Where the Hell is HAY?

This is what is says on the postcard that K picked up from the caravan park in Hay, this evening. Hay is, I can inform you, where we’re staying for tonight, a little under 300km short of our intended destination. The town is situated approximately half-way between the cities of Sydney and Adelaide. On the upside, this gives us another town to explore and the time to write yet another blog entry! Always look on the bright side of life and all that!

As I mentioned this morning, Big Things were on the menu for today. At lunchtime, we stopped of at Narrandera. It is advertised that "The World’s Largest Playable Guitar" is housed in Narrandera. We spent some time driving up and down the streets and eventually parked up at the Tourist Information office… just as they closed for the day.

To our delight, the lady who had locked up the shop opened the doors and when we told her why we were in town, she invited us in. Propped up against the back wall of the Narrandera Visitors’ Information Centre was a 582cm long, 202cm high acoustic guitar! Having fingered the opening riff to Smoke on the Water on the fretboard and had my photo taken with the aforementioned gargantuan musical instrument, we made for the exit.

We thanked the kind lady who had admitted us to the building after hours and told her of our travels. She mentioned the Big Things book that I had seen advertised in the window. They had some copies in stock and so now I am armed with David Clark’s indispensable guide to Australia’s amazing roadside attractions.

From Narrandera, we set out in the afternoon heat for Mildura. The Hay Plains were possibly harder work than the Eyre Highway. Thankfully we were stocked up on water. We stopped for a planned fuel stop and driver change (we tend to only let the tank get down as far as half-full before refuelling and this makes for a good time to change divers). As I hopped back into the car I noticed an ominous gurgling sound. Outside the car I witnessed our bright green coolant colouring the tarmac of the forecourt. And didn’t swear once.

The nice man from the NMRA arrived promptly after a telephone call and suggested that we drove to his garage to pressure-test the radiator. This was a short drive (thankfully, as the coolant bottle had completely emptied itself inside ten minutes in the forty-degree heat) and he soon established that the radiator system was watertight, which was a relief. He made a minor technical adjustment to the thermostat that controls the amount of coolant that gets into the engine block. After a test drive along the highway with a full coolant bottle, he confirmed that the car was roadworthy once more.

It being too late to head off for Mildura, we have parked ourselves at the caravan park next to his garage, where we will spend tonight. An early night is predicted, so that we can get as many kilometres behind us in the morning before it gets too hot. By contrast to what our friends in Perth were telling us, it’s been one of the hottest summers in Hay for years!

On the news, we have hear that Europe is experiencing one of the coldest winters for years. I hope you are all wrapped up warm at home. If you think it is too cold, just bear in mind how much harder it is to sleep when it is too hot. The grass is always greener, my friends!

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about what we’ve actually been up to, so I thought I’d take the opportunity as K is driving along Hume Highway to catch up and try to get back into the habit of blogging more frequently. As I was saying to my friend S in Sydney the other evening, I like having a place to share my thoughts and experiences with friends and family (and, heck, anyone who wants to read it). Some people I know would rather send such information by email, but that assumes that all of the recipients actually want to read it. I don’t wish to be so assuming, and so leave the onus with you guys to visit this page (or subscribe to one of its feeds, which is less of a burden), that way you can pick up the story where and when you like (if at all). The blog, of course, also serves as a diary, so I can look back and see what I’ve been up to. If I recall correctly, my memory used to be much better than it is now.

I digress. I want to talk about our time in Canberra, which is where we have been since Friday evening, when we arrived from M’s father’s farm in Orange.

Canberra, for those who don’t know, is in ACT. If last night and the night before are anything to go by, ACT stands for Australia’s Centre of Thunderstorms. We’ve seen some fairly spectacular lightning in our time in Australia’s Capital Territory. I’m sure there are plenty of websites out there which will provide you with the history of how Canberra and the ACT were created in the early part of the twentieth century to move the Federal Capital from Melbourne, so I see no point in getting it wrong here! To me, the City is much like the New Towns back in the UK. No matter how hard they try, architecturally-designed cities always seem to fall short when it comes to providing the character and soul that the older cities of this planet are abundant in. Canberra, sadly, is not the exception.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing to do in Canberra. It is, after all, the Capital City of Australia. It houses parliament, universities and the national film and sound archives. There is also plenty of shopping to be done in the centre, if that’s what you’re after.

