While K sits on the edge of the bed, playing with her belated Christmas present, I thought I’d take the opportunity to catch up with the blog. Sadly, this hostel (the YHA in Bunbury, for those interested in such matters) does not offer a wireless hotspot, hence this blog entry will appear on the website some time after its timestamp declares it was written.

As I recall, I left the story shortly before New Year’s Eve, just after we armed ourselves with bank cards and a roadworthy wagon. If this is incorrect, you shall just have to fill in the gaps or remove the overlaps yourself.

We left the Moores on New Year’s Eve and made tour way south to Fremantle. The Aussies like to shorten as many words as possible and have them ending in a vowel; Fremantle, therefore, is known locally as Freo. I may have mentioned this after one of my two previous visits to this dockyard town. The weather was predictably gorgeous on New Year’s Eve, while we received reports of snow (or possibly ash from an exploding alien ship ) from the UK.

After we’d booked ourselves into the Pirates Backpacker’s Hostel, we spent a lot of the day wandering around the Esplanade, the Market and so forth before ending up in The Sail and Anchor, a fine drinking establishment with its own microbrewery in-house. One of the locals, going by the name of Michael and claiming to be celebrating his 55th birthday, spent quite some time telling us that he was going to win the Lotto that evening and even showed us the ‘winning’ numbers on his lottery ticket. This was dated some time mid-November. Shortly after he declared that my wife had a lovely nose and that I looked like Robbie Williams (oh please(!)), we headed for a different bar in the same establishment, lying to our new-found friend that we were off in pursuit of a lottery ticket! The upstairs balcony of The Sail and Anchor afforded us a good view of the eight teams of the Around The World Yacht Race, who were parading through Fremantle on their stop-over (we actually saw the last team pull into the port as we ate fish and chips at Cicerello’s that lunchtime).

For our evening meal, we went to The Bengal Indian Restaurant, which has an affiliation with a couple of the hostels in the town and is very reasonably-priced indeed, particularly when you BYO bottle of fine Aussie wine from the Bottle Shop at the aforementioned Sail and Anchor. The food was spot-on, and I can heartily recommend the restaurant to anyone visiting Freo.

From the restaurant, we meandered down to the docks and watched a fireworks display over the water. It was only 20:30, mind you… I would have expected them to be a little bit later. Perhaps they were for the visiting yachtsmen (and yachtswomen)? We stopped off for a couple of drinks in The Sail and Anchor (where they’ve elected to have an Eighties Night to celebrate the end of 2005), before moving on to see what else was happening in the town. In the end, as it got closer to midnight, we decided that we’d grab another bottle of Wolf Blass from the Bottle Shop and take it back to the hostel.

We started 2006 with a glass of Australian Cabernet Sauvignon at the Backpacker’s Hostel and with some other travellers, which strikes me as an appropriate start to a year where we shall be travelling around as much of this great and vast land as we can manage.

New Year’s Day was a quiet affair. We went to St. Patrick’s Basilica, which was nowhere near as big as I would have expected a basilica to be, in fact it’s fair to say that I have been in bigger churches! St. Patrick’s is worth a visit, though, for the most impressive, most colourful mural that I have ever seen behind an altar. The rest of the day was largely spent sitting in the courtyard at the hostel, reading. That evening, as I sat in the courtyard with a beer and a book, I felt more relaxed than I have done in a long time. A good start to the New Year, I think.

We checked out of the hostel nice and early on Monday morning so that we could get our room key deposits back and continued southbound towards Penguin Island. On the ferry to Penguin Island from the mainland, we were lucky enough to spot a couple of dolphins playing merrily in the channel. The dolphins were being followed by a cormorant, hoping to find some leftover fish in their wake. We also saw a large number of pelicans and some sealions. And this is before we got to see the main event: Penguins’ Lunchtime! Little / Blue / Fairy Penguins, which live on their aptly-named island are incredibly cute. Mrs J took some great video footage of some of them swimming. Perhaps she will be good enough to share it with you, if you ask her nicely enough.

En Route to Bunbury, we stopped off at Harvey to fail to find The Big Orange, but succeed in getting a photograph of The Big Cow at Brunswick Junction.

Again, we’ve turned up trumps with the hostel (which, as a matter of interest, the locals pronounce to rhyme with hotel, not dropping the sound of the ‘e’ as we tend to in England). The room is nice and cosy, the staff are very smiley and friendly and the facilities are plentiful.

After a bike-ride with the flies and the drizzle this morning (yes… rain in Australia [brought about, I might add by me smearing myself from top to toe in factor 30+]), we went for a drive to Australind. Australind, I’m informed by my lovely wife is a contraction of ‘Australia’ and ‘India’ as they planned to breed horses there and shipping them across to India. We hadn’t stopped to admire horses though, we’d stopped to do some shopping (a pair of flip-flops for me: another step on the road to true Aussiedom) and to take a photograph of our first Little Thing: the smallest church in Australia (about four metres wide and seven metres long)!

We took a picnic lunch (leftover pizza from last night’s dinner at the local pizzeria, which was possibly the nicest pizza I have had in years) to Donnybrook. We went to Donnybrook to get a picture of The Big Apple, but over-shot that and ended up at Byramgou Park Winery. Hey-ho! Since I was the keeper of the car keys, the task of sampling a selection of wines was left to Mrs J, a task that she saw through to completion. We picked up a fine Grenache to go with tonight’s barbecue and a beautifully scented rosé for later.

And now that K has finished playing with her ukulele, I’m informed that it’s time for that barbecue I mentioned, so I shall shut down the laptop and open that Grenache to breathe.