There's a Praying Mantis in the shower

We've had fun, worrying, boring, exhilarating and knackering experiences in the few days since I last posted. Lots of fun ones and only one worrying and boring one which is the right mix I reckon.

We last had some WiFi in a small town about 200km south of Perth called Margaret River. Wine and surf buffs will recognise the name as it is the largest wine producing region in WA and has some of the best surf beaches. We spent nearly two hours in the bookshop providing us with access to t'interweb and chatted a lot with a guy who works there, Sully, who gave us a load of info about what to do in the area and shamelessly plugged his book he'd just got published which we did end up buying! Just another friendly Aussie - haven't found an unfriendly one yet, just a few odd ones in the teeny tiny towns in the middle of nowhere... So we followed Sully's advice and headed to the beach, hired a surfboard and a bodyboard and played around in the waves for a couple of hours (accounting for the 'knackering' category above).

Chris preparing for the waves...

...spent half an hour looking like this:

...and not once like this:

I caught a couple of waves slightly too big for my skill level and knee surfed all the way to the beach - great fun but not quite the idea!

From Margaret River, we carried on driving south towards Augusta - the most south-westerly tip of Australia. We drove out to the lighthouse and decided not to go on a second lighthouse tour in 3 days so just took some photos and scrambled over the rocks.

Heading east along the coast we stopped in a small town nestled in the forests, Pemberton where the main attractions are the giant Karri trees and especially the Gloucester Tree. Back in the day, trees scattered through the forest were used as 'fire trees' and some poor soul had to climb up every day to check for forest fires. Nowadays, they use planes but have turned a couple of these trees into tourist attractions so crazy people can climb up the alarmingly narrow spokes to the lookout platform 61m above whilst the girlfriends wait for the less nervous ones to descend :-)

Chris half way up:

Near to Pemberton are the Yeagarup dunes - a massive sand dune system that's already moved itself a few kilometres inland and is still moving. We parked up at the end of the 2WD access road and planned to walk the rest of the way but some friendly guys heading that way in their 4WDs kindly gave us a lift. Luckily for us, the guy driving my car had his sons along who also hadn't seen the dunes so he gave them (and us!) a bit of a tour and thrashed his jeep around over the deep, white sand and then the two jeeps had a contest to see how far up a really steep dune they could get :-) Brilliant fun and we'd have had to have paid many dollars to go on a tour of the area. We had to walk  back, but it was a nice bimble through the trees and past the lake.

We spent the night at a bush campsite (complete with the stinkiest drop toilet in Australia) near to a fabulous beach, Mandalay Bay. The access road to it is unsealed for 8km so it's a dusty trip but well worth it. The beach was deserted and ours seemed to be the first new footprints of the day. The currents and waves there are crazy so surfing and swimming are not advised (probably why it's deserted) but we spent a good hour clambering over the rocks snapping photos.

We're now in Esperance after stopping for 2 nights in Albany. We only planned to stay one, but our van decided it didn't want to drive in the 38C heat yesterday so we spent the day waiting for the RAC and then a tow truck (the boring and worrying experience!). All is well though and we were on our way again in the morning and covered nearly 500km through ever changing scenery of bush and farmland.

And there was a praying mantis in my shower tonight. Better that than a cockroach.

The Big Fat Trip - Chapter 2

We're on to country number 8, a new hemisphere and a welcome back to 'normality' - Australia! It is nice to be back somewhere where everyone can understand us and we can understand all the signs and we're even starting to pop 'o' on the end of words and are referring to the cool box as an 'eski' :-)

We headed back to Singapore from Borneo and spent 2 nights staying with one of Chris' friends, Steve - was really great to stay in someone's house and be able to make our own brekkie and do laundry and just hang out without being in a hotel room or skanky hostel lounge! We saw a few things we hadn't on our first trip to Singapore and Steve showed us a few places we probably wouldn't have come across on our own. And we finally had cocktails at Raffles which cost more than our last 3 meals put together but it was worth the money to soak up the atmosphere and I ate my money's worth in peanuts!

We caught a plane to Perth from Singapore after much deliberation about where to start our Aussie adventure (Perth had the cheapest flights...) and arrived late on 3rd March. We spent our first day wandering the streets of Perth and enjoying seeing some recognisable things and lots more new stuff - I had an afternoon bimbling the shops on my own after Chris developed a dodgy tummy and retreated to the hostel - after 4 months in Asia and no proper illness, Chris gets ill in Oz (but prob from something in Asia admittedly)... Perth is a nice small city with lots of coffee shops and parks scattered around the city - we've had (until today) near perfect weather with the bluest sky I've seen at sea level - the lack of ozone is bad for the skin but does make some nice looking sky.

