10 weeks away, and we're still talking!

(Stephen and Michelle, Perth Australia, 30th January 2008. Picture by 'Jot' Nick!)

We listen to the news on the radio in the cab on the way to the airport. All sorts of wild and gruesome theories are being pushed forward as to how Heath Ledger died, although the ever-present drug related line seems the most likely.

The check-in at Adelaide is, if at all possible, even easier than previous ones, and we sit by the gate waiting for our call. We discover the free Wi-Fi, and I send a few quick mails, one of which is returned by my sister, who is sitting up late at night back in the UK. We have a chat via mail, and I realise how much I’m missing her. After watching a bloke a few yards away from us get arrested by about 8 police, we are the last ones on the plane, it’s not very full and the two hours er, fly by (thankyouverymuch). The views out of the window are stunning, and very red, as the city quickly gives way to the fabled Aussie outback.

It’s incredibly hot as we land in Alice Springs Airport. We find a cab, which thankfully has AC, and it drops us off at our hostel just outside the town. This hostel was chosen on the basis that it had a pool, as we had all day there before our coach trip to Uluru early the next morning. Unfortunately the water was an ugly green colour, with stuff floating in it, and a big sign saying it was closed, so we decided to walk into town, in the midday sun. There were no mad dogs about, only us, and 10 minutes later we made it into the rather small CBD. We found some food, quickly, and got out of town. It might have been that we had become used to the big cities of Australia, but The Alice, as it is known to the locals, felt scary in the daylight, let alone how it must feel at night. The hostel owners assured us that it was safe, but we bought at the supermarket to cook at the hostel just in case.

Our room had AC, and a telly that was so fuzzy it was like watching snow, which in 40 degree heat, is quite surreal. We read, wrote, napped, and Chelle cooked in the cramped and sweltering shared kitchen before we eat outside, appreciating both the clear skies and the very slight reduction in temperature.

We’re up at 5.30am the next morning, showered, packed, and walking along the road to a much posher hotel down the road where our coach was picking us up. Tony is our cheery driver, who entertains the sleepy half full coach with some well-rehearsed banter, a movie about bushmen, and a couple of stops for coffee and snacks, one of which is at a camel station. Yes, camels. Some are still used in the bush, having been introduced to help build the railways, but there are now more wild camels than kangaroos.

After a 5 hour drive we get to the Ayers Rock Centre, 20 km from the actual rock. There are 5 or 6 different places, ours of course being the last, and the furthest out from all the others. This is the only dorm room we have booked on the whole trip, and the tiny room has four beds in it. We select ours, with Chelle on top of course, and one of our other room-mates arrives. His Korean name is so difficult to pronounce that he tells us to call him ‘Clark’. So we do. He has been working as a fruit picker for 4 months, and is now doing the travelling bit. Considering he could speak no English when he arrived 4 months ago, his conversation is great, and we exchange stories before heading off to book our trip. We’ve left this one to chance a bit, and having booked our trip at 2.30 in the afternoon, we’re climbing on the coach an hour later. Uluru is now a national park so costs us another $25 each, and the first stop is the Cultural Centre, which explains the rock’s history according to the Aboriginal people who now own and run the park in conjunction with the Government. The rock was finally, and rightly, returned to them in 1985, after protracted negotiation, which is why it is now referred to as Uluru, the Aboriginal name, and not Ayer’s Rock, the white name. The centre in which you stay is still called Ayers Rock, but it is outside the National Park and I guess the Aboriginals don’t have any say in that.

After the centre we are driven around the rock itself. It is, surprisingly, smaller than I imagined it would be, but much more impressive. The Aboriginal People discourage visitors from climbing the rock, likening it to playing football in the Vatican, and the trip organisers tend to use any excuse to close the climb. We had already decided that we wouldn’t, out of respect. By the time we stop and get out of the coach to take some pictures, and talk a short walk to a waterhole closer to the rock, the sky is looking darker and darker, and sure enough as we reach the sunset viewing area, it starts to rain. It’s not that it never rains out here, it’s that it is ‘unusual’. So, instead of sunset pictures of Uluru, we have pictures of Uluru with an angry dark sky and rain. We don’t mind too much.

When we get back to the hostel we change quickly and hit the pool. It’s fantastic. I get to meet our fourth roomie, Aphed. A Hungarian Aussie, he has been to an old friend’s funeral out in the bush, and has all his bush camping gear with him to go off the next day. By the time Chelle returns from the pool, Aphed has gone for a walk, so we go and find some food and a beer, and listen to the worst country singer I have ever listened to. So far. I do a bit more writing, Chelle does some reading, and we creep into the room without waking Clark or Aphed.