Our first evening did not get off to the best of starts. Having found the budget hotel that we had reserved for us at the Tourist Information Centre, we spent the best part of an hour trying to find a car park where we could leave The Beast for the weekend without having to pay by the hour. Eventually we struck gold on London Circuit where we found a car park that was free for the whole weekend (and not too far from the hotel).

Yesterday we walked to Capital Hill, perhaps not by the most direct route, despite making a bee-line for the huge flag flying from the roof of Parliament House. It seems that Canberra isn’t the most pedestrian-friendly city and we ran out of footpath at the base of Capital Hill, to be confronted with more lanes of traffic than we would have hoped for. Parliament House itself was an interesting excursion. It’s free to enter and free tours start every thirty minutes. We were taken into the House of Representatives and The Senate. Every one of the vast rooms that we were taken into was impressive. Unlike the city, itself, the effort that had been spent on creating Parliament House and the amount of thought that had gone into the details has really paid off. I would say that it’s worth visiting Canberra just to experience Parliament House. To get back to the Civic Centre just walk down Capital Hill towards the old Parliament building (you’d think they’d get it right first time, wouldn’t you?) and take a left to get you back to the bridge.

We spent much of the afternoon at ScreenSound Australia watching archive footage from the past 110 years, including scenes from Neighbours, Home and Away and Skippy. Again, this was a free visit, but I would have happily paid to sit in their dark, air-conditioned rooms watching films.

We chose a pizza-place for dinner last night, which claimed to have its own brewery. However, each time I asked for one of their own beers, they brought me a different bottled beer from further afield. Their pizza wasn’t much cop, either, so I wouldn’t recommend visiting it.

Today, we’re heading West again to Mildura. We’ve seen a small Big Thing en route so far and there’ promise of more. Perhaps I’ll post a picture of the Big Dog on the Tuckerbox with these words.

Note: While typing this, we have passed a sign advertising "fixourbloodyroads.com", which I shall check out when I get online. I have put this paragraph in here to remind me!

"We are about to re-enter the Zone of Unpredictable Connectivity"

…wrote Plurp, which pretty much sums up what we are doing today.

Today we leave Sydney for Orange, where we’ll celebrate Australia Day, before continuing on our journey and our quest for Big Things.

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun, exploring cities, visiting friends and family, barbecuing in a pub and all that jazz?

We hope not to be In The Zone for quite as long as Plurp has been. Keep your RSS Reader, tuned, folks.

We’re in Sydney!

In the past few days we’ve covered a fair amount of kilometres, avoided a couple of hopping marsupials and stayed in a couple of nice motel rooms. Now we’re staying in Hornsby with our friends M and N and baby A. It’s really good to see them again: last time we met was over in Horsham and N had only recently discovered that she was pregnant, now they have a lovely little girl. It’s fun playing with little A. It’s also going to be nice to be in one place for a few days, I can tell you!

The trip from Port Augusta has been pretty uneventful, to be honest with you. We stopped off in Wilcania for the first night, and in Bathurst the second night. From Bathurst, the journey to Hornsby was to be an easy one, so we made time to stop off and see some Big Things, drive around a motor racing circuit and take in some scenic views.

Mount Panorama in Bathurst is a public road, but is home to a 1000km race every October. We took The (fully laden) Beast around the circuit at 60km/h, which enabled K to take some snaps of the beautiful views as we went around, but also enabled me to keep my driving licence. I shall have to pay a visit to Bathurst next time the V8 Supercars are exercising their muscles around the track as it looks like one heck of a race circuit!

