Good Times in Perth

I spent my first few days in Perth in a hostel, enjoying my Easter Bilby and printing out some resumes to distribute around town. The Monday after Easter (which was a public holiday) I went snorkeling in the morning with Andrew and Caroline at Cottlesloe Beach. The water was a bit chilly, but otherwise nice and we admired some wrasses and butterfly fish, as well as a lot of big greyish fish and a few other cool ones. Here’s the poster of the resident fish in the snorkel hole.

I think we saw the red-lipped morwong, crested morwong, McCullough’s scalyfin (definitely the juvenile one if not the big one), stripey, cowfish or boxfish (can’t remember which type), and maybe the silver drummer? The boxfish/cowfish especially made me happy because they’re some of my favourite tropical fish – so cute! It was my first dip in the Indian Ocean, which was pretty cool, and rounded out my trip so far, which covered the Pacific, the Southern, and now the Indian Oceans. We also saw an osprey chilling out on a lamppost, and I got some nice photos.

That afternoon I took a bus to Fremantle, which is the port region of Perth (the main city is up the river a bit from the ocean). It had this street art festival thing going on so I watched a magic show in the middle of the main area, catching a few glimpses of the acrobats beyond (it was pretty crowded and I didn’t feel like trying to make it to the acrobats when I had a really good view of the magic guy). He managed to produce a playing card out of a sausage and make a lit cigarette disappear, which was fun, as well as a few other tricks. There were also some punked-out bagpipers rocking out in a different sidestreet (festooned in combat boots, kilts, and tattoos) and a funny mime who accidentally terrified a little girl when he was pretending to be a Tyrannosaurus rex, and then tried to win her back with repeated behind-the-ear coin tricks (she eventually calmed down but I don’t think she fully got over his craziness). The market was also open so I tried a few more food samples and honey, but no tasty cheese this time. I also distributed resumes and went back the next day for a trial in an Italian restaurant (I did a lot of unpaid trials during my two(ish) weeks in Perth, but never got a job with any of them, and I think they take advantage of backpackers desperate for work and just use people when they need an extra set of hands without actually intending to hire anyone – it’s more than a little bit frustrating). 

That evening I got off the bus early to go back to Cottlesloe for one last quick swim at sunset. Lots of other people had the same idea (at least about watching the sunset, if not swimming, I think they might have been a bit wimpy about the water temperature, although I thought it was quite nice) but it was still very relaxing. I actually like the kid in the foreground who snuck into my sunset shot, since the endless sunset photos get a bit old without a person to anchor them.

Anyway after a few days in the hostel (which was a nice one housed in the historic Swan Barracks building) I decided to try out couchsurfing, since I needed to save money and had heard good things from different travelers I’d met along the way. So I loaded up all my stuff and took the train north to Joondalup to stay with a guy named Michael. Turns out there were a few other travelers staying there as well, so it was like a fun hostel/eternal slumber party vibe with some co-op-living thrown in. I ended up staying there for about 2 weeks, which was a lot of fun, and I met a bunch of other cool travelers moving in and out, including an Estonian girl, a few French guys, a German girl, another German guy, and a French girl. The only person who was there the same amount of time as me was Kelly, an Australian from Adelaide who was waiting for his visa to go to the US to be approved so he could attend the Jazz Festival in New Orleans (he made it in time and is currently living it up along the Mississippi). 

We had a lot of fun in the evenings when most people were home (unless we were doing pointless waitressing trials, grrr), playing cards or watching movies or cooking. Michael was a very cheerful and generous host and performed magic tricks and played the piano to wake us up in the morning and send us to sleep at night (I appreciated his repertoire of movie soundtracks and the way he could pick out tunes upon request). My penny whistle was also appreciated and one night we took to the streets to go to the shopping centre briefly, and I accompanied our sally forth with a few marching tunes (I think there is a video of that somewhere on Michael’s phone). Most nights someone would cook something for everyone, which was also awesome and I tried an Estonian potato dish and a German pasta dish, among other things. I made challah bread a few times, which was appreciated by all, and everyone helped me nearly finish off my remaining jam supply from Kangaroo Island after I made yeast pancakes for dinner. I also impressed everyone with a nectarine cobbler that I cobbled together (sorry, just had to) after realizing that the discount nectarines at the fruit stand were really not up to snuff for eating fresh, but came out all right in a pie. It went even better with whipped cream – yum!

