Organic Slaves and 'king Waves!

So we headed south from Perth towards Margaret River, via the 'city' of Bunbury for a long weekend. We decided after much investigation that the easiest and cheapest way to get there would be by train. This was mainly due to the fact that the supposedly greatest surfing nation on earth has a tendency to make it either difficult or expensive to travel with a surfboard. I have to admit that as soon as we started to find out the charges for taking a surfboard on the train or bus I began to wish that I had waited until we reached Queensland to buy a board!

When we booked the ticket we were told that we were lucky and had got the last seats in the carriage that carried surfboards and bikes. Phew, what a relief. It was only when we got on the train that I realised what a joke that was; there were no other boards or bikes on the train and mine went in the overhead luggage carrier!

Anyway, we arrived in Bunbury and sought out the Wander Inn, our hostel for the next few nights, only to find that the reception was closed from 12 to 4pm, so we couldn't check in. Our room was OK, but the hostel seemed to have a number of more permanent residents who weren't travellers but sat around smoking and doing nothing all day.

That evening I volunteered to make dinner, Chicken Pilaf. This was the first time that either of us had cooked since we left (apart from the famous Thai cookery course) as it was so cheap to eat out in Sri Lanka and Thailand that it wasn't worth cooking for yourself, and none of the accommodation we stayed in had any cooking facilities.

I immediately hit upon a problem when I tried to find a pan to cook dinner in - there weren't any! I headed off to reception to ask where I could find one and was told by the owner that I would have to hand over my room key in exchange for a battered old saucepan. It was hardly something that I was going to steal! I was sorely tempted to tell him that it wasn't flippin' Le Creuset, but thought better of it as we were booked to stay there two more nights.

The next drama that we had didn't emerge until the next morning when Sarah went to check the washing drying on the line. Only not all of it was drying on the line. Someone had stolen three pairs of Sarah's knickers, which was a particular problem as she was only travelling with four pairs in the first place. What kind of weirdo would steal someone's pants?

This really summed up the Wander Inn, a bit rough, and Sarah spent the rest of our stay wondering who else in the living room was also wearing her pants, female or male?

The only good thing about Bunbury

On Sunday morning we decided to go down to the Dolphin Discovery Centre, where we discovered that the dolphins weren't coming out to play. We were hopeful that they might make an appearance the following day, as it was my birthday and our last day in Bunbury, but again a no show from Flipper. Don't they realise that we are on a very tight schedule?!

From Bunbury we took the bus down to Margaret River, where we were picked up to go to the Surfpoint Resort at Gnarabup. It was then that we learned that you really need a car to get around the Margaret River area and that the surf was flat!

We amused ourselves the following day by renting a scooter again and headed off into town to explore. It cost roughly twenty times more than our Thai racing machine, but this time we had helmets and they wanted to see a driving licence, which was reassuring.

Now where did I park my moped?

The next morning I retraced our steps north on the bus to pick up a hire car. It was a Kia Rio, the car of choice of people who don't like cars. It was actually an upgrade from the bottom of the range car we had ordered, because they didn't have any of them in stock, I dread to think how small that would have been. Good news, the board fitted in the car....there was room for Sarah on the roofrack. Once again we were mobile, so we headed straight to a farm in the middle of nowhere to live like hippies for five days. As you do.

Yes, we had decided that in a bid to save money, the planet and bring some moral justification for taking six months off work, we would spend some time WWOOFING. For those of you who don't know what that is, it has nothing to do with dogs, but actually stands for 'Willing Workers On Organic Farms'. Unfortunately it should have been WWSETLING, 'Weirdos in the Woods Searching for Extra Terrestrial Life', or something like that. Yes, I know it's not as catchy, but it's more accurate. Crop circles, you know the hoaxes that were exposed many years ago in Britain, well the news that they weren't created by aliens doesn't seem to have filtered down to South West Australia.

Sarah spent five days cleaning kitchen cupboards, one of her favourite household chores, and I spent five days building a fence that was twenty foot long and I could have built in five hours if I'd been doing it on my own! (It wasn't actually finished when I left.) Sarah also spent one day learning to sculpt...or was it learning to dust sculptures, she's still not sure. They were actually a very nice family and made us very welcome, but we are now no wiser as to the ways of organic farming than we were before we started. We did manage to fit in a few quick trips around Margaret River while we there, to Redgate Bay, a beautiful beach with white sand, completely deserted, Hamelin Bay, completely packed out with school leavers and flies, and also to Augusta and Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet. Very wild and windy.

