Perth and Western Australia

So my first time in Perth, and I really liked it. The weather was brilliant and we settled in pretty quickly. I met up with a friend of a friend back home, Keith Tiernan's mate Donncha, who I'd really only met a few times at home whilst out in Keith's place working on my motorbike. But Donncha was brilliant, meeting us at the train station early in the morning and lending us a couple of really good bicycles and dropping us off at the ferry to Rottnest Island.

We spent the whole day cycling around the beautiful island, basically covering the whole thing during the day. Donncha then picked us up when we got back off the ferry and then it was back to his lovely house to meet his wife Gillian and their new babbie, and have a lovely BBQ. It was a great night chatting and reminiscing about Malahide and just shooting the breeze really, before Donncha dropped us back into the city again. It seemed weirdly 'normal' to be just sitting around in a mate's gaff having dinner after the days cycling, but I really enjoyed the relaxed nature of the whole day.

After a couple of more days checking out Perth we rented a car to head down along the south coast of Western Austrialia. First stop was just down the road at Freemantle, which is a lovely buzzy place (and had one of the best bars of the trip so far I reckon, the Little Creatures Brewery).

Then is was down into the Margaret River region and exploring some of the vineyards thereabouts (and buying some wine for Mikey and Steph, and beers from a local brewery for Enda, who'd we'd be meeting up with in Melbourne).

Moving along we took the scenic train journey from Pemberton (that had a fantastically entertaining driver/guide), and climbed up the very impressive Gloucester tree. I was putting my hiking boots on and was surprised to see that Sarah had already vanished up the tree well ahead of me. It's a pretty scary experience to climb up along these exposed spikes just hammered into the side of the mighty Karri tree, but the view from the top at 60 meters was brilliant (they used to be used as fire lookouts by the forest rangers there). I was well impressed by Sarah's enthusiasm - I'd done a high-ropes experience years ago at the Killary Adventure Centre as part of a birthday present weekend Sarah had bought me, but Sarah had been far too scaried to give it a go - seems travelling is broadening her scope for adventure nicely!

We pretty much ended our Western Australian odyssey in the town of Albany, where I'd heard there was great scuba-diving. We stayed an extra night so that I could get on a scuba trip to a famous local ship wreck, but unfortunately on the morning of the dive it was cancelled due to poor weather.

Then it was back to Perth to catch our onward flight to Melbourne and meeting up with Mikey, Steph and Enda. Little did I know at the time that we'd end up spending nearly two months there!