Australia

Big City!

Well, not really big, but Albany can just about get away with calling itself a city, if you squint a little.

I was staying at the imaginitively titled Albany Backpackers, a very big hostel which seemed to have a steady stream of tour groups which came in every day or so and left again very early the next morning.

On the plus side it had free cake every day at 6.30 and if you got up early enough free breakfast in the morning.

Albany is blessed with a few more sights to see than Walpole which I think has a population of somewhere around 500 but still has a hostel, Australia is a funny place.

I met up almost immediately with some random people from one of the tours, they were leaving the next day but we got to chatting and they had the pleasure of getting the same list of questions that everyone asks fired at them from me. It was something of a novelty for me though since it was the first time I'd done anything like that in Australia. After staying at the hostel a few more days the novelty had worn off somewhat though. In any case, Myself Uma and Nicola were soon joined by Anton, a Dutchman with a cow trading card game. I kid you not. So I spent that evening playing a somewhat surreal game that involved bidding money for various farmyard animals with the aim of getting 4 of a kind.

The next I visited the last Whaling station on Australian soil, which has now been converted into a fascinating if somewhat grizzly museum. I took Anton along, everyone likes the guy with the car, and we spent a few hours there in some really quite cold and stormy weather. Infact, most of the time I spent in Albany was a bit miserable and cold on the weather front. But then again it just made the christmas decorations look a bit more in place.

I spent an inordinate amount of time in Albany just wandering around looking at shops and buying little things I probably didnt really need. One purchase I was very pleased with however was a shiny new Trangia cooking stove thing. A national park east of Esperance had caught my eye and it looked like a good opportunity to do some camping.

I did the usual touristy things of climbing Bluff Knoll the tallest peak in SW Australia, Visiting the replica of the Brig Amity that brought the first settlers to Albany, Its a really small boat, and visiting the local natural wonders, namely the blow holes, the gap and the natural bridge. The last three were all visited in nice miserable rainy weather, which shows off their charms very well, the gap is a section of cliff that has fallen away leaving a box that the see rushes into frothing and splashing off the granite walls. You could watch it for hours, if the spray didnt regularly splash you in the face when you stood on the viewing platform. The Natural bridge is a large granite bridge hollowed out by the sea with the swell washing away underneath its span. The blowholes were only moderately impressive blowing small vents of water out through the rock, but the seas all around there were the most interesting of all, very powerful, beating against the shore, and the weather wasnt even that bad really.

The original plan, well, as much as there had been much of a plan at all, was that I would find people to share petrol in Albany and head east with them and Naoko would go back to Perth, but Naoko was interested in heading to Esperance and go camping with me, and no other potential car mates were forthcoming so off we went.

Posted by Craig at December 18, 2003 03:36 AM