Breakfast in Tokyo, Lunch in Cape Town & Dinner in Medellín

Since I had another full day in Perth (essentially 2 more since my flight doesn’t go until after midnight tonight) I took a ferry over to Rottnest Island. You can just about see the lighthouse on the island from the mainland, the ferry takes about 45 minutes from Perth. I had a discount from an ad so I got bike and snorkel gear rental on the island for free, not bad.

As soon as I got off the ferry I jumped on my bike and rode away from the mass of families near the quay (it’s still school holidays here this week) as fast as possible, stopped at the first beach I saw that looked amazing, and nearly empty. It was still morning, around 10:30 and there were clouds still hanging around with a bit of a breeze so it wasn’t that warm yet, but it looked too nice not to get in (I’m not bothered about water temperatures anymore, I just get in) and try snorkeling here. I didn’t have that high of expectations for what I was going to see here, given the fact that I’d just come from snorkeling on the Ningaloo reef, but I was pleasantly surprised. Quite a few kinds of tropical fish and a decent amount of coral was in this bay, nothing like the quantity on the reef but still worth a good snorkel around.

After that I spent the day biking for a while, finding a good beach, checking out the water, chilling on the beach and then repeating the whole process. I got to 4 great beaches, though none of the snorkeling was much good after the first one. The weather warmed up significantly in the afternoon so I spent more time on the beaches later on. Nice little island…

After the ferry and ensuing bus shuttle back (during the latter, through Perth’s outer suburbia, I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t in America) I headed off into the city for a couple pints of my favourite beer on tap, so rare to find it and so worth it when I do… Now I’m waiting until it’s time to go to the airport for my redeye flight to Adelaide tonight, I’ve got a few nights there before it’s on to the East coast and the last leg of my Australian travels, I’m into my last month here now. I’m looking forward to Adelaide, most of the backpacking crowd here don’t really like it and claim it’s boring (maybe that means they don’t sell goon there? ah wouldn’t that be nice…) so I’m thinking I will like it at least somewhat since I interpret ‘boring’ as, not many nightclubs. I should be couchsurfing and meeting up with a previous travel mate from Tassie there, looking forward to that too, the area surrounding Adelaide is the flagship wine region for Australia too, should be a fun few days before I hit the East coast.

I kind of have a plan for the East coast now (finally), I’m starting in Byron bay and going all the way up through Queensland to Cape Tribulation before my flight out of Cairns. I’ll, hopefully, be hitting the great barrier reef in a couple spots, touring fraser island, chilling on the sunshine coast and finally exploring the rainforest around Cape Tribulation before I fly on to South Africa and beyond. I’ve got a night out in Sydney between flights before I leave Oz, nice way to go out…

Still got 3 continents and (at least) 10 countries (South Africa, England, Holland, Belgium, France, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Columbia) to go through before I arrive back in the US and about 5 months to do it in. I’m looking forward the most to, an African safari, the 4 day inca trail to Machu Picchu which I now have booked, Patagonia in Argentina (hopefully) and being back in the UK and Europe for a few weeks in June (I even have a couple weeks off from travel visiting friends and family in there!), and those are just the things on the top of my anticipation list, there’s not really any part of the remain trip that I’m wishing I hadn’t scheduled (which was a fear of mine before), nothing worse than getting halfway round the world to find that due to the travel so far I was no longer interested in a planned destination, thankfully that hasn’t happened to me.

That’s enough for this entry and my battery is almost dead, so I’m signing off from Western Australia, the next time I post on here I’ll be in a (silly) 1/2 hour timezone in Adelaide (just like Newfoundland). One note about my time here in WA, the remoteness out here, driving long distances and lots of time with nothing to go do have called on my song writing, I’ve written quite a few songs out here adding to the ever growing list of songs coming out of this trip, they keep getting easier to write too… I can’t wait to start putting music to them and recording when the trip is finished, I have heard my guitars calling to me from halfway around the world over the last few weeks…

I left Coral bay for Exmouth, at the other end of the reef, was going to go out and do some more snorkeling but the clouds came in and it actually rained, didn’t look like a great afternoon for snorkeling so I just chilled out in town, yes Exmouth is actually a town. A small one but nevertheless, restaurants, shops, hotels and actual houses with residents in them!

Next morning the weather had cleared somewhat so I headed over to the reef, rented some snorkel gear and went to the two most popular snorkeling spots in this area. The reef is so close to land here it’s amazing. at one of these sites it’s maybe 30 meters off shore!! What I saw was similar to the snorkeling in Coral bay, not quite as intense as the kayak snorkel trip since that was farther out to sea over the middle of the reef but still breathtaking, no coral formations look the same so it’s all worth exploring. While snorkeling at turquoise bay (appropriately named) I saw a black tipped reef shark, surprisingly because there was lots of snorkelers, normally the sharks would be scared off but I turned my head and there he was, swam by and disappeared. It’s an interesting feeling to turn around in the water and see a shark…

After I was done snorkeling for the day I headed back into town, was couchsurfing again, another great experience there, very good night spent at my hosts weekly poker night. I think the most enjoyable aspect of couchsurfing, for me at the moment anyway, is the opportunity to just spend a night just hanging out with people at their place, a mental break from the hostel atmosphere and being on the road in general, you just feel like a house guest with this, it’s refreshing, a load of fun and a great concept.