We are both awake early, and creep out of the room without waking Clark or Aphed, to go to the ‘Lookout’, a hill near the hostel. It’s quiet, and peaceful, and very dry. You would never guess that 12 hours ago it poured with rain. Chelle goes for a swim, I write, we pack and wait for the airport coach. We realise that Chelle never got to meet Aphed, as he was either asleep or not around whenever she was in the room.

At the airport I am pulled aside and told that I have volunteered for an explosives test. Luckily I test negative, although the guy tells me that my bag has been sitting on grass that had fertilizer in it, which is a form of Glycerin. One element short of Nitro-glycerin.

As we fly into Perth, the ground still looks browny red, right up until the airport comes into view. When we leave the plane I go to the toilet and have to wait for a space at the urinals. A phone rings. One of the blokes standing at the urinal fishes around in his pocket, pulls out his phone, and answers it, as if he’s standing in his office.

The shuttle takes us into the city, and as we get dropped off at The Emperor’s Crown, our hostel, the driver tells us that there are Fireworks down by the river tonight, and we might want to go down. We suddenly remember that it’s Australia Day, a public holiday in the way that the Americans celebrate Independence Day, and we have just enough time to shower, change and head down to the Swan River.

It’s a ten minute walk into the city from the hostel, and about 5 minutes down to the river from there. It’s a bit like going to a football match – as you get closer to the venue, more and more people join you walking in the same direction, and by the time we reach the river, there are thousands of people about. Later, on the news, we hear that over 400,000 people were in attendance, but it just seems a lot when you’re in the thick of it.

We settle down in Logan Park, just back from the river, watch a couple of local bands and take in the atmosphere. It’s great to watch another country celebrate being themselves, and I wonder why we in England seem to struggle with being English, why being patriotic has been hijacked by the few. Australia Day is all about the day that the First Fleet landed at Botany Bay in 1788, and when the fireworks start they are accompanied by a soundtrack which, as stated in the beginning of the show, celebrates Australia’s cultural diversity. To represent England there is a mercifully short blast of The Spice Girls (who, a few days later cancelled all their tour dates in Australia), Scotland get Rod Stewart (born in South London), and there is a didgeree-doo or two in there to represent the indigenous people.

To be fair, we had witnessed Sydney’s New Year fireworks 26 days before, and these were never going to compare, but they had enough to get some ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ from the crowd, and we walked back, seemingly with the rest of Perth, to find a woman on the phone in the hostel common room complaining loudly, in the most grating of Northern English accents, that Perth was crap and there was nothing going on.

As in the UK, a bank holiday weekend drags on (freelancers don’t get paid on bank holidays, remember, so we don’t really like them too much) through Sunday and Monday, and the early Sunday morning walk we had started was turning into an epic. We had planned to walk towards Leederville, a well-heeled suburb of Perth, and catch a bus. Of course, no buses were running along that route and after an hour of walking in the increasingly baking sun we finally arrived at Oxford Street, the hub of Leederville. Disappointingly very few places were open, but the one we were particularly looking for actually was. Oxford 130 was one of those places we had read about in a number of different places, and it lived up to it’s played down image. Two shops roughly knocked into one, knackered furniture, posters covering every inch of wall and ceiling, loud music (Kings of Leon), and three people behind the bar that looked much cooler than you could ever be. It would have looked great anyway, but after an hour of walking in the scorching sun it looked heavenly.

We had been warned that Sundays were the busiest day, and rather like the waves at the beach, locals ruled the roost and would have all the best tables, and probably, ALL the tables. We were in luck and almost ran for the empty booth at the side of the café. Having ordered our food, we started sorting out the Sunday paper, dividing the sections up, and then spent more time watching everyone else in the café from our vantage point.

The poached eggs lived up to the billing, as did the super chunky toast and the orange juice, all brought to our table with just the right amount of cool.

We walked along Oxford Street, selecting the side that had the most shade, browsed in the two stores that were open, noted the others that looked interesting, and tried to prepare for the long walk back into Perth. Just round the corner we found another of those second-hand book stores we seem to like so much, at which I managed to find more Clive James books to add to my growing collection. The road selected for the journey back was no shorter, but had a lot more shade, and half an hour into the return journey, Chelle noticed a man sitting at a bus stop, and the sign on the stop indicated that a bus was due in 6 minutes. This, it turned out, was one of the three free buses which sub-divide the city centre, which all ran on bank holidays.