We saw The Big Gold Panner on the outskirts of Bathurst. We didn’t get out of the car to photograph him as we were on the wrong side of a busy road. By the time we got to The Big Trout in Oberon the rain had started to fall. Rain, we have learned, will fall every time I put shorts on and cover my legs in factor

1. Our scenic route to The Blue Mountains was not as scenic as it may have been. Visibility was practically nil as we entered the clouds. This is where I discovered that The Beast is not fitted with fog lights! We stopped off briefly in Bilpin to snap The Big Fruit Bowl, again staying in the dry car. But we made it to our destination with no dramas. I did miss the car I had in the UK, though. The roads in the Blue Mountains would have been a lot more fun with bigger wheels and more power to pull us up the steep inclines.

That’s about all I have for you. Later on I shall borrow some of M’s bandwidth and upload a stack of photographs for you to marvel at. That should keep you busy!

A few moments ago I received a text message from my cousin who’s recently landed in Sydney from Dublin. I suspect that this will lead to us having a few beers in the City later on this week. I’m looking forward to that.

Ceduna, it transpires, is the home of The Big Oyster! Our Big Things average is going through the roof, I tell you!

A Big Oyster, which was not all that big to be honest with you was not all that huge, was not enough to keep us in Ceduna, though and we were soon in the belly of The Beast and heading for the Orient once more.

It appeared that we’d stumbled unwittingly into The Lake District as the heavens opened and we were in the middle of a massive downpour. And then for a while, every town we passed seemed to be the same as the last with a bowling / golf club, a pub and a massive grain store.

Kimba marks the half-way point between the East and West coasts of this giant continent. We acknowledged this by parking outside the snappily-titled Half Way Across Australia Gift Shop and taking a photograph of the great Galah that stands in their car park.

Eager to make it more than half-way to our destination, we set off at the national speed limit, continuing due East. Our enthusiasm was overwhelmed only by a lack of petrol as we approached Iron Knob. The sign outside the petrol station declaring "Come in, we are open" was betrayed by the locked doors and the closed shutters. Thankfully, there were ten litres of petrol in a handy red can in the boot of The Beast. This was more than enough to get us to our planned stop.

Port Augusta is Australia’s crossroads. To the North lie Alice Springs and Uluru, to the East, Sydney. South is Adelaide and if you want to know what lies to the West, then I suggest you go back and read the previous ten blog entries! Tonight K and I shall lie in Port Augusta, having found that the hostel we had planned on staying was no longer there and the hotel we had as a backup was closed. We have found a nice room above a pub, though for not-too-many dollars. Sadly, this does not seem to include WiFi.

Food will be served shortly, so I shall wrap up here by announcing that we have changed our planned route around Australia and that we are now going to continue to the East Coast. It seems a fair number of our friends and family are going to be in Sydney towards the end of this month and it would be a shame to miss them all by arriving there after they have left. I’m looking forward to seeing Sydney again and our friends that live there. More news as it happens.

Predictably, I am still typing this offline. I’m going to enjoy having broadband when we eventually settle, I tell you!

Norseman, as I mentioned earlier was our last stop before we hit the Eyre Highway. In fact, our stop in Norseman was far shorter than we anticipated. There was nothing to do there other than stock up on food, drink and petroleum and then follow the sign that ran, "Adelaide - 1986km". This is pretty much what we did, K taking on the first leg of the long, long road.

Setting off, as we did, at lunchtime limited the distance that we could cover in a day. Driving after twilight is not recommended as that’s when the marsupials tend to go off in search of food and they don’t learn their Green Cross Code at school. The sides of the Highway 1 are littered with kangaroo cadavers. I can only imagine how the cars looked after their impact. The birds, though, seem to do quite well out of this long stretch of road: it has a plentiful supply of fresh food for them!

Driving across the Nullarbor was actually nowhere near as daunting as I imagined it might be. It may have been more daunting if I were to cycle across like one Swiss nutter (I assume he was Swiss – not because all of the Swiss people I have met are nutters but because he was flying the Swiss flag from his bicycle.) who we passed along the way. You do have to keep your eyes and ears open all the time, though, particularly when a roadsign (and what looks like a zebra crossing) announces that you are actually driving along an emergency runway for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The other advantage to watching what’s going on around you (in addition to the long road ahead) is that you get to see (live) dingos, gallahs and kangaroos.