The next morning I left Exmouth and headed South back towards Perth, ending up at the same strange hostel in Geraldton for the night simply because I was sick of driving (about 750km driven) and the other hostel in town was full. There’s not much choice for towns to stop at in this area.

Now I’m back in Perth, returned my rental car and I have a couple days here before I fly to Adelaide, enjoying city life again…

I apologize in advance for any excessive use of adjectives in this post.
After another night at my dump of a campground I got up early (though not before sunrise this time) and got out of there. Heading farther North, through the town of Carnavron, a place to resupply myself with food and fuel. I was originally going to spend a night there to split up the drive to Coral bay, but once I got there and saw the place it seemed very ordinary and it was only midday so I drove the rest of the 300km to Coral bay.

I showed up in Coral bay (which is not actually a town, just a collection of resorts and tourism related industries) around 4pm with no reservation for the night, during the Easter school holiday, which the guidebook tells you explicitly not to do. I got one of the last campsites at one of the caravan parks, lucky me, and this place actually had a usable and semi modern camping kitchen. Microwave soup is fast and easy. The day before I tried a different way for heating soup to good success. You put the can of soup in the back window of the car which is sitting in the sun, it was quite a warm day and after sitting there for a large portion of it the soup was piping hot. I was very happy with the result, but the microwave is much faster.

After that, and a long awaited hot shower, the sunset on the beach was magnificent…

The next morning I got up early, called ahead a hostel bed for my coming days in Exmouth (no more sleeping in the car!) and headed down to the beach to see the reef. I was going to take a kayak/snorkeling trip but there weren’t enough people interested for them to do the morning trip, possibly because it was cloudy, so I rented snorkel gear, got some tips and went to see what I could see close to shore. It’s amazing really, once you leave the shallow area by the beach you only have to swim 5 meters to see some coral and fish. I saw quite a few kinds of fish, many kinds of coral scattered around and several manta rays. Exhilarated by this I took the afternoon kayak trip out onto the reef.

Amazing is how I’ll describe it. I’d never snorkeled before today and I spent about 3-4 hours doing so today with an hour of that being out on the main reef. Here’s the best thing, you kayak for 10 minutes and you’re in the middle of the reef. 10 minutes, that’s how close to shore it is here (it’s even closer to shore farther up North). We kayaked to 2 different snorkeling spots, one to see reef sharks of which we saw 3 kinds, the grey ones being the largest and looking like what you generally imagine a shark to look like. We just saw one of those and he payed no attention to us, an awesome sight for sure.

The second snorkel spot was farther out of the reef and even better than the first, substantially so actually. The number of different kinds of fish in the water is amazing, the big schools of them swimming past you is unbelievable. Saw a few good sized sea turtles too, snorkeling a foot away from a sea turtle is an amazing feeling. The corals here are mostly brown and green, not the brightly coloured stuff popularized by the great barrier reef (which I will hopefully experience in a few weeks), but the coral formations here are awesome and the variety/colouring of fish is incredible. I got back from the kayaking thoroughly exhausted and equally impressed and satisfied, one of the best things I’ve ever seen.

One note, the pictures on here were not taken by me, I’m keeping this non waterproof camera away from saltwater, our guide was shooting throughout and I bought the photo package. Some of the shots aren’t actually of my session, the ‘best of’ shots they have was included with todays and some of the photos from today didn’t turn out well for whatever reason, however everything I have uploaded I saw. Simply stunning, my best experience in Australia so far…. (loads more pics on flickr..)

I spent Easter Sunday at Monkey Mia (no monkeys here though), got up before sunrise to make it there in time for the dolphin feeding which was pretty cool.

After that I took an aborigine cultural bush walk, part of which was eating various wild berries/leaves. A pretty cool experience, welll worth doing.
The rest of the day I spent either in the amazingly coloured water or close by to it. The water is so nice it’s like a magnet, especially when you are being swarmed by flies, which happens immediately whenever you stray from the waters edge into the bush. This is an area where the desert comes practically right up to the sea, so there’s some cool colour changes from red sand, to white sand, to greenish crystal water.