It took me ages to do my hair this morning!

After we left the WWOOFERS we managed to fit in a day visiting a few wineries. Well it would have been rude not to! We sampled a few in various locations, but it was definitely Sarah who got the most out of it, as I was driving and had to spit most of them out. (It'll be Sarah's turn to drive when we visit New Zealand's wineries.)

Labour shortage in South West Australia leads winemakers to resort to desperate measures

We spent another night in Margaret River and met up with Sarah's friend Matt and his girlfriend George, who it turns out, I worked with when I was working for BT in Bristol, small world, as they say. (Good luck Matt and George - you should be somewhere on the Nullabour Plain by now on your way to Adelaide we think.)

The Margaret River area is renowned for three things, wine, surfing and caves. We had tried the first two so on our last morning we headed off to the Lake Cave to learn about stalagmites and stalagtites. It was actually very impressive, but one cave is more than enough for me, so we headed through the famous southern forests of karri trees to Pemberton. There wasn't much to see there, so two toasted sandwiches later we were headed for Walpole where we were booked in for the night at the YHA.

I decided to start a new paragraph to describe Walpole, but it doesn't really merit it. Sarah described it rather aptly by saying that it was like driving 100 miles to stay in Porthyrhyd for the night, but without the pubs. For those of you who don't know Porthyrhyd, let's just say that it's small and there is no reason to visit it.

The next day we headed straight for the Valley of the Giants and its Treetop Walk. This was very impressive as it was a 500m long walkway through the Tingle trees - 40m above the ground at it's highest point. It had a tendency to sway a little when you walked on it, which was mildly alarming at times.

Looking very pleased with ourselves

We then followed the advice of one of our WWOOFING hosts and headed to a spot called Conspicuous Cliffs. This involved an 8km drive along an unsealed road, think red dirt and ruts, which our hire car was neither designed nor insured for. It was worth it though, it was by far the best beach that we had seen so far on the trip and it was completely deserted. It was very windy, but we managed to eat our picnic on the beach, although our sandwiches were very sandy!

Comes complete with squeaky sand

We were very careful while walking along the beach as the night before we had been warned by a local to watch out for King waves. These are freak waves which occur in the Southern Ocean and have a tendency to take fishermen who are standing on the rocks by surprise and sweep them away. Phil, our friendly local advisor, didn't know why they are called King waves, but we have found out since that there is actually an apostrophe missing from the front of King. This is because it's actually an abbreviation of the last words uttered by a fisherman shortly before being swept to his death. The full version is "Oh no, look at the size of that ***king wave!". I'd like to apologise for my language, I have been in Australia quite a while now and I seem to be picking up the local accent...

That evening we did our usual trick of leaving it to the last minute to book somewhere to stay, but this time we fell on our feet. We arrived at the Cruize Inn in Albany to find the best hostel we've stayed in yet, it was very comfy and quite small and all the time we were there we saw no fights, swearing and the police weren't called out once (unlike in Bunbury, where they were called out twice). We celebrated by having fish and chips by Middleton Beach, which was lovely, but sadly there was no surf. Apparently it had been really good on Monday. Typical.

The next day we managed to fit in almost every tourist stop and sight in the area before heading off to town to get Sarah a book and me a new rucksack. We also found somewhere that did a lovely cup of tea, so that made us both very happy!

It was very cold and windy at the edge of Australia

After all too short a time in Albany we headed back up to Perth, dodging a plague of locusts on our way. Well, trying to anyway, but there were quite a few attached to the front of the hire car when we handed it back. Albany was really very lovely and we could have spent much longer than we did there. The climate was much more pleasant there than Perth and Kristin summed it up perfectly when she said that Albany was where they should have built Perth!

We headed back to David and Kristin's in Perth on Friday, which just gave us enough time to visit Lawrence, Sarah's grandfather's cousin, for a cup of tea.

I also managed to see Sebastian play cricket on Sunday morning. He's going to be playing at the Waca during lunch on the Friday of the third test, so keep an eye out.

Sunday morning we waved goodbye to our new found family. Hopefully we will see them all in Wales soon ...

Next stop Melbourne......