Photos are on Chris' blog: www.rootfest.com

In Asia, there are so many cheap places to stay that we'd got used to be able to completely wing our plans and just arrive in a city and wander around until we found a room to our liking... No so in Oz... Perth appears to be a bit lacking in the cheap room department and we had to relocate to Scarborough for the next 3 nights as there was nowhere in Perth to stay. The hostel was a bit ropey but it did the job and was a 15 min walk to a spectacular white sandy beach with perfect turquoise ocean so we were happy to spend the next couple of days lazing on the beach topping up the tan and jumping in the refreshing sea to cool off. Not a bad life eh? :-)

We spent one more night back in Perth before picking up our home for the next 15 days - our Wicked Campervan (www.wickedcampervans.com.au) - a cheap and cheerful graffiti-ed old banger of a van but it has space to sleep and a wee stove to cook and it's great to be able to go wherever we want all the time and not relying on buses. And even nicer to not be lugging our now full-to-bursting backpacks anywhere! We're gradually heading south from Perth and have spent the last couple of nights in Bunbury and Bussleton.

Bussleton Jetty - the longest in the Southern Hemisphere at 1.8km:

The possum who visited our table at drinks o'clock:

Right now we're set up for the night in a car park overlooking the ocean near Margaret River - Australian wine country (of course we visited a winery this afternoon and enjoyed a tasty glass of rose with our camping stove cooked dinner!).

Wednesday's nights camping spot - our van's the one in the carpark:

Surfing in Yallingup:

We're heading south and east to Albany, Esperance and then back North to Kalgorlie-Boulder before heading back west to Perth, and maybe a cheeky trip North to visit the Pinnacles desert if we have time. 

Internet access is a lot more erratic and more expensive than in Asia so the reports may be a bit few and far between from now on...

Swimming with Crush, Nemo and Dory

We've said goodbye to Borneo and Malaysia after having spent a fantastic week or so exploring the East of Sabah. From Sepilok, we boarded the bus for a wiggly windy 5 hour journey south to Semporna on the coast of the Sulu Sea. The journey gave us a horrific indication of how much of the rainforest in Borneo is being destroyed to make way for huge palm oil plantations - at some points all the eye could see was rows and rows of palm trees and only the steepest slopes were left to forest. Craziness.

We arrived in Semporna and joined up with an Aussie/NZ couple from the bus who were staying in the same hotel as us and headed through town to the hotel. As usual, no thought has been put into any town planning whatsoever and the whole place is a mishmash of ugly concrete blocks and smells like dead fish and sewers. Nice. Why did we go here, I here you ask.... Well, off the coast of Semporna is the only oceanic island in Malaysia, Sipidan - it is not attached to the continental shelf but it a limestone column that sticks up from the sea bed. This makes for good coral reefs apparently and is one of the top dive spots in the world. Fortunately, there's no development on the island and only 120 divers/snorkellers can visit each day which is keeping the place nice and clean and tidy (unlike most of Malaysia...). As you can't stay there, we stayed on a nearby island, Mabul, which consists of stilt villages built all over the pristine white sandy beaches and most of their rubbish appears to go straight in the sea. You can imagine why I say it's fortunate that Sipidan is not developed. But it had some nice spots and we spent a day wandering around the island and lying on the beach shadebathing.

 

The following day we headed out on the dive boat to spend the morning snorkelling around Sipidan. And it was so so so worth the trip down there as it was by far and away the best snorkelling I've ever done ever. The water was unbelievably clear and there was so many different types of fish that it was just like swimming in an aquarium. It must have been the reef that the Finding Nemo people based their reef on :-) The first spot we snorkelled was a shallow reef and the fish were mainly small brightly coloured and there were all different colour corals and anenomes.

We thought that was great, but the second spot was even better - along the edge of the reef where there was a drop-off down to about 30m so there were a lot of larger fish including reef sharks and Giant Sea Turtles. It was amazing to swim alongside such graceful creatures in the deep blue of the sea. We saw at least 10 of them - some in the shallows of the reef and some out in the deeper water. Brilliant. I didn't want to get out of the water, but it was one of the best things we've done on the trip so far and I'm reluctant to snorkel anywhere else now as it will seem rubbish in comparison!

We took our sunburned bodies back to the mainland and headed back to Kota Kinabalu on the night bus. Argh I hate buses and we spent 10 hours on a crappy bus attempting to sleep in my broken non-reclining chair shrouded in my sleeping sheet as the air-con was set on 'arctic'. But we survived and luckily were able to check-in to the hostel in KK at 6am and get a couple of hours decent sleep before starting the day. We've just spent the last couple of days hanging out in KK and figuring out where to go next... We decided that after 4 months we're now done with Asia and ready for something different so we're spending a couple of days in Singapore and then heading to Australia to suss out maybe working there for a bit. So it's goodbye Asia for now and I'll miss:

• cheap good food
• cheap shopping
• friendly people
• amazing beaches
• amazing wildlife
• amazing cultural stuff

But I'm happy to be leaving:

• being stared at/hassled
• being ripped off by taxis
• the smell of open sewers
• the smell of dried fish
• cockerels with internal clock issues that crow at 2am
• crazy frog ladies
• being hot all the time or freezing cold anywhere with aircon

But we have had a fabulous time in Asia and will definitely come back to visit all the places we haven't been - and there's a lot I still want to see! But for now, I'm very excited about going to Oz and having some home comforts back again.