One infamous day Kelly decided to cook and I offered to make coconut ice cream to go with his cherry/lychee pie (the menu was decided based on a few random ingredients Michael had in his cupboard that he said we should use up – I should note that everything Kelly made turned out great, it was only my ice cream that had challenges). I was super excited to try a recipe that I had learned from my wwoofing days at a blueberry farm in Victoria (need to put that post up soon) that involved whipping egg whites with sugar and fruit and then mixing it with whipped cream and freezing it into a fluffy ice cream. Unfortunately Michael didn’t have a mixer and it turns out that blenders don’t quite do the job. We managed to whip the cream by hand but the egg whites were non-cooperative. Even with the helpful suggestions of Philip, a French cook staying there at the time, we gave up after several tries and just combined everything anyway. The coconut butter ice cream came out a bit dense, but it was still edible and went very nicely with the pie – no one complained! 

Sometimes Michael brought back some pies or sausage rolls from the (meat) pie shop where he worked, which was also fun to try. I don’t know if it was the best environment for me to focus on finding a job, but it was definitely the most fun place l’d stayed so far in my travels, and reminded me of living in a dorm, but with a lot more accents spoken and a lot less space (with up to 8 people staying in a studio apartment, it was snug but we managed to make it work with a lot of air-mattresses and Michael’s couch). It was also fun to meet some younger Australians (Michael and Kelly were really awesome) since I’d been spending so much time with older wwoofing hosts (although they were also really awesome), aside from Andrew and Caroline.

This is a bit of a summary post, and I don’t have many photos from those weeks, unfortunately, but there were a few specific adventurous days that I’ll post separately. Here are a few pics from an afternoon when I went walking to the nearby Joondalup Lake with Kersti, the Estonian girl, Giuliano, a German guy with Italian heritage, and an American from New Jersey whose name escapes me (he was only there two nights).

 

It was a really hot day but I saw a few birds, nonetheless, including these cool stork things and some ducks.

These little grebe guys were cute, I think the second one was a half-grown chick.

I also caught this shot of one of the giant ravens that hang out everywhere – look at those jowels!

During the days I trolled Gumtree (the Australian version of craigslist) for jobs and wandered various suburbs of Perth distributing resumes, mostly to bars and restaurants since I wanted to get a hospitality job quickly (I really really didn’t want to have to go back to fundraising call-centre jobs). I saw an ad about English tutoring, so I helped this Italian guy, Matteo, with his English every few days, usually at various beaches (the weather was still really nice at this point). I had always known English was a confusing language, but it’s never so confusing than when you have to explain all the different pronunciations of “thought,” “though,” “tough,” “through,” and “thorough,” as well as all the many uses of the word “get” (think about it…it’s really ridiculous how ubiquitous is this fairly meaningless word). Anyway he was a nice guy and one day I even got to ride on his scooter because we were meeting his girlfriend at this beach a few kilometres from the train station. It was one of the most stereotypical experiences I can mention to date – riding on the back of an Italian’s scooter! But normally it would be on the streets of Rome, not to the nearest swimming beach on the Indian Ocean (by the way I did manage to go swimming a few times during those weeks, but snorkeling didn’t work out again since the next time I went to Cottlesloe beach there were all these invisible, but still very noticeable, jellyfish!).

The two Saturdays I was there I spent at the Kanyana Wildlife Centre, which is outside of the city, being trained to be a volunteer. It was really cool to start out, since we learned about the resident bilby breeding program – we got to see baby bilbies and I’m just sad I didn’t have my camera they were so cute!! Most of their patients are birds, because mammals are too hard to care for (since a lot of times they have to be fed every few hours throughout the night) so they get outsourced to other people, but the sick parrots and kookaburras were still cool to see, and we practiced changing the hotboxes (literally small enclosures with a heating system to keep birds and reptiles warm) and installing the right sized perches depending on the nature of the patient. We also saw some bobtails, which are a type of skink with a blue-tongue (I think they’re different from the blue-tongued skinks on the east coast, but I’m not sure) although a lot of them are suffering from a disease that they have trouble curing, so that was  bit sad. 