Cocklebiddy was our retreat for the night. This came at the end of a ninety-mile stretch of road without a single bend! Their budget room was the price of a bottle of white wine cheaper than their standard motel room. We took the budget room and the bottle of Chardonnay went down very nicely with dinner, thankyouverymuch. Actually dinner was very nice indeed, it was the first meal that we’ve had out recently that came with boiled potatoes. It seems that most places expect that if you are driving then you must want ‘…and chips’. The room was functional, with tasteful wooden veneer. The towels that were provided looked as if they were new when the motel was built, but still, I can’t imagine anyone spending more than 12 hours in Cocklebiddy (apart from the staff). I was amazed that for somewhere so remote the night was so loud and so bright. The diesel generator behind the motel and the constant flood-lighting prevented me from getting too much sleep and soon after sunrise I was ready to hit the road. Of course sunrise arrives in Cocklebiddy three-quarters of an hour earlier than in the rest of Western Australia as they are in their own bizarre timezone: Central Western Time.

Today we drove and we drove. Stopping just for fuel and to change drivers. We caught two pictures of Big Things (a kangaroo and a whale) sadly, we were going too quickly to catch a photo of The Big Boomerang (we shall have to go back sometime!). We also stopped to take our first views of The Great Australian Bight as we reached it. On average we switched drivers about every 200km, which works really well. The time in the passenger seat is far more relaxed than normal as very little navigation is needed on such a long highway, just right for dozing sufficiently to get a crick in your neck!

The last hour or so on the highway was hard work. The temperature soared as the clouds that protected us for most of the journey disappeared. While The Beast is equipped with air conditioning, I was conscious of the position of the needle on the temperature gauge on the dashboard and aimed to give the engine the best chance of keeping cool. Thankfully, the fruit fly checkpoint wasn’t far away at this point and having assured the nice man that we were not bring any of that nasty Western fruit into his fruit-fly-free state, we stopped in Ceduna for the evening.

Pinky’s Point provided a scenic venue for a picnic while we decided where to stop for the night. We chose a caravan park very close to the centre of town and also to the beach. Conveniently they have a vacancy for the evening and we’re currently enjoying sitting in our air-conditioned cabin.

Just one final point before I head off to prepare a nice cool salad for tea: when the sign at the state border tells you to wind your watch forward by 45 minutes, check first to see if the state you are entering has Daylight Savings Time, this will prevent any embarrassment as you try to enter a shop as it’s closing and declaring that it doesn’t shut for another hour. We are now, incidentally 10.5 hours ahead of British Summer Time (in case you were thinking of calling)!

The reader joins us, on James Dane’s birthday, in Kondinin, which I believe is Aboriginal for the posterior of nowhere!

To pick up the story from where we left off… …we did climb a big tree on Sunday. Or at least, K did. I got 25m up and decided that I’d had enough. I don’t consider myself to be afraid of heights, but climbing pegs around the outside of 75m tree was enough to make me get a bit dry in the mouth and a bit wobbly in the legs. The views from 25m were pretty spectacular. K kindly brought my camera to the very top of The Bicentennial Tree and too some shots from there. They’re pretty impressive, too. Again, once I get a decent Internet connection, you will be able to share in these photographs. A decent Internet connection is now a necessity before the end of the month as I’m informed that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs require that I file a tax return for 2004/05 by the end of January. Deep joy!

Back to the trees… We left Pemberton bright and early on Monday morning and headed off for some more tall trees. The Treetop Walk in The Valley of the Giants was Mrs J’s must-see in West-urn Australia and it was conveniently situated on our route from Pemberton to Albany. On this occasion, I managed the entire 600m bridged walkway, which ascends to 40m above the ground without any problems, even when the walkway started swaying considerably! The views were spectacular!

Even more interesting than The Treetop Walk was the (free) Empire walk, through the various gum trees. It’s fantastic the way these indigenous trees recover from forest fires.

