Margaret River

Our main activity whilst at Perth was actually renting a car and leaving Perth. We set off to a small place South of the city called Margaret River mainly because Mr. Andrew Taberner and his parents were staying down there. We looked into bus ticket prices but instead managed to convince ourselves that renting a car to drive down would be a cheaper and more entertaining option.

The trip down there was mostly uninteresting as the roads were dead straight, wide open, dual carriageways with a speed limit of either 100 or 110kph. It was, however, good to see some of the Australian countryside. The only thing missing were Kangaroos; though we were told to be careful of them the only ones we spotted were lying by the side of the road ever so slightly dead.

 After saying a quick hello to the travelling Taberner family (who were actually staying in a town called Busselton up the road) we carried on to Margaret River, planning to return the next day. We spent the afternoon just relaxing and visiting a few of the beaches before deciding to find a place to sleep for the night. Well I say a place to sleep; we had already decided to sleep in the car but needed a place to park it. After deciding on a car park on the seafront that looked good (conveniently ignoring a sign telling us camping was forbidden) we parked up and started our horrible nights sleep.

At about half past 6 in the morning we were woken by a Western Australian policewoman at the window of the car. Pete had seen her and so had sat up and cleared our food and stuff away to make it look like we hadn’t slept there… unfortunately me lying in a sleeping bag in the drivers seat wasn’t too subtle! Anyway Pete pleaded ignorance and we escaped without the $100 per person fine.

Then next day we made a couple of stops on the way back to Busselton. The first was at a cave called the Jewel cave that was, well, a big cave. After that we went to the Margaret River Chocolate Factory which I have to say is definitely no Cadburys world. It was more a very expensive chocolate shop with a window into the small attached factory. The best bit about it was that they called the workers Umpa-Lumpas… workers who all happened to be Asian.

After the Chocolate factory we went up to Busselton and stopped off at the jetty which is almost 2km long. Once we had walked all the way to the end we set off to meet the Taberners.

After an extremely unsuccessful attempt at fishing (it would have been more accurately described as feeding fish) we had a BBQ in the hotel’s grounds. After our meal our evening was interrupted by several possums coming to check out what we were up to.

When me and Pete finally left it was late and we had to find fuel from somewhere. We tried one place in town that had just closed so we set off to look for another place. Somehow I had forgotten to switch the headlights on for the first 100 meters. As soon as I realised I flicked them on and then noticed the headlights in the rear-view mirror; thank God that wasn't a police car… woooop woooop woooop. FUCK. First time I have ever been pulled over. Luckily they weren’t too bothered, they just breathalysed me and sent us on our way with directions to the nearest petrol station that was still open. After that it was a long boring blast back to Perth, the only interest coming from how confusing and disorientating such perfectly flat, straight, roads can be at night.

Perth

I wont go into detail about the journey to Perth from Indonesia, I’m sure get the idea by now; travelling is not the fun part of travelling! Anyway we made it to Perth and more specifically to Ashleigh’s house, a girl we met in Vietnam on the bad day that ended with me in hospital. So firstly I have to say a massive thank you to her as she put up with me and Pete clogging up her flat for a whole week! 

We didn’t get up to much in Perth itself apart from discovering how bloody expensive Australia is at the moment! Over £6 for a beer and it’s not even a pint -  need I say more. I do have to say that despite this I did enjoy our time in the city. All along the central street there are really old buildings mixed with shiny new high rise blocks just like at the end of Batteries Not Included (that‘s a reference most people wont get). Apologies for the poor photos but they were digging up the road so I had to reach over a fence to take these.

The other attraction of the town centre was a park with statues of kangaroos outside the entrance. Of course this meant that we had to pose for pictures.

Apart from walking around town we visited the Perth city park; actually the biggest city park in the world - yeah I bet that fact blew your mind! The main part of the park that stuck in my mind was a tower called the DNA tower. If you are as big a nerd as me then you will notice that the tower shouldn’t be called that because it is not the shape of DNA. 

Now for a feature that my mum will really appreciate, they have these really exotic parrots all over the place on Australia!

