Relay for Life 2010

Yesterday Dave and I participated in Relay for Life, which is an overnight fundraising event for the Cancer Council of NSW. The idea is that in teams of 10-15 you take turns to walk or run around a 200m track for 24 hours - we were part of the American Express team.

Alongside the walking and running, there was also entertainment throughout the day including a cooking demonstration by a celebrity chef (he cooked a delicious lamb quesadilla which I'm going to recreate at home), cupcake decorating, tug-o-war, and a candlelight ceremony of hope, to name but a few things.

As night set in, people were invited to write their messages of remembrance on candle-lit bags, which were put around the track - walking round reading these messages was incredibly emotional and humbling; it really makes you appreciate the health and happiness of your family and friends.

Despite having originally intended to stay overnight in a tent, at around 10pm, and being the only two people in our team left, we decided to call it a night and head home. All in all I think I ran and walked approximately 20km, and Dave approximately 30km - a very tiring, but very rewarding day!

Day 9 of the Western Australian adventure: Perth and home

The holiday had finally come to an end. We packed up our bags in Cervantes and headed back to Perth, where we spent a couple of hours walking around the city, just to see if it was any more interesting than last time. It wasn't.

Our journey to the airport was incredibly straightforward and uneventful and, before we knew it, we were back in our little flat in Sydney, getting ready for the next week of work.

Only 2 weeks until our next adventure in New Zealand though....

Day 8 of the Western Australian adventure: Cervantes

So, we awoke on our second-to-last day in WA at our lovely little cabin, made lunch and breakfast and hit the road. On the way into Cervantes we took a slight detour, well, about a 3 hour detour so 'slight' by Australia standards, to go to Kalbarri National Park to see Nature's Window. Nature's Window is basically a whole in a rock caused by many years of erosion, which you can look through onto the Valley below it. It's quite spectacular, and it needed to be; without it, Kalbarri would not even be on the map.

We got back into the car and started the long drive to Cervantes and again had to contend with the Australian wildlife which seems to have an odd draw towards the road. At one stage Lucia had to slam on the brakes to avoid taking out an emu which was just leisurely strolling across the road.

We arrived in Cervantes and checked into our hostel which we had chosen because it had won lots of awards, and it didn't disappoint. It was the nicest, cleanest and most welcoming hostel we'd been to. The only issue was Kyle the Candian, and he was an issue. As soon as we'd checked in at reception, Kyle was bothering us for a lift to the Pinnacles that night. The Pinnacles are thousands of, slightly freaky, sandstone pillars ranging between 5 and 12 feet high. Again, these are quite the natural phenomenon and have generated a whole localised tourist industry.

The idea is to gather there around sun set with your picnic, champagne, your camera and your intrusive Canadian friend and spend hours walking around looking for the best shot of the sunset. Below is my effort, I hope you like it.

After we dropped Kyle back at the hostel, we went to the local country club for the seafood platter. This had a big local lobster and the standard other seafood trimmings, but to be honest, it reminded me why I don't particularly like seafood. Lucia, of course, loved it. When we got home we cracked out the 1985 version of Australian trivial pursuit, which lasted all of about 5 minutes, before we realised we knew nothing and went to bed to watch Valkyrie. Valkyrie is, on reflection, every bit as bad as you would expect from a film where Tom Cruise plays Hitler's assassin...

Day 7 of the Western Australian adventure: Kalbarri

Today was a rather long and uneventful day of driving with a few stops thrown in just for fun. We woke up in Denham and headed off early to our next stop which we had decided would be Kalbarri as there is a National Park there with some interesting things to see.

On the long drive to Kalbarri we stopped at Shell Beach, which is apparently the only beach in the world made up entirely of a crustacean shells.

Next stop along the way was the stromatolites, which was one of the things Dave had wanted to see. Stromatolites are collections of cyno bacteria - they are the first single-cellular organisms which produced oxygen and eventually gave rise to multi-cellular organisms; so basically, without them we wouldn't be here. Shark Bay is the only place in the world you can see them because they only live in extremely saline water. I could tell you why this is but it's actually not that interesting for a blog post...