We stopped off en route to Albany at Denmark’s Ocean Beach for a lunchtime picnic and to watch the young surfers take lessons. We both quite fancied joining in, actually. Once back on the road we made good time down to Albany, making it to the YHA before their office opened for the evening. We paid a visit to The Old Gaol, but to be honest once you’ve seen one old colonial prison, you’ve pretty much seen them all.

Rocks seem to be the big thing at the moment. Albany houses a rock at the side of the road, which locals claim looks like a dog. We wandered up to take a look at it, and, with the help of the signs of a couple of local businesses that take their name from Dog Rock and a helpfully painted-on dog collar, we could make out why they name the rock Dog Rock, but if you look at it form the other side, it looks more like a bottlenose dolphin. Far more interesting, if you ask me (and even if you don’t: it’s my blog), were the pink parrots flying overhead. The birds here are amazing, so brightly coloured.

Today’s activities have been largely rock-related, too. We’ve driven about 500 kilometres (paj’s rule of thumb for converting kilometres to miles, stick a zero on the end and half four times {500, 5000, 2500, 1250, 625, 313}, simple!) inland to see the phenomenom that is Wave Rock. Again, you’ll have to wait to see the snaps. Nearby is the Hippo’s Yawn, which is another huge rock that if you squint sideways in the right light after the correct amount of alcohol, you’ll see looks astoundingly akin to a hippopotamus yawing. Really.

Bizarrely, having driven so far, I’m sure that today we’ve seen more horses made of tin than we have seen cars! The Tin Horse Highway stretches for 20km {20, 200, 100, 50, 25, 12.5} from East to West Kulin. This proved a useful source of amusement on the long stretch from Wagin, The Home of The Big Ram. The Big Ram being our fourth Big Thing, keeping our average above one per week.

We stopped driving before twilight as that’s when the kangaroos start foraging and we didn’t want to be hitting one of those with The Beast. Kondinin presented itself as a friendly enough town with a couple of motels. The one we’ve chosen to stop at has a bar next-door, which is dead handy. This is a small town (population _c._250) and just to prove what a small world it is, the barmaid went to the same school as a guy I used to work with!

I have a few moments to myself, so I thought I’d pop another blog entry onto my camera’s Memory Stick to be uploaded next time I am online. I also have a load of photographs to share with you, but slow Internet connections with an hourly rate aren’t ideal for uploading them. For the time being you shall have to make do with a few hundred words instead of the pictures, for which I can only apologise.

We’re currently in Pemberton, staying in a wooden-built Villa attached to the YHA backpackers’ hostel. We’ve pretty much had the villa to ourselves since we arrived yesterday afternoon, which is nice.

Last time I updated the blog we were considering a trip to the Fudge Factory in Margaret River. This was indeed our first stop of the day. We didn’t spend long there, though, as there was little more to see than lots of sugary merchandise.

K suggested a visit to The Giants Cave (there was no apostrophe on the sign, so I have no idea if this was a cave of one or many giants, sorry). This sounded like a far better idea than stuffing ourselves full of chocolate, fudge, caramel and milkshakes, so off we went.

Ten dollars gets you a helmet, a big torch and a few spoken words from the guide on the cave. After that, you’re pretty much on your own with a huge, unlit underground cave. As we decended the steps towards the mouth of the cave, we could feel the temperature dropping considerably. I cannot recall what the outside temperature was on Friday (I think it was Friday, the days are all merging into one, now), but it has been in the thirties most days since we landed in Western Australia. The temperature in the cave was a pleasant 17 degrees celcius with 90% humidity. There were a lot of steps down into the main cave and with the torches off it was pitch black. Having established how dark it would be with no torchlight, we kept the bulbs burning brightly until we reached the far end and exit of the cave. There was a huge, sand-floored ‘ballroom’, where the roof was many metres above our heads. I forget now if that was before or after the ladder climbs. I tried with varying degrees of success to take photographs in the dark of the roots of the trees above us as well as the many calcium-based structures that had formed in the cave, I shall put them on Flickr sometime for you to criticise.

