Margaret river, and the perils of ridesharing…
Thursday, April 9th, 2009Monday I rented a car with 2 french girls after they responded to an ad I put up on a backpacker website and we headed down to the margaret river. Full of wineries, more than I’ve ever seen in one place before, and with lovely beaches all around it’s a great setting.
Now this part of my trip is meant to be cheap, this is why I am sharing the rental car and since the girls had a 2 person tent, we decided to stay in campgrounds, they would tent it and I would sleep in the car. We spent a couple nights in the margaret river area, sitting in beaches, tasting wine and soaking up sunshine before heading back up to Perth, Fremantle to be exact, on the way North. We watched a stunning sunset had a bbq, then slept on the beach.
However, as good as it sounds this trip just wasn’t working, the girls English was not nearly as good as I thought based on our pre-renting meeting and just in general, it was clear we had different ideas for the trip (I actually had pre formed ideas about the trip) and I had more stress in the last 24 hours than any day on the trip so far as I can recall. The last time I had communication issues this bad and stress like this was with my last boss in America, this was worse and not nearly all because of language barrier. So this morning I paid them for the rest of the car rental and headed North alone, feeling better about it with every passing kilometer…
Of course that meant the remaining 10 days on the car rental are paid for entirely by me, not the money saving I had in mind. At least I will enjoy the time though. I drove 450km North of Perth to a town called Geraldton, the drive is through bushland and some farms, not much of anything else, the area around Graldton looks like Nebraska. It’s basically just a place to stop for the night, nothing much of note here except it’s amazing American resemblance. Walking into the mall after driving into town I had to think hard to remember what country I was in, then I heard someone say ‘how you going mate?’ and remembered. Accommodation for this weekend is going to be dicey due to the Easter holiday weekend (damn holidays screwing with travelers!), the hostel I got a bed in tonight is the first “dry” hostel I believe I have ever stayed in. I’ll take whatever I can get the rest of the weekend.
Adam