 in the afternoon. Daisy and I popped into the supermarket on the way back and headed to the hostel where I was staying to cook some dinner and have a drink before retiring for the night.

One of the things that Daisy was very keen to do in Australia was WWOOFing (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) and she managed to convince me that this would be quite a fun thing to do for a week or so. Basically the idea is you go and live on a farm somewhere and get free food and board in exchange for doing something like 4-6 hours of work on the farm each day. It does vary a lot from place to place but it sounded like it would be a great way to see a different side of Australia. As such, on Wednesday we went and signed up for the scheme which basically consists of buying a book of all the current available placements and getting a membership number that entitles you to partake in it for a year. After doing this we grabbed a bit of a picnic lunch from a supermarket and walked up to King's Park (which is the largest urban park in the world). We were a little disappointed to discover that much of it seemed to be undergoing some kind of construction work but nonetheless we managed to find a spot on the grass with great views overlooking the river and the city to eat. While eating we had a look through the WWOOF book to see if there were any particular ones that caught our eye. As it happened, there were quite a lot that caught our eye, but not all for the right reasons. They seemed to vary from people who wanted a spot of gardening and housework done on there 1 acre 'farm' right up to people with 40,000 acre cattle farms who wanted experienced riders to help out. Some other highlights included a nudist farm, numerous 'communities' interested in meditation and sprituality and absurdly strict people with a huge list of rules you would be expected to follow. We did, however, manage to find a number of very promising looking ones that we thought were worth following up.

On Thursday we went over to the WA University campus to meet up with Margry. It seemed really nice, not quite as pretty as Cambridge, but it looked like a lot of fun, to the point that if I was ever to consider going back into academia I would definitely think about going somewhere like that. After only making about 1 wrong turn (which seemed to be becoming quite a regular occurence) and Daisy again confusing the river with the sea (quite surprising for a geographer) we found our way to Margry's department where she had lots of machines hooked up to a mostly naked guy in an inflatable bath. Once she had finished that particular test we headed back through the university and up to King's Park again. It actually turned out that the construction work was only happening in a small part of the park, but that it just happened to be the part of the park we arrived at last time. It was really quite beautiful with parts of it looking like wilderness and other parts full of lush trees and flowers. We walked along a nice elevated walkway which gave some stunning views accross the city before catching a couple of buses back to Margry's via the supermarket for dinner.

The plan for the next day was to get up bright and early and catch the train down the coast to Rockingham and from there get the ferry across to Penguin Island. Unsurprisingly our start wasn't quite as bright and early as it might have been (mainly my fault) but it wasn't too long before we were on the train. The plan we had was actually quite vague in that we didn't really know how we were going to get to the jetty for the boat across to the island. Fortunately I still had a brochure in my bag which at the very least indicated which bus we should catch. So we hopped on the bus (quickly feeling glad we hadn't attempted to walk it) and kept our eyes glued to the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of anything that looked promising. Daisy was quite paranoid about missing the stop so we eventually got off when we were down on the waterfront, although after asking a couple of locals we discovered it was a fair walk to the jetty as we had disembarked several stops too early. It wasn't all bad though as we had a lovely walk in the sunshine down along the seafront until we located our destination. Conveniently we had arrived just 10 minutes before the next ferry departed so we bought tickets and hopped onto the boat almost immediately. Unfortunately this did mean we didn't have lunch as there was nowhere to buy food on the island and we didn't have time to buy anything before we left. We managed to cope though, and had a lovely time on the island. The weather was almost perfect as we walked around the island and although we didn't see any of the penguins out and about (we could hear them in the bushes) we were there for feeding time inside the Discovery Centre for those penguins who had been injured or orphaned. They were really cute, although they did smell pretty bad...

Saturday was to be our last full day in Perth before catching the Indian Pacific train all the way over to Adelaide (the distance is roughly the same as Spain to Turkey). Daisy wanted to go and watch Margry play hockey so I opted to stay at the hostel and try and send a few emails and do a little bit of work in the morning. Later I popped into town to grab a bite to eat and have one last wander around. It just so happened that it was also the last weekend of some kind of contemporary music festival in Perth so I had a bit of a listen to some of that before visiting the Western Australian Museum which had some interesting displays on various kinds of flora and fauna, the aboriginal people and an exhibition on AC/DC which had a very impressive range of memorabilia as well as a recording of one of their live concerts. On the way back I stopped to listen to some more music before popping into an art gallery. Most of the pieces in the gallery were very modern and a little bit strange but still interesting. One of my favourites was a series of photos capturing the instant when various fairly everyday objects landed in pools of coloured water, there was something fascinating about seeing all the ripples and droplets caught on film like that. Slightly more unusual were things like a load of blank white cartridge paper lain out along the floor and some strange video pieces. I spent the evening packing up my bag in preparation for the next day and finishing off a spot of work with a beer while watching telly. Not a bad evening.

It was yet another early start on Sunday with Margry's mum very kindly offering to give us lifts to East Perth station where we were going to be catching the train from. We weren't entirely sure what to expect apart from it would take about 2 days to cross the country, but we were definitely excited.