This peninsula is a world heritage site, one of the reasons for that is the amount of species of endangered animals here. Today I saw an echidna, dolphins, a manta ray and various birds, including the pelicans…

Shark Bay

After another night sleeping in the car, I got up early for the daily pelican feeding on Kalbarri beach. One problem, the pelicans didn’t show up. No I’m not kidding. After that laughable event, I headed North towards Shark Bay which is full of green-blue water, several strange geological phenomena’s and one place where you can get up close to the wild dolphins. The 350km drive up there was even more boring than the driving the day before, flatter and less vegetation for the most part.

A couple of the interesting sites in the shark bay area, the stromatolites (some very simple organism millions of years old thought to be one of the original forms of life, apparently) in Hamelin pool which is a very shallow part of the bay due to a large salt bar. I don’t know much about geology but these things looked pretty cool in the shallow, crystal clear water.

The next stop en-route was shell beach. Literally, a beach made up of tiny shells. There’s actually many of them in this region, but this one is actually called “shell beach” and hey, it’s not half impressive.

Then the day took a downwards twist, I got to my campground or, “resort” as they have named it. Before I continue I should add that this is absolutely in the middle of nowhere so at least it’s somewhere to camp with facilities (kind of). Unfortunately this place seems to have hit it’s prime a few decades ago, it’s rundown and not impressive in any regard. I wont use the ‘kitchen” and there’s no hot showers at the moment either… I’m blaming Easter, that’s why everywhere else is booked full. I didn’t even know when Easter was this year until a couple weeks ago, I have paid that little attention to calendars, they just aren’t relevant to hardly anything I do. Damn holidays getting in the way of my holiday!

I was going to spend the afternoon at the “resort”, but once I saw it I drove to Denham, the only actual town around shark bay. There I found a pay phone that took coins (omg!) since my phone has had no reception since Kalbarri and made a booking and some enquiries about the coming days. Then I practically ran to the beach (another one made up of shells) and went for a quick dip (it was another hot and humid day)before laying there on the beach for a while, something I have found myself doing more here on the West coast than anywhere before. Usually it’s been because there’s not much else to do, outside of Perth it really is remote. After that I headed off for fish and chips since my refusal to use the kitchen at my campground would have resulted in my eating a cold can of soup for dinner. The cafe I ended up at advertised wireless internet but I was told it couldn’t be used after 5pm. Normally, in most places, such a statement would have had me confused, angry and asking more questions. However this is Western Australia so I just plainly accepted it, frankly I didn’t expect to see any internet in this area at all.

It becomes painfully obvious out here in WA, how nice and easy being other places is. Having phones that work, internet access, supermarkets readily available and not having to constantly be thinking about making sure you have enough fuel to get to the next possible fueling station. So far, most of what I’ve seen out here has been secondary, stop along the way sort of attractions, the main reason I’m driving up North is to go to the Ningaloo reef near Exmouth. That’s not to say the stuff I’ve seen isn’t nice, but it’s not stuff I would normally go far out of my way to see. This is one area that seems overly hyped in lonely planet.

After dinner and the 50km drive back to my campsite I took a cold shower, lovely, drank some wine I picked up in the margaret river region, listened to some music and saw the nearly full moon rise. I’ve been listening to music a lot the last week or so, mainly as something to do while driving or laying on a beach. It’s nice, at times when I’ve been busier sight seeing I’ve missed the simple pleasure of my ipod. Of course that means I want to play a guitar now more than at any time on the trip so far…

I got up early and left Geraldton, after figuring out what other town in that area I could stay in to break up the driving on the way back down to Perth (there’s not a hell of a lot of choice in that section). Heading North to Kalbarri and the national park there. The day was quite hot and very humid, the most humid day I can remember since I was in Hong Kong, which was quite some time ago. I did get a campsite for the night (all the hostels in WA are booked for Easter it seems), and then explored the park. The main feature of the park is the river gorge with it’s red rock canyons. On my way there from the town you drive inland through vegetation like this.

And that’s all you see in every direction. Lonely, desolate area this. In spring it’s full of wildflowers apparently, this time of year just flies. As soon as I stepped out of the car for the first time since driving inland from the town of Kallbarri I was swarmed by flies immediately, after several attempts of applying my heavy duty insect repellent I concluded that it kept a significant percentage of the flies away, but only for a short period of time. I got to the most accessible (meaning I didn’t drive 25km on a bad gravel road to get to) viewpoints of the gorge and while it looks cool enough, standing there sweating in the heat and humidity and being constantly bothered by large amounts of flies is not my idea of fun. My original plan of hiking one of the trails around the gorge was killed off then and there.

Instead of hiking, I went to the other part of the national park which is back on the coast. It was cooler here, the coastline has some pretty cool cliff formations and from one of these I saw about 20 dolphins, pretty cool.