We opted then to head to Australia’s most South-Westerly point for a spot of lunch. Augusta marks the point where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean and has the third-tallest lighthouse in Australia. It also has a calcified water-wheel and quite a few flies (have I mentioned the flies before?). Other than that, Augusta is a pretty unremarkable town.

Back in Margaret River we made the most of the hostel’s outdoor swimming pool, which was just the ticket after spending a lot of the day in The Beast. We had a barbecue by the pool that evening and enjoyed a bottle of Chardonnay that we’d picked up Edward’s winery.

The journey from Margaret River to Pemberton was a hot one. I shall have to look out for a thermometer as The Beast doesn’t have one built in. I think that yesterday was probably the hottest day since we landed. I’m glad that we have the iPod and relevant adaptors with us, as there are vast stretches of road where there is no radio reception. The GSM phones lose reception regularly in between towns, much like the radio. For this reason we have a CDMA phone in case of emergencies (thanks to Mr Moore for the tip!). About half of the journey was on an unsealed road. Kilometres of loose red gravel on which the car tends to find its own tracks. Thankfully this road was mostly straight meaning that it wasn’t too much work keeping the car heading in the direction that we wanted to head and at the speed we wanted to head there. It was amusing to consult the rear-view mirror and to witness the plumes of red dust left in our wake!

We stopped thrice along the way, firstly in Nannup for a quick stretch of the legs and secondly in Manjimup for a bite to eat. Both towns were remarkably quiet for a Saturday, possibly even quieter that Augusta, one can only imagine what these places are like on a Sunday! Our other stop was at The Four Aces, four huge karri trees believed to be over 300 years old.

The first thing that struck me as we arrived at the hostel in Pemberton was Live After Death (in my opinion the finest of Iron Maiden’s live albums) was playing loudly in the office (in fact it is playing again today), I knew I was going to like it here. We were shown to our room in the villa and told that every Saturday all guests are invited to a free sausage-sizzle. What a nice welcome!

We had a few hours before the barbecue was lit and discovered that there was not only a winery but a brewery on the outskirts of town. We drove up to Jarrah Jack’s Cracker Jack brewery, where I tried all six of their beers ($10 for a rack of six glasses, about a third of a pint each). We picked up a six-pack to take with us to the barbecue. At the barbecue we got chatting to a couple of guys who we’d also met at the previous hostel. We joined them for a couple of drinks at the local pub / restaurant / betting shop / drive-through off-license afterwards. I was glad of those few beers as it meant that I got straight to sleep when I got back to the villa, despite the wedding reception in the hall next door. Sadly, the effects had worn off by the time the cockerel began to herald the crack of dawn this morning. Hey-ho.

After lunch today, we’re planning on climbing a big tree or two. Stay tuned.

One of the Japanese men staying at the YHA in Margaret River looked confused this afternoon as an Englishman asked him Genki desu ka?. However, he replied politely and they exchanged pleasantries. The Japanese man seemed very surprised that the man next to him had been to his hometown of Kamakura. Twice. The aforesaid Englishman is usually a bit more keen to try out his linguistic skills when he’s had a glass or two of something alcoholic, which is about where we are in our tales of our journey around the South-West of Australia.

Yesterday morning, we got up long, long before our breakfasts to dash down to the Dolphin Discovery Centre to try to catch a glimpse of the wild dolphins that are reported to visit the beach there and swim among their fans. It was a bright summer’s morning, but the water seemed very cold as we waded in up to about our knees (or at least my knees, which may not be as far from the sand as those around me). Right on cue two dolphins (Tangles and her calf Turbo) came up and swam around for a good forty minutes. While we didn’t go swimming, as such, with the dolphins, this was definitely worth getting out of bed for and certainly worth the $2 admission fee.

Even with one activity under our belts, we were able to load up The Beast and check out of The Dolphin Retreat YHA in Bunbury well before ten o’clock.