The worst thing was that the second day of training I was really late because I was getting a ride from this girl who also lived in Perth and we literally got trapped in the city because the main highway east was under construction and there’s a river running through town that makes it hard to just skip to another highway when the main one’s closed. By the time we navigated out of there we had missed the introduction to the resident animals, which included quendas (another hopping marsupial), bettongs (ditto), and echidnas. This wouldn’t have been a huge deal except that I never made it back to the wildlife centre again because I took a job outside Perth (I was really striking out in the city and was getting desperate to be paid again) so I didn’t get to see those animals. I also never got any photos from the centre. Oh well, I have a t-shirt and I got to learn a little bit about how they operate, so it was still a cool experience even though it was too brief.

I’ll skip two side-stories for now about a trip to a national park with Andrew and Caroline and a trip to Rottnest Island with Lucie, the French girl, and end this post with my last days in Joondalup before heading south to work as a bartender at the Nannup Hotel (more on that to come, but I do think I made the right choice in taking that job, since it’s worked out well and been an entirely different experience).

Kelly got his visa approved and his flight booked for the day before I was due to travel south, so Michael took us to the local pizza shop for a celebratory nearly-last meal together. Here’s the two of them about to devour a Ferrero rocchero cake thing that we split after the pizza (everything was super tasty). It’s a slightly creepy photo, I’ll admit, but still a good one.

I was doing a bit of packing, and had decided I needed to part with at least one of my Adventure Travel Expo t-shirts I’d been lugging around since Sydney (they were good pajama/work shirts, but I needed to lighten my load and I didn’t think I needed three of them). Kelly and Michael both agreed to take one, since they were actually more of a guy’s size anyway, so we had to take a few silly matching photos – check it out!

 

I also got some voice recordings of their Australian accents before we said goodbye to Kelly and went to bed (his flight was at some ungodly early hour of the morning). The next day I made apple/pear pie with the remaining pastry in the fridge and we whipped up some cream with Michael’s brand-new mixer that he had just bought – it was delish! It wasn’t officially a goodbye since I’ll be coming back to Perth for a night or two before I leave for good, but it was still nice. When I come back I plan to make the ice cream properly and also to bake one more loaf of challah (there’s some in the freezer because the last time I made it I halved all the ingredients except the water, so then I had to double all the rest of them to keep the challah from becoming a mushy disaster – oh dear).

Oops, I forgot about the Fremantle Prison, which I visited on my last day in Perth – I’ll have to do a mini-post about that!

Into the West: Traversing the Nullarbor on the Indian Pacific

After crossing back to Adelaide on the Kangaroo Island ferry (which everyone said would be really choppy and I was worried about my seasickness-prone tendencies, but it was totally fine – am I improving?) I holed up in a cute little hostel that had free wifi and pancakes in the morning (score!). The next day I was leaving on the 6pm train to travel across the vast expanse of nothing called the Nullarbor (meaning “no trees,” and pronounced “NULL-ah-bor” or “boh,” depending on how Aussie you want to sound). I spent the morning prepping my “train bag” and my checked bags, stopping by the Central Market to get some food (every city seems to have its own magical market to enjoy, and fortunately this one ran on Thursdays). Along with sampling lots of fruit, honey, and olive oil, I watched the cheese stall people hand-stretch fresh mozzarella (pretty cool) and I sampled some hard and soft cheeses (the fresh mozza was pretty divine, but expensive). I bought a very tiny chunk of goat cheese (which turned out to be more like goat cheese brie, but it was still good) and made some sandwiches to have for dinner, along with my pre-cooked mashed potatoes (I was determined to avoid over-priced train food, even though I would be on the train for one and a half days, from 6pm on the 28^th to 9am on the 30^th, not counting the time difference that would take us 2.5 hours back).