Another part of the coast has some very red rock formations by some very nice white sandy beaches. In amongst the rock pools there I saw more crabs than I’ve ever seen before, both in different kinds and total numbers, this one was eating a prawn…

After seeing the majority of the lookout points I headed to the beach at the mouth of the river for a cooling swim, laid on the beach for a while afterwords and then walked the whole length of town, sat on a sand dune and watched the sunset. Watching the sunset is great entertainment, there’s never two the same. Tonights version wasn’t as good as the pervious nights awesomeness but watching an orange ball of fire sink slowly over the horizon with waves crashing on the beach below isn’t too bad of an experience.

The town here, and indeed the caravan park I’m staying in, is full of mainly Australian families on holiday for the Easter long weekend and the river was full of people kite surfing, fishing, jet skiing, sailing and just about any other kind of watersport or beach related activity you can think of! I managed to get the next couple nights of the holiday weekend booked at another campground farther North, I’m slightly surprised at this fact, I guess most Australians are traveling in groups and have very large tents/caravans so just me sleeping in my car is easy enough to accommodate though all the hostels are booked out all weekend.

Monday 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.

My second full day in Perth I spent on the beach/beaches. There’s a lot of beaches near the city, I went to Cottesloe, one of the higher rated ones, 15 minutes on the train from downtown Perth for my first site of the Indian ocean.

The beach wasn’t that busy, and the water was very nice, significantly warmer than in Tasmania! It’s so clear here too! From Cottesloe there’s beaches stretching in both directions, North as far as you can see. I walked up to North Cottesloe beach, chilled there for a while before heading back to Cottesloe for some fish and chips and another swim. Such a perfect day for it, from what I can tell the weather is perfect most of the time in this area. I decided to walk back up North along the beach and watch the sunset, which, not as amazing as I’ve heard they can be here, was still nice. That concluded my five hours of beach life for the day, tough life this…

I left my couchsurfers place on Friday too since he had someone else arriving that night, found a nice hostel in the city to spend the weekend at before hopefully renting a car and heading out next week. I spent Saturday walking around the city and exploring more thoroughly than my first excursions. I stumbled across an english pub with just about my favourite english beer on tap that I seriously never see, after enjoying that pint immensely I discovered that there was a belgian beer hall not 300 meters away with my favourite belgian varieties on tap! I like this, alot.

So far I’m enjoying Perth, the weather is great, the city centre is a buzz with activity and can easily be traversed on foot. It does seem a tad more expensive than Melbourne, though not as costly as Sydney. A bit less variety than Melbourne in general for going out but this is to be expected considering it’s smaller population. Melbourne is still my favourite city in Australia, so far, but Perth is definitely firmly my good books.

Hello from Perth, the only major city on the West coast of Australia.  My flight to Perth went fine, 4 hours long showing just how big Australia is!  It was the longest flight I’ve ever taken on a discount airline and despite their statements telling you not to take food on to plane (so they can sell you food in flight) everyone seemed to smuggle something onboard, including myself.

There’s a 3 hour time difference between Perth and Melbourne at the moment due to the fact that WA already changed daylight savings time for the Spring and Victoria didn’t yet. So I arrived in Perth with the local time being an hour after the flight started with a pretty cool sunset visable from the plane.  Though the sun setting just after 6pm now is crazy, I’m too used to long days!

I had decided to use Perth as my first official time couchsurfing through the website (if you don’t know what that is, google it).  I’d sent several requests before hand and had one accepted.  My host lives near the airport and was able to pick me up from there, great start to the couch surfing experience.  Tonight is my second night staying at his place and it’s been great.

I spent today exploring the city centre mainly, walked up to the botanical gardens here (i’m guessing there’s one in every Australian city?).  The ones in Sydney are still my favourite.  There is a fantastic view of the city from the gardens here though.

Perth is substantially smaller than Melboure with just 1.5 million people here.  Still big enough though, with plenty of stuff in the centre.  They seem to have a good transit system throughout the city too, made up of trains and natural gas powered buses, though the bus drivers here seem to be related to some of the more acceleration happy tram drivers in Melbourne.  
I still cannot get over how similar stuff looks to parts of America here, in the suburban residential areas especially but in the city too! Just a little side note, I’m about as far away from Iowa right now as I am going to be on this trip, almost exactly half way around the world…

Today is my last in Melbourne, tomorrow I fly to Perth and begin the rest of my trip.  I’ve had a fantastic time in Melbourne, I love this city, but I’m ready for more adventure and to be on the road again.  I have 6 weeks left in Australia and I’ve decided to split it evenly between the West coast and the East coast/Queensland.  I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing out West, I still need to figure that out but all the options look good, starting in Perth.  The weather in Melbourne the last week has been perfect, every day, and it’s looks to be even better in Perth.

Another month finished today, I have about 6 of them left on the road now and still 3 continents after Australia to see.  This is also my 100th blog post, I hope everyone’s enjoyed reading them..  I may get to 200 entries before I’m finished!