What seemed like hours later we eventually arrived in Kalbarri. Once again, the Lonely Planet had been somewhat misleading - there was pretty much nothing to do in the town, despite it having said it was a hub of activity. There were some nice cafes and restaurants about but they were ridiculously expensive - I wouldn't pay that much for food in Sydney, let alone out in the middle of nowhere in Western Australia. So we settled for a night in our little cabin on the camp site with our usual picnic fodder, the essential ciders and a pack of cards for crib...I beat Dave twice...no change there then.

Day 6 of the Western Australian adventure: Monkey Mia

Today was a big day: the reason we had wanted to visit Monkey Mia was because it is the world's most reliable destination for dolphin visitation.

For the past forty years, dolphins have visited the shores of Monkey Mia every morning. Unfortunately they choose to do it very early: around 7:30am so it meant an early rise for us.

I set my alarm the night before for 6am - as soon as it went off we were up and rushing to get ready as we wanted to ensure we would be close enough to see the dolphins. Turns out my phone was still on Sydney time and Sydney is two hours ahead of Perth...big boo boo....it was actually 4am.Urrrghh what were we going to do for the next three and a half hours?!?! We decided to set off anyway and were at Monkey Mia by 5:30am. I slept in the car whilst Dave entertained himself watching The Inbetweeners.

Finally it was time to go down to the shore to see the dolphins and despite being there so early, we were still some of the last people to turn up as the dolphins had decided to come early that morning. We managed to sneakily push ourselves towards the front and we were lucky enough to be incredibly close to them. The resort feed the dolphins around three times each morning and choose people from the crowd to do so - they chose me, yay, and here I am feeding one of the dolphins a fish (which left my hand very smelly afterwards!)

By the time the dolphin feeding was over and they had left the shore it was only 9am. Despite having had breakfast we were now very hungry (our breakfast had been 5 hours ago afterall) so we settled down in the Monkey Mia cafe and had a second, healthy breakfast of fruit toast and fruit salad. We had decided to hire a boat and have a picnic on the water for lunch so we spent the next few hours soaking up the sun and reading - absolutely blissful.

We took the boat out at around 11am for a couple of hours, had lunch and a swim. On taking it back to the shore the friendly boatman said we could keep the boat as long as we wanted so long as we moored ourselves out in the sea and came in if he needed the boat. Another few hours spent on the water reading, relaxing and swimming. We only came in when a massive wave hit the boat and absolutely soaked my half of it. Not good. The rest of the day was spent milling around waiting for the cultural Aboriginal experience we had booked the previous day.

At 6:30pm the slightly intimidating Aboriginal man turned up with two didgeridoos and a bag full of Aboriginal stuff. We walked to a nearby campfire which he had set up and sat around it ready for some Dreamtime stories and freshly caught mullet cooked on the fire (which was delicious). It was really quite interesting - he gave us a very condensed history of the Aboriginals in Western Australia, his family and their culture, taught us some Aboriginal language and also played the didgeridoo for us. A different way to spend an evening that's for sure!

Day 5 of the Western Australian adventure: Denham

We got up pretty early as today was our longest drive of the week, from The Priory in Dongara to Denham in Shark Bay- 500km or so. We did the normal- made lunch, ate breakfast and hit the road before 8am. The drive was a bit of a bore, the highlight of which was a stop for petrol and an ice cream. Lucia was doing her normal helpful navigation, where she props the map against the window to provide some shade, then falls asleep.

The scenery was lovely, nothing as far as you can see and the deep red sand for which Australia is famed lining either side of the road. The problem is the scenery didn't change for the full five hours; the only thing to break the vast expanse of bugger-all was the occasional dead roo, or the slightly luckier soon-to-be-dead roo.
We arrived at the backpackers lodge at about 2pm. The accommodation was basic, but clean. We had a room to ourselves and were sharing a communal area with a couple of others. After unpacking we went to harass the local visitors centre who were very helpful with ideas for what we could do with our time in Denham.

That afternoon we went to 'Ocean Park' which offered a guided tour around some aquariums containng an array of Shark Bay's marine life- including a fair few varieties of shark (Tiger Shark, Lemon Shark, Nervous Shark (yes...because it's nervous!)) which we saw being fed.

On the way home we went via Little Lagoon to watch the sun set. The Little Lagoon is an almost perfectly circular pool of water sitting just in land, with a small estuary connecting it to the sea. I went snorkelling, which proved both challenging (as the water was ankle deep at it's deepest point) and pointless (as nothing exciting lives in water as deep as the average puddle). The sunset was lovely though, and we have lots of pictures to prove it!

On the way home we went via a cafe for a scrummy, if a little expensive dinner. Again, it was another early night, but we intended to get up at 6am the following day to drive to Monkey Mia to view the feeding of the dolphins. We wanted to get there early to beat the Chinese, who have a similar reputation to the Germans and their deckchairs.

Day 4 of the Western Australian adventure: Dongara-Denison

We woke up at our hostel in Freo at about 7.30am, had our muesli for breakfast and prepared our lunch for the drive. Today was going to be one of our biggest drives- trying to cover 400km+ north up the coast to Dongara. Unfortunately we didn't get off to a great start getting stuck in traffic for about an hour in Perth, but we soon made a sizable dent in the journey and stopped for lunch to celebrate.

After lunch, which Lucia and I shared with the local swarm of flies, we set off again to drive the next hour or so into Dongara. We'd booked to stay one night at the Priory Hotel; an old colonial building- one of the largest in Dongara. The building was massive with huge rooms, very high ceilings and polished dark wood floorboards throughout. It was lovely, or if you're Lucia, creepy- we did have a whole block of about 10 rooms to ourselves. The Priory itself started life as a public house, then it became a nunnery and boarding school and more recently has become a pub and hotel in one.

At dinner time we went to hunt around the 5 eateries Dongara has to offer. Dongara is famed for its Moreton Bay Figs and locally sourced Crayfish, so we were determined to try at least one of these. After a short while we discovered that of the five restarants, one of them looked pretty poor (and served neither crayfish or figs), two of them were closed for the day, one of them was closed permanently and the other one was, in fact, the Priory Hotel, where we were staying!

Feeling somewhat deflated and betrayed by our trusted Lonely Planet, which had promised such good things, we went to IGA and stocked up on picnic stuff- anti-pasti, bread, cured meats, dippy things and some fruit. And, of course, some cider.

To finish off the night we sat on the massive verandah by ourselves nibbling, sipping and reading before going to bed and watching some Australia's Got Talent. I can now tell you, on the basis of the programme alone, if Australia does have talent, it hides it well.

Day 3 of the Western Australian Adventure: Rottnest Island

So, after getting up at about 8am, my first chore of the morning was to go and find Lucia some skimmed milk, which in Fremantle, is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.

Australia in general seems to have more varieties of milk than you could shake a stick at. In Fremantle, you could definately shake a stick at it- finding anything other than full fat milk is almost impossible. One of the very helpful shop assistants even told me "you'll have to go to a specialist shop for that sort of thing" with a look on her face as if I'd just asked her for some rare concoction of unicorn blood. Anyway, I ended up bartering with a man in a cafe to sell me a cup of his skimmed milk, so Lucia was happy as she got to have skimmed milk with her organic, fair trade, free-range and extortionate muesli..

After breakfast we found our way to Shed C on Freo docks, which was where our Rottnest Island ferry was due to depart from. The ferry over to Rottnest was pretty quick, but also pretty bumpy and we both arrived a bit quesey. I managed to convince Lucia that an iced bun would settle her stomach, so we went to the Rotto bakers. Obviously the iced bun did nothing for her, made it worse if naything, but I still got a custard tart out of it so I wasn't complaining.

Rottnest itself is a small island just off the coast of Freemantle. It's 11km long by 4km high and is a total 19kmsq. It's been used as a prison for the Aboriginals and more recently a prison for POWs in WW2. Despite its fairly dark history it is a very peacful and idyllic place, home to a population of 300 residents and temporary home to 500,000 visitors (each paying 15$ to enter the island!)

People aren't allowd to take cars to the island, so bikes it was! We paid (/got fleeced) for our bikes and set off cycling around the 22km perimeter with intermittent stops to the toilet for Lucia to be sick in. On our way to visit the lighthouse in the middle of he island (yes, an unusual place for a lighthouse but it was built by the aboriginal prisonors so maybe this was their idea of a practical joke) we came across our first propper viewing of a quokka.

Rottnest is called so because when the Dutch explorer discovered it in he 1600s he was struck by the number of 'bush rats', or quokkas that were there, and named it Rat Nest Island (in Dutch obviously), hence the name. Quokkas are like small kangaroos which seem to have no inhibiitons. At one stage it was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin the way they were emerging from the bush to say hello. The photo below is of one of the quokkas and Lucia, who looks like she is about to devour it.

We had lunch at Little Salmon Bay, a small secluded beach that we had virtually to ourselves. Lunch was a sourdough roll with cheese, avo and tomato which we'd prepared in the hostel earlier. Little Salmon Bay has never been home to any salmon, but it does provide an underwater snorkelling trail with some under-water signage to make it a little more fun.

After lunch we cycled back to Thompson Bay, returned the bikes and jumped on the Rottnest MegaBlast; this is an alternative ferry home with the basic aim of somehow flipping you overboard en route. We managed to get the very front seats and Lucia spent the whole time screaming on the way home. When we got home we showered and trudged out to dinner at one of Freo's many local eateries. Dinner was nice, but not particularly memorable. Afterwards we headed home for a well deserved night's sleep.

Day 2 of the Western Australia adventure: Perth/Fremantle

Sunday was Anzac Day, which is a public holiday in Australia to commemorate the lives of those lost at Gallipoli in World War I. Australians take this day very seriously and throughout the country there are parades and services: we were lucky enough to see a little of the parade in Perth before heading to Fremantle where we had decided to spend a couple of nights.

Although we hadn't booked any accommodation we managed to find a cheap and clean hostel with a vacancy; after settling ourselves in we walked to Fishing Boat Harbour and a place called Cicerello's, which apparently serves Western Australia's best fish and chips, and is a tourist must-do when in Fremantle. It was absolutely packed and rightly so: the fish was delicious.

Next stop was the Fremantle Markets which are held every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. There were a variety of stalls there selling all sorts of arty-things, as well as stalls selling fruit, vegetables, home-made breads, cheeses and lots of other yummy fresh food. There were also buskers outside doing Covent Garden-esque acts, in particular a guy called Mickey who did lots of cool (and a bit weird) dancing to Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake.

We eventually headed back to the hostel with our goodies from the market and after our backpacker-style dinner, which consisted of a cheese, avocado and tomato sandwich we finished the evening off with a trip to the pub for some cider and a game of crib (Dave won, but I'm rusty...I'll beat him tomorrow once I'm back on form, I'm sure).

Day 1 of the Western Australia adventure: Perth

We arrived at our hotel very late so it was straight to bed ready for our big day out to Cats: The Musical. We woke fairly early so that we could wander around Perth before the show.

First stop was breakfast at a quaint little cafe in a place called London Court which was built in 1907 in a mock-Tudor style and reminded us alot of places like Oxford and Cambridge (but without the history!). It was a beautifully sunny day so we decided it would be nice to walk around the Swan River to the other side of Perth and the theatre rather than getting a cab.

It ended up taking us just under two hours to get there so we were in great need of a sit down and some entertainment by the time the show started. Cats was amazing and took me right back to my childhood - I just love the music and couldn't help but sing and dance along throughout it!

After two and half hours of pure, unadulterated fun we headed back to the city for some dinner at an interesting place called Annalakshmi, which is an Indian buffet-style restaurant run entirely by volunteers. It is all-you-can-eat vegetarian food and at the end you pay what you feel the meal is worth whether that be $5 or $50. The food was delicious and we made a donation of $25 (looking back now maybe that was slightly stingy but we're on a budget here....!). Having walked around 20km (Dave's estimation) throughout the day, we were both pretty knackered so on full and satisfied tummies we headed back to our hotel for the night.