Its definately not a jaguar. Its a Toyota Corolla, and its tremendously basic. Unfortunately there are still things that can go wrong with it, so I got it checked out by a mechanic. And surprisingly, he told me, after sucking in vigorously through his teeth, that it would cost me.
Don't get me wrong, I like my car. 1.6l 1985 Toyota Corolla. Its had a new engine in it, new universal joints and front brakes put in, the guy that had it before was a mechanic, sounds promising. I decided it was a good idea to get it serviced before I set off anywhere major in it. Much better to find out a problem now, rather than in the middle of the desert somewhere. Even better yet would have been to find out there were no problems with it at all. Alas my lucks not that good.
Anyway, I get up bright and early wave goodbye to my new motor and let the grease monkeys take a look. The report comes back that afternoon. The slightly suspect temperature readings on the gauge on the dash are not a symptom of a faulty thermostat or something easy like that. It turns out my radiator is buggered, definately better to find that out now rather than on the road. In addition the water pump might be a bit knackered. Not content with this bad news the garage manager tells me that the shock absorbers are a bit worn out, the timing belt too, and that not only the rear brake pads but the rear brake cylinders need replaced. Great. And I paid this man 300 bucks to tell me this bad news. To be fair he did change the oil, oil filter, spark plugs, air filter and he did spend time tuning up the car to get it running nicely. Still, better to know all this now I guess.
Well, I can hardly turn up the radio and ignore any noises and smoke that might start coming out of the car, so I've bitten the bullet and as I type my car is getting some annoyingly expensive repairs done on it. Such is life. Hopefully though, I wont have to do too much more to it for a while.
I remember now the woes everyone I know with a car goes through. Still, I can recoup my losses by sleeping in it for the rest of the year. ;)
After our brief visit to Exmouth we decided we wanted to get away from it all back at coral bay, so the rest of our trip consisted of large amounts of very little.
Back at Coral Bay we got ourselves some new accomodation. Paul was keen to do a whole lot of tours, including swimming with manta rays, an outer reef tour and whale watching tour. I was only really interested in the whale watching tour, content to let him run around like a headless chicken for a couple of days. The girls were looking even less likely to do anything, highly content to sit around on the beach and just chill out.
Unfortunately for both me and Paul, Coral Bay at this time of year gets quite strong winds, and that weekend the conditions were such that because of the tide and the wind, the passage out to the open ocean was a bit dangerous and the sea was likely to be pretty unpleasant so most of our tours got cancelled. Paul still made it out to the outer reef and went snorkelling for a while out there, but there ws no swimming with manta rays and no whale watching for either of us.
The last night however, all 4 of us decided to go on a sunset quad biking tour out on the sand dunes. The basic idea is you drive out on these quad bikes bumping along sand tracks through sand dunes, climbing up and down big dunes and opening the throttle as you charge along the sandy beaches (trying to avoid losing control and plowing into the water). All good fun. We headed out at a leisurely pace guided by a man with one of the better jobs in the world, namely getting paid to drive around sand dunes in a quad bike.
The quad bikes had 5 gears and I reckon you could probably get them upto 70kph if you were really trying, as it was we were somewhat hampered by the slower people in front of us and I only managed to get it up to 55kph. Great fun though, definately have a go on a quad bike if you get the chance.
After our brief encounter with off roading we retired early as we had a very long days driving to look forward to the next day. We had decided to drive back to Perth, with breaks a 13 hour drive, maybe 1100km. Up and away at 630am we hoped to get back by 8 so there wasnt too much driving in the dark, we took shifts, and helpfully everyone else fell asleep as soon as I set off. A quick stop for breakfast and a change of driver at about 1030. It was about then we noticed the automatic transmission starting to play up, but it wasnt much of a problem once you got upto speed. One more change of driver, the problem was a bit worse, but it got really bad as we arrived back in Perth, getting to the point when it would only change up to 4th at about 90kph, not ideal when you spend most of your time with the engine screaming at 70. The old girl got us home though, and our little holiday within a holiday was over. Beautiful.
After getting up as far as coral bay it seemed rude not to go and visit turquoise bay just a few hours north, so we made a trip of it and stayed up in Exmouth a small town nearby.
We arrived in Exmouth and quickly found our accomodation for the night, the promisingly named, Exmouth Marina Beach Retreat. It is in fact a very nice hostel. The dorms are permanent tents on raised platforms with lots of trees in between them. Each dorm sleeps 8 but when we arrived the place wasnt very busy, so we managed to get a whole dorm to just the 4 of us.
The guy at reception was a very chilled out hippy type who said we were the most styling backpackers he had seen, largely because instead of turning up in a van of some sort we had arrived in a big white merc. We dumped our stuff and headed off to a lighthouse about 30km out of town to watch the sunset. We got there early and were standing around chatting looking out to sea and generally not paying much attention to anything when a guy wandered up looked out to see for about 30 seconds, then said, "There are the whales there" and sure enough when we looked out we sould see a couple of whales playing out in the waves. They were too far out to make out any details, but it was still nice to see them. We watched the sunset and piled back in the car to go back to our tent and make some food.
It was too good to be true, we'd had a whole day without anything happening to the car, and on the way home, with the light fading, we hit a poor kangaroo. The kangaroo came off worse, but the car lost the lights on one side and the instrument lights on the dash stopped working. Not an ideal end to the day but these things happen.
Somewhat subdued we returned to our dorm, but our mood brightened again once we had the barbie fired up and some steak cooking. We cooked up a feast and sat around for a while drinking before being joined by the guy who looked after the place and shortly after that by an aussie girl and a dutch guy who were staying at the hostel.
We stayed up quite late again that night, and were woken up to the sound of attention seeking cockatoos. After a bit of muddling around we got in the car and drove out to turquoise bay. Its a beautiful piece of the world, loads of little bays up the coast beside the reef. Unfortunately that day it was really windy, so we didnt get the best out of the place. We stayed for a while, had a bit of a snorkel then packed up and drove back down to Coral bay to spend the rest of the trip there.
Well, yes, I've been terribly lax at reporting my activities for the past week or two. I'm sorry, I know your all living out your travelling urges vicariously through me.
I do have an excuse though, I've been spending my time on sun kissed beaches swimming with fish and watching the world go by.
When I last spoke to you I was planning a trip up north to Coral bay with some folk I'd met. Paul and Clare, 2 ozzies, and Rachel a brit. The plan was to head up to coral bay and see what we could see up there for about a week then come back down.
We would be taking Clare's dad's wheels. A beat up old 80's Merc, nicknamed "the tractor". The car was, as you might expect, not a speed machine, but once you got it up to speed it trundled along happily enough. Something to do with momentum I think. It wasnt the lightest of vehicles.
We set off with a very full boot early on Monday morning. and got about an hour out of Perth before we blew one of the tyres. Thumbs up to Clare for controlling the not so nimble tractor and stopping safely. Then we unloaded the very full boot to get to the spare, put that on and continued up the road, stopping off to get a new spare put on the car.
A gentle detour to see the pinnacles shortly followed. The Pinnacles are big rocks that stick up out of the ground in a haphazard manner. Theres a track you get to drive around and you can get out to look at the various different shaped rocks. Its definately one of those things that is on most peoples lists of things to see in western australia and they are nice enough. But after all is said and done they are just big rocks sticking up out of the ground.
We continued on for the rest of the day stopping off in a very nice hostel in Geraldton about 450km north of Perth. The most impressive thing about the days drive, and the rest of the driving on the trip was the sheer distances involved. I am now starting to get a proper appreciation of how big australia is.
The next day we had a long stint driving, making it the further six or seven hundred kilometers to Coral bay were we were staying the next 2 nights. Coral bay is refreshingly small. It has one street. A petrol station, lots of reef tour companies a supermarket, 2 caravan parks a pub a hotel and not much else. There is a real shortage of water there, so much so that you shower in brackish water. Oh yeah, the other thing it has is a beautiful beach and the ningaloo reef just off shore.
We went out that night to the pub and much beer drinking later I introduced our (very)merry band to the joys of the rusty nail shooter. As Paul commented, "you can feel it all the way down to your liver". We then discovered that after the pub shuts, the place to be is the bakery. The security guard came and moved us on from our cabin in the caravan park because we were making too much noise and told us to go to the beach or the bakery. Somewhat dubious, we wandered up the road and lo and behold there were a good 6 people already partaking of the days left over bakery items whilst the bakers worked on the next days baked goods.
The next day dawned, not very early, and I spent the day sitting around on the beach trying not to fry in the sun. That evening we went out on a sunset tour on a catamaran, which sailed out for a few hours and we got to watch the sunset out on the water. Very beautiful. The next morning Paul and I went out on a glass bottomed boat tour to have a look at the fish life off the beach. Its amazing, beautiful multicoloured fish all over the place. The reef itself is mostly browns and greens and blues. Not terribly colourful, but there are loads of really inquisitive fish. We even got visited by a turtle at one point.
We were so impressed by that that we went out snorkelling around lunchtime to get a bit of a closer look and saw more of the same. Its good fun chasing after cool looking fish, until you realise how much better they are at swimming than you are and leave you miles behind with a flick of their tail.
Tired but happy, we jumped in the car we headed up north to another place called Exmouth. We intended to go and visit Turquoise Bay, which is supposed to be beautiful too, the next morning then head back for a few more days in Coral bay before heading back to Perth.
Laziness is setting in already, its terrible, who would have thought that I would have been able to find better things to do than update a blog? Anyway, I have been doing some stuff since I last spoke to you all so I should probably give you all a update.
My Plan(tm) such as it was, was to turn up in Australia and look at stuff for about a year then go home. To help me with this, I was probably goin to get a job so I didnt run out of money, and I was also going to get a car so I could go and look at things further away. As you can probably imagine, its far too soon to be worrying about things like jobs, however, Australians seem to like suburbs, so getting around is a bit of a pain, much thanks goes to the collection of people who have helped ferry me around. That being the case, I decided to look for a car.
Now, being a scotsman, and therefore tight, I wanted a cheap car and being on holiday and generally lazy I didnt want to hunt around for ages to find one. Tricky. Fortunately, the girl I'm staying with Kerensa has a father whos a mechanic, and one of his work mates is selling his car because hes getting the company ute. So, on Friday I should hopefully hand over $2000 and get in exchange an '84 white toyotta corolla 1.6.
In other news, I've met up with Michelle from work, its a bit weird meeting someone your used to seeing in Scotland, on the other side of the world. As you might expect there was drinking involved, I ended up invited to her dads birthday party combined with her brothers leaving to go travelling party, her coming back to visit party, and her sister Kristen's I want my name on the invite party.
Through Kristen I also met up with a couple of girls called Clare and Rachel and a guy called Paul and the 4 of us are heading up north towards Coral Bay at the start of next week for some excellent lying on a beach inaction. We might get round to going and seeing some dolphins or some other sights around there as well. Oh yeah, and there will be some drinking I imagine.
There thats enough to be going on with, consider yourselves updated.