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.