I also managed to fit a few hours in at the South Australian Museum, although of course I wanted to have more time (I didn’t get a chance for the gallery, but one can only see so much). I think I’ve been in too many museums recently and am having trouble remembering what was at each one without the help of photos (I left my camera in the bag check area), but I think this one had a display about Antarctic explorers and some natural history exhibits about animals of the world (and Australia, of course). It also had an extensive exhibit about Aborigines so I spent a lot of time looking at the different spears, shields, boats, decorations, and other artifacts. There was kind of an overwhelming amount of items, since most of the time the displays didn’t focus on any specific regional group, but instead tried to show a range of different groups’ tools or artwork within different categories. I’m really having trouble remembering details of what I saw (the problem with not writing about things until a month after they happen), but it was cool to see and read about the different hunting materials, baskets, stonework, etc. They had several water gourds made out of kangaroo or wallaby skin, which were cool-looking and I was impressed at how they had stitched them together to make them water tight.

Along with some whale skeletons in the lobby, the other skeletally awesome part of the museum was the opal room, which had fossilized (and/or “opalized”) dinosaur skeletons from the interior regions of South Australia where they do a lot of opal mining. Not all of the bones were totally multi-coloured, but there were lots of small sections that were, which was pretty amazing to see and reminded me of the ammonite colours in the paleontology museum in Alberta. In fact I think they had a picture or two of some ammonite fossils, which was funny after learning all about them in Canada. The Opal Room was definitely worth seeing.

On the way back to the hostel I made one indulgent stop at Haigh’s, the local chocolate chain and home of the “Easter Bilby.” Every Easter Haigh’s makes chocolate bilbies and donates a portion of the profits to bilby conservation (a bilby is a large, long-eared bandicoot, which may not mean much, but basically it’s really cute, about the size of a rabbit, nocturnal, and unfortunately being over-munched by all the feral cats, dogs, and red foxes). Since it was the last real shopping day before Easter (everything would be closed for Good Friday) it was packed, but I joined the winding queue through the store and bought a dark-chocolate bilby to eat on Sunday (I also got a free sample of a chocolate egg on the way out – win!).

The hostel people were really nice and drove me the 2km to the train station, saving me an expensive bus ride, and I checked in my big bags and hung out in the lobby until the train was ready to board (they wouldn’t let me take my sleeping bag strapped on the outside of my backpack, which turned out to be a good thing because it was quite chilly on the train at night).

Because having a sleeper cabin cost over $1000, I was in the all-nighter section, which I hoped would be tolerable for sleeping two nights. It was pretty nice, actually, since there was a lot of legroom and the seats leaned back almost 180 degrees (mine was slightly slanted to the right, which made me afraid I would awkwardly lean into my elderly seatmate while sleeping, but fortunately I didn’t). By the time we left the station it was pretty much dark, so we didn’t get to see any more of the South Australian coastline and hills area behind Adelaide, which was a shame, but I enjoyed reading for a while, eating my cheese-and-jam sandwiches, and visiting the lounge car before it was prohibited (you were supposed to pay another $10 to be able hang out there, once the second day started, but I didn’t feel up to the additional expense). I read an entire reader’s digest in the lounge, which was kind of funny, since there were a few Oz-isms in it, though nothing super hilarious comes to mind.

I enjoyed peeking at the dawn the next morning in between sleeping (I actually didn’t sleep too badly), but unfortunately all my photos sort of look like this, and it was pretty cloudy so the light wasn’t as spectacular as I’d hoped.

The landscape wasn’t quite treeless, but it was generally pretty shrubby and dry, with greenish plants and very red dirt. I was super excited to see a dingo standing watching the train, he was so reddish (either from the dirt or naturally) that I almost didn’t notice him. Yay for seeing the largest (not really so I’ll put this in quotes) “native” placental mammal in the wild! (I’m going out of order, but I’d checked off a lot of the marsupials by this point, even wombats!)