The Gili Islands

Before we flew to Australia we had just enough time for a flying visit to the Gili islands at the north end of Lombok. We used the time here for a bit of a chill out before the next bit of travelling that was due to take us nearly 24 hours, most of which would be spent waiting in airports.

Even getting to the Gili Islands was a nightmare minibus journey across the country before spending an hour trapped in a restaurant and arguing with people at the "ferry" port to honour the tickets we had bought. Eventually we got on a boat and after about 5 minutes were regretting it. The boats they use are long and thin and for some reason the usually placid sea around the islands was swelling up massively and threatening to turn us over. Somehow we made it without dying and managed to get a really nice place on the island; a two story house thing.

We were staying on Gili Trawangan, the largest and most developed of the three islands, and so we decided to get on one of the cheap glass bottomed boat trips around the other islands to see a bit more. Luckily the sea was a bit calmer by then and the islands were looking a lot better in the sunshine.

The trip took us to various locations around the group of three islands to try snorkelling. By some amazing stroke of luck we actually managed to take the under water camera with us this time! There was about the same variety of fish that we had observed off the coast of Koh Phi Phi though here they seemed in much greater numbers, and were also much more friendly.

The main highlight of the boat trip was our visit to turtle point where, surprisingly, we went off in search of turtles. Our guide pointed out the first few that were around and then I was happy to spot one for myself that only me and Pete went after. 

Though the turtles were pretty cool, the best fish of the day was obviously the Nelson fish that Pete captured swimming under the boat...

Two Kutas

After we had finished with volcanoes it was back to the beaches. The first two stops were at two places called Kuta, one on Bali and the other on Lombok. It has to be said that Kuta in Bali wasn’t our favourite place in the world. It was full of Australian chavs, or bogans as they are known to the Australians. As well as this it was the worst place for being hassled by street sellers and taxi drivers since Bangkok. We weren’t there for long and as such there are only drunken photos and this fantastic one of our curtains that had Claudia Schiffer written on, I don’t know why… or why I took the picture.

Whilst we were on Bali we tried our hand at surfing for the first time. We rented a couple of boards on the beach for pretty much nothing and just tried to copy what you see on TV. The tactic worked and both of us were quickly up and surfing like pros (well that’s what we thought).

Our next stop was Kuta’s namesake on Lombok, the island next door. On our first afternoon we tried our hands at surfing again. This time things didn’t go so well. We were told a place called Gerupuk Bay would be ok for beginners so we went there only to find out we had to take a boat 10 minutes out into the bay to where the waves were breaking. When we got out there we realised the waves were huge (well for us) and so we spent most of our time being half drowned and beaten up by our surfboards.

 

During our second night, there was an earthquake off the coast of Bali, with a magnitude of 6.9. In the morning after there was the quake in Japan and the locals were definitely worried about tsunamis. luckily we were able to tell the ones that we were staying with that the forecasts were saying we were safe in this part of Indonesia, though some had already evacuated inland. We spent the night celebrating the absence of tsunamis by drinking palm and rice wine with some of the locals at a restaurant we had eaten at earlier. Whilst on Lombok we had planned to take a ride around the island if we could rent some nice-ish bikes. We were told that they could find us a couple but in the end it turned out there was only one nice bike and one helmet in Kuta so Pete shot gunned that and I was left with the WORST bike in the world. It had no lights, indicators, keys, ignition, had the softest rear suspension, and was an old 2 stroke. I decided it wasn’t a good idea to take the bike around the island which was a good decision as it turned out it also drank fuel at a crazy rate! 

Though Kuta in Lombok was worlds away from it’s counterpart on Bali and there were no street sellers in the tiny town one thing it did have was what we called the bracelet mafia. At pretty much any time of the day small children would come up to you trying to sell little bracelets. On our last night there we finally relented and decided to buy one each, we ended up surrounded by the kids as word quickly spread that people were actually going to buy!

After buying bracelets we learnt one more thing about Indonesians; they like playing with fire almost as much as I did when I was 12 / still do now.