The air conditioning on the bus, the new opium of the masses on the west coast, was fantastic. We resolved to stay on the bus for the whole loop, to get our bearings, but mostly to sit in the AC, finally getting off at the paved mall which led us to the train station, for timetables and bank holiday running information, before hitting the stores and shopping at the Quiksilver store.

Back to the hostel where sandwiches are made, layers of clothes are prepared and the train timetable studied. We’re off to Bureswood Park for more of those ‘Movies in the Park’. The only problem is that, once we get off the train at Bureswood, we have no idea where to go. When the moment arrives, we follow all the other people, reasoning that they must know where they’re going, and see a minibus parked near the station. We ask a guy standing nearby if the bus goes to the ‘Movies in the Park’, and he tells us it goes to the resort, but it’s near the park.

Finally, after a walk through a casino, three car parks, and half the park, we find the place and settle down to eat, drink and watch “The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”.

Judging by the comments we hear on the way out, we are in the minority who enjoyed the movie, and we discuss it while trying to find our way back to the station in the dark. As we reach the station (which we found more by luck than judgement), a train pulls in, and we rush to get our tickets out of the machine in time to jump on. It’s a good job we did, as checking the timetable later on back in our room reveals that that was the last one that night.

So, it’s a bank holiday Monday, in summer – what do you do? If you were us, you’d go to the beach of course! Our newly found confidence in the train system had led us to plan a day out to Cottesloe Beach, with a stop off in posh Subiaco (the Perth equivalent of Hampstead) on the way. Each ticket you buy for the Perth Transport system lasts for two hours, and you get as many journeys - within it’s zone parameters - as you can squeeze in, so the plan was to stop off, have brekky, and get back on in time to get to the beach on the same ticket.

We look for the local market, find a building with ‘Market’ spelt out along the top that is all closed up, walk up and down the main street and can only find one place that actually has prices on it’s menu and isn’t too full of expensively dressed ‘ladies-wot-lunch’. It’s still expensive, and not a patch on yesterday’s. And then, on the way back to the station, we see the hand written sign that says ‘Market’, and find this hidden gem, with an excellent looking café and stalls and stalls of foody snacks, cheap clothes and specialist items. We buy some muffins to eat later on the beach.

The beach itself is a good 10 minute walk from the station, and by the time we get there it’s time for coffee. A group of ageing cyclists have just pulled up at the same café, and we overhear one of them say that they deserve a coffee after the 160km ride they’ve just done. The waiter reckons they deserve a beer, at least. I think some kind of psychological counselling would be in order, because we’re melting in the sun after a 10 minute walk…

We attempt to set up on the beach, but the wind is so strong that sand blasting is a serious concern, so we retire to the grass on top of the cliff and read, and doze, and apply sunscreen, and read, and doze, and so on.

When we feel pretty baked, we head back to the station and decide to get off at Leederville for coffee at our new favourite place. Turns out that the station is about 20 yards further down the road than we had walked the previous day. We could have avoided all that walking after all…

It also appears that there has been some kind of event in the main street, as teams of people are dis-assembling barriers and sweeping up debris. Chelle asks one of the guys who tells her that the annual Perth Cycle Race had finished about 20 minutes ago. She’s not too happy about this one. To make up for it (well, slightly) I buy noodles and rice at Hans and we get the train back to the hostel. It’s been around 35 degrees today, and more is promised tomorrow.

We have a couple of people to visit in Perth, one of which is Ipswich escapee Becky, a friend of Michelle’s from running clubs and gyms in our hometown. She had done the travelling thing and met an Aussie called Mike in Las Vegas, eventually settling down in a suburb of Perth called Stirling where their first child, Tyler, had arrived 7 months ago.

Becky’s dad Clive, and her sister Amy, who both also ran with Michelle, were over from the UK, so we had arranged by e-mail to go and see them all. Becky picked us up from the Stirling train station and drove us the couple of miles to her house, where we met Tyler for the first time, and chatted with them all before having lunch out on the patio. Our phone, which had rung perhaps three times in the last 6 weeks, rang three times in about 15 minutes, the third of which was Nick from The ‘Gong. I stepped outside and caught up with my friend, before we all piled into Becky’s car and headed down to nearby Scarborough Beach for an hour to enjoy the shade, while Michelle and Clive fought some waves. Sorry, caught some waves.

By the time we got back to their house Mike was back from work and we had a while chatting with him before he gave us a lift back to the station. Becky and Mike had only just announced their engagement, so here are our public ‘good luck’ wishes guys!

Back in Perth I called Nick (a different Nick to Nick from The ‘Gong), a guy I had been exchanging emails with as part of an online music based group, called ‘Jot’ for over 10 years, but had never met, or even spoken to. It’s a small, invitation only group that grew out of a list for American band ‘Jellyfish’. When a few of us were getting flamed a bit too often for talking about stuff other than ‘Jellyfish’, the idea of a separate list came about and then there was JOT – Jellyfish Off Topic. We’ve covered a lot of ground over ten years on the list, mostly non-music related, and I feel that we know each other pretty well, but it was still a little nerve-racking knowing that we were going to meet up. What made it worse was that Nick’s wife Kylie had been on the list for over 6 years, so I felt like I knew her already too.

He knew we were in Perth, and was waiting for our call so we could arrange a ‘Jotogether’. Within about 30 seconds we were chatting like old friends, and eventually we had to stop talking or Chelle and I would have gone hungry that evening, what with everything closing so bloody early. Arrangements had been made for the weekend. We made it to a veggie house called Moaz in the centre of town with five minutes to spare, wolfed down some falafel and salad, and headed for the Brass Monkey on James St for a wheat beer.

The next morning we had a rough plan to visit Kings Park, but wandered down the road for some breakfast first. Nick called, wondered what we were up to and offered a Taylor Tour, suggesting that we start at Kings Park. We jumped down his throat. I explained where we were, and that I was wearing a check shirt, so Nick would recognise us. “I should look for one skinny brown and one white fat person, if your blog is to be believed” he said. Either way, I had seen recent pictures of the Taylors, so was fairly confident that I would recognise him before he recognised me.

Of course I was in the toilet when he arrived. I went back outside to see a bloke sitting in my seat chatting to my wife, and hoped it was Nick. Luckily it was, and we hugged like the old friends we now were. He filled his frame almost as comfortably as I do, and I told him that his voice ‘sounded’ the way he typed; confident, self-assured and well informed. They were all good things in my book.

We all relaxed after a few minutes, and it was clear that Chelle wasn’t going to get much of a word in.

The tour started up in the park. Nick had the reassurance of someone who had done this tour before, and we had the luck of being with someone who knew their way around. Again! Soon we had an outstanding view right across Perth and the Swan River, pictures were taken, and a short walk through a tiny bit of this huge park followed before heading back to the car. We drove along the River towards Fremantle, our base for the second week here, and home for the Taylors, stopping off at various beaches and a couple of places in the port to look out into the Indian Ocean, before heading into downtown ‘Freo’ as it’s known to the locals. Actually downtown is pushing it a bit – it is essentially three main roads that criss-cross each other, with the port and train station at one end, the Market at the second and the former Jail, now a major tourist spot, at the third.

We parked and went to the Mad Monk bar to sample some of their microbrewery produce, which was excellent, especially the ‘Epic’, and Nick then drove us back into Perth. We arranged to drive to the Taylor house on Saturday after we get back from a jaunt southwards for a party, and then again on Sunday to eat, and swim, and meet the three Taylor kids. We couldn’t wait.

The rest of the day disappeared in a blur of shopping, writing, reading and packing before we found some cheap noodles and prepared to say goodbye to Perth – for the moment.

Another hot day as we walk down into the city to pick up our latest hire car from the Thrifty office. Of course there is no record of our request, so we follow the usual course of phone calls, going away for a coffee, and going back when they have a our car ready. It’s a brand new Hyundai something or other, and we pick up our bags from the hostel, find our way out of Perth and head south.
We’re back on Highway 1 – we seem to have been driving on Highway 1 since we got here – and after about 100km we decide to pullover and have our pre-prepared picnic. There is a sign ahead which says ‘Florida Beach’, so we take a right off the Highway and pick our way through a whole bunch of small housing developments. It seems that the Australians have just twigged that all that land by the beach might be a good place to build a house, and so blocks of houses are appearing all the way down the coast, Of course, they have so much coast, that they could build for the next 200 years and not begin to cover anywhere near the length of coastline there is on offer.

Florida Beach has a little carpark, and there are three cars in it. A short walk takes us to the actual beach, and it’s glorious. A woman and four kids are 300 metres to our right, to our left there is a man with two kids and a kayak, and infront of us is about 10 metres of golden sand and the Indian Ocean.

We sit and eat our picnic and look out to the ocean. When I look over at Michelle, she is grinning nearly as much as I am.