From Bunbury we headed to Busselton for a wander around the town. Down at the beach, near the big water-slide, they have a lengthy jetty. This, K had read is 2km long! There’s an admission fee (isn’t there always?), but we figured that it’s not every day that one gets to walk over a mile out to see without getting their toes wet. The sun beamed down on us as we walked the mile along the disused railway line, past the fishermen and fisherwomen and those diving in off the pier. The ocean was wonderfully clear down below us. Towards the end of the pier, there is an underwater observatory that you can go in (again, for a fee). We opted just to take photographs back along the jetty to the coast. If you see these photos, see if you can count how many flies were there that day, it seems like there were rather a lot, if not all of the flies in Western Australia.

Cape Naturaliste was our next stop, famed for its lighthouse and splendid views. I shall now remember it for the following reason: That is where I locked the keys in The Beast in the blazing afternoon sun. Miles from anywhere.

Thankfully, there is a little shop at The Cape, where they had part of an old coat-hanger to lend me. After a good little while of fumbling around with the coat-hanger inside the skin of the passenger door, pretending that I knew what I was doing, I effected my first ever car break-in! I was surprised at quite how easy it was, to be honest. Thankfully, people in the car park took an interest in what I was doing and the keys were clearly on display in the ignition. I feel assured that had I been up to no good, that this would have been obvious enough to passers by and that I would soon have my collar felt by one of the local constabulary.

Having sweltered in the heat, we opted not to take a long walk around The Cape and stopped only to have an ice cream before we headed back on our way to Margaret River, which is from where I am writing this.

On the way I marvelled at the beautiful landscapes. The colours here in WA’s landscapes are phenomenal: all of the colours of the rainbow are evident in the natural surroundings. One day, I shall take a photograph that will capture this, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was reading this!

I brought The Beast to an abrupt stop about 20km outside Margaret River and did a swift u-turn in the road. A sign had caught my eye, and I recalled a conversation from a journey home from work, one evening last month. ‘Dave’ Juniper, a friend of mine from the office, isn’t a huge fan of red wines he was telling me. One evening a friend of his presented him and his good lady with a bottle of red from the Juniper Estate somewhere in Australia. He told me that this was the nicest red wine he had ever tasted. I promised that I would keep an eye open for this winery. Oddly, I’d forgotten about the conversation until I saw the sign announcing its proximity, so the subconscious had obviously retained the conversation and kept it handy.

Having driven away from the previous wine-tasting, I swapped places with my darling wife and tried some of the wines that The Juniper Estate had to offer. Indeed their reds are, indeed, very tasty and we took a couple of bottles away with us. And a white. The first bottle of red went down particularly well with our meal in the town last night. You’ve got to love BYO restaurants!

Today got off to a much lazier start than yesterday. I sat in the courtyard of the YHA and read though a Colin Dexter novel in the sun. Our wineries tour wasn’t due to start until around noon. Today, though, we both hung up the car keys and allowed the nice lady from Wine for Dudes do the driving. We stopped of at four wineries in total, each being very different. None of the wines at the first were to my palate. At the second winery we got to blend our own Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot. Having tested both the Cabernet and the Merlot, I opted for a 9:1 mix, which tasted just right with our picnic lunch on the lawn.

Our third winery of the day was… The Juniper Estate! I don’t think the woman behind the counter recognised us from the previous day’s testing and we joined in tasting their wines. We even got to try a white port, a bottle of which we took away with us. We made a quick stop off to pick up some locally-produced olive oil on our way to the final winery of the day… Edwards. Mrs J put the plastic card into action having taken a shine to a couple of the wines there, while I spend some time outside taking rather a shine to the beautiful yellow Tiger Moth aeroplane on display in the hangar. This ‘plane has flown from the UK to its current resting place and has also completed a circuit around Australia.

And that’s us about up-to-date. We’re spending an extra night here in Margaret River because we like it so much. Tomorrow there is talk of visiting a fudge factory, but we haven’t yet decided what we are to do with this evening. I feel that this decision may be easier if I close up the laptop.

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.