I went to take a shower (which was also pretty fun on a moving train, but not uncomfortable) and who should be stepping out of the compartment but Anna, from my Great Ocean Road trip! (I know haven’t introduced her yet, but she was German and had been hoping to find harvesting work in Adelaide, but no such luck). We chatted for a bit and then went outside to wander around once the train made its only Nullarbor stop in the ghost town of Cook.

The landscape had definitely changed by this point, and even proper bushes were few and far between, with only these little scrubby plants remaining, so I had to make sure I posed in the middle of nothing.

The “town” was a bit creepy, because you could see the old school, pub, pool (long-dry), and various other buildings, and everything was pretty desolate but also kind of weird, since every week train-traveling tourists wander around it for a half hour so it has some signs and monuments that look in good condition.

We had paused while in the middle of riding the longest straight stretch of rail in the world, although I’ll have to double check how long it actually is…This mural conveniently depicted my dingo-sighting experience (minus the kangaroos in the background). 

I had expected Cook to be roiling in the sun, since it was my first experience being in a deserty and arid part of Australia (though not nearly as deserty as other parts), but it was pretty mild and overcast, which was a little disappointing. This sideline train shot should be dazzling in the sunlight, but alas, the Hogwarts Express had better lighting…

Anyway the rest of the day I alternated between reading, talking with Anna, and watching the endless flatness of the Nullarbor. It’s pretty hard to tell with these photos, but it was actually pretty colourful and relaxing to watch. All the plants were ranges of greens, yellows, purples, and blues, and then the ground was so orange and red that it made a nice contrast.

We also passed the Western Australian border, which was announced over the intercom (which was normally pretty annoying since they kept saying things like “tune into your radios for information about the Nullarbor” only the all-nighter people didn’t have personal radios, so it was little aggrieving to hear about the exciting info all the fancy sleeper people got to hear). Here’s my fleeting shot of the backwards sign on the border that presumably said “Welcome to South Australia” (we didn’t have much warning about when to take the best photo, so I missed shooting the “Welcome to Western Australia” sign, although I did see it).

Here’s a pic of a significant sheep station thing in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know anything else about it, though, since I couldn’t find the right station on my imaginary radio.

By the time sunset approached, the scenery had changed, yet again, and now there were trees, bushes, and other shrubby sclerophyll species (sclerophyll refers to the types of leaves that many trees inhabiting arid, fire-prone, and nutrient-poor environments possess. They are narrow (to minimize surface area and sun exposure), waxy (to keep from drying out), and grey-green (to reflect off sunlight) and hang vertically (also minimizing sun exposure). Some of them, like eucalypts, also emit flammable volatile oils to help the spread of fires. Sorry, that was a long botanical digression (and I broke my rule of never using parentheses within parentheses – yikes), but the point is that I was seeing lots of these plants as I traveled through the arid south of the country). The sunset and the red dirt and the greenish trees combined for some nice photos, even if the moving train prevented them from being totally in focus.

Sometime in the evening we gained an hour as we traveled west, which wasn’t in an official time zone, but was just for the purposes of the train. We stopped in Kalgoorlie for three hours in the evening (pronounced “kal-GOOL-ee,” just ignore that “r”), which is a famous gold-mining town and “the biggest city in the outback,” though it was pretty dark and silent so I couldn’t see much of it or the outback setting. Being the evening of Good Friday, nothing was open, but Anna wanted to wander around and distribute her resumes anyway, so we did a little bit of that by sliding them under the doors of a few pubs (kind of sketchy, but then it was a sketchy-feeling place). We got soft-serve at MacDonalds, but otherwise the only interesting thing about Kalgoorlie was this hilarious sign on a (closed) vet’s office.

In the morning I caught a little bit of the sunrise again, but we were traveling through farm and forest areas now, so it wasn’t as exciting as the day before. We went back the final 1.5 hours (Adelaide was a half hour earlier than Sydney and the rest of the east, and we were now a full 3 hours earlier, which made more sense) and finally arrived in Perth at about 9am. My Perth friends, Andrew and Caroline, