Well I've travelled a few thousand kilometers since last we spoke so I thought I'd give you the edited highlights. Then I realised that quite a lot happened in Esperance so my blog will have to trail hopelessly behind my travels a while longer.
Naoko had decided to travel with me a bit further, to Esperance in fact. This was going to be my last stop before heading across to Adelaide. After that she was going to get the bus back to Perth. Before that though we decided to spend a few days camping at the Cape Le Grande National Park.
The Park was a beautiful place, with amazingly blue seas and white beaches. We also climbed Frenchmans peak which gives amazing views over the sandy scrubland in the park.
After a few cold nights and a whole lot of relaxing our time in Esperance was up, and Naoko and I had a sad parting as I waved her off on the bus back to Perth. However, it wasnt all sad, I had decided to stay another day in Esperance because I found out that Little Birdy were playing.
That night I set off from the hostel I was staying in and wandered to the pub, intent on enjoying myself even though I didnt know anyone else in Esperence remotely interested in Little Birdy. I was quickly engaged in conversation with one of the hard drinking locals who for an hour gave me many hints and tips on how to survive in the desert. He waxed lyrical about two british guys who's cars broke down, one who survived the other who died.
Local: You have to stay with your car, the guy that survived stayed with his car
Me: Uh hu
Local: if you stay with your car at least you have water, you can drink the antifreeze if you need to.
Me: Isnt that poisonous?
Local: Its better than nothing.
So that was nice, he also confided he was barred from several pubs, including the pier hotel, the local nightclub. At The Pier the bouncers, about 3 of them, had tried to throw him out, so using his 5 years of ninjitsu and karate experience, and his not insubstantial frame, he had thrown all of them out and shut the door.
If I had any doubt about how hard he was, he then proceeded to show me the Esperence version of the Tequila Slammer, the Tequila Sawmill. Instead of licking salt off your hand taking the tequila shot and biting on a lemon, you snort the salt up your nose, drink the shot(a bit unconventional I thought) then squirt the lemon into your eye. So that was nice, I declined the offer of trying one.
He poured himself into a taxi shortly afterwards and I settled down to watch the gig, with only a few brief conversations with another maniacal looking local to amuse myself.
Little Birdy themselves were pretty damn good, they were reassuringly small and down to earth, they bought a few drinks from just beside me at the bar, not that I realised this till they went on stage. The pub had filled up and the crowd were definately enjoying themselves. They sound more up beat than they do on their EP and the music had loads of energy. So I'm very glad I stayed the extra night and braved the locals to see them.
I ended the night talking to a lovely girl called Karen who was back home visiting her parents then wandered home to my hostel ready to set off across the Nullarbor the next day.
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.
Well, not exactly half a bee, but lots of them. The next place we stayed at was a farm near the town of Walpole and the Valley Of The Giants. The main things the farm produces are honey, and fresh water crayfish called marron, which are similar to lobster.
The reference to erik as I'm sure you all know is from a monty python song.
One more week of WWOOFing and we would be in Albany, I'd decided to go and stay in a hostel once I got there but in the mean time we had a pleasant few days with Tom and Karen Pascoe and their kids Megan and Brian.
Karen was actually a WWOOFER herself, only she forgot to leave, and shes been on the farm for around 6 years. Her and Tom got married 1 year ago and their two kids are 2.5 (Brian) and almost 4 (Megan). Interestingly, since Karen is German they decided to bring up their kids bilingually so both of the little ankle biters can demand attention in two languages.
Naoko had been very keen to learn about the bees on the farm, thats the reason we visited in actual fact. So the day after we arrived she went off for a whole day playing with the bees.
Hmmm, well, I had a hugely witty and entertaining post but the browser seems to have swallowed it so you'll have to make do with this.
Farm good. Ate Marron. Went to the Valley Of The Giants Treetop Walk, walked among the treetops. Left.
Oh alright, I'll elaborate. Karen and Tom grow most of the food they eat, so we had various bits of meat, bacon that tom killed and cured himself, chickens and best of all Marron, fresh from their dam. A marron looks very much like a sinister lobster, being quite dark in colour, but then again, I can't remember what a live lobster looks like so it might just look like a lobster. I've never eaten lobster either, but I'm assured that marron tastes like a sweeter version. I can confirm however, that it is very nice.
We actually spent most of our time on the farm with Karen and Tom, who were more than happy to blether away for hours as we did bits of work here and there, we did manage to struggle out and do a few tourist things, including a couple of scenic drives and a trip to the giant tingle tree, which is hollow and large enough to park a small car inside.
The sightseeing highlight of the stay was the Treetop walk though. Its a walkway supported by rusty(the sign assured us its supposed to be like that) metal pylons that meanders through the treetops around 40m above the ground. We had a pleasant mornign admiring the view there just looking at the scenery.
Anyway, after about a month of doing WWOOFing I had become a bit bored with weeding, so I decided to stay a few days in Albany. Naoko was going to continue WWOOFing nearby and we could still meet up and go and see stuff together but I wanted to experience the whole stereotypical backpacking lifestyle a little, oh yeah, and go to the pub. You see the problem with owning a car and living at farms miles out of town is that it makes it a bit pointless going to the pub, particularly when your travelling companion can only drive automatics. So I was looking forward to staying a hundred yards from the nearest pub.
Oops, my adoring fans have been waiting entirely far to long for an update on my progress. I'd better let you know the latest events before you get bored waiting.
So, the last you heard I was pottering around in some caves near Margaret River staying at a vineyard. No, I'm not still there wandering around in a drunken stupor. After a few more days looking around at various bits and pieces Naoko and I decided to head across to Pemberton, a logging town in the middle of tall timber country. The Karri trees we had seen near Margaret River had just been babies at around 100 years old. The really big ones are around 350 years and the trees can last as long as 500 years. Pemberton has lots of fine examples of these gigantic trees and we decided to go and have a little look see.
The place we ended up staying at used to be a YHA hostel, but it had changed hands recently and was just a hostel/forest stay about 10km out of town. A really peaceful place to go and just relax for a few days, or if you are WWOOFing a great place to go and build a hexagonal berbecue area for a few days.
The couple we were staying with, Alison and Rob turned out to have met Kerensa, the friend I stayed with when I first arrived in Perth, the world really is a pretty small place. They had just taken over the running of the place and had decided to do some upgrading so over the course of a long weekend we helped dig holes and erect the skeleton of a new barbecue for the tour groups they get travelling through.
When we weren't doing that, we visited a local winery, where the random valley wines are actually bottled, and even got to taste some wine straight from the barrel.
Apart from that we took some scenic drives along gravel roads which would have been immense amounts of fun if I had a shiny new 4x4 subaru. As it was the view was still really enjoyable and we saw some pretty impressive forest.
The highlight of my time in Pemberton definately has to be climbing the Gloucester Tree, a big tree that used to be used as a fire lookout. a good few years ago some enterprising souls drove metal spikes into the side of a tall tree and put a platform on top that you could use to look out over the surrounding land to check for fires. It isnt used for that anymore, but people come to climb up and have a look at the very impressive view. The tree is around 60 meters tall and all you have to climb up are a series of metal poles stuck into the side of the tree spiralling round the trunk. Once you get to the top you get a panoramic view across the forest canopy.
So that was Pemberton, I'll get round to putting up some photos which will hopefully do it justice, but after almost a week there we moved on to Walpole a small town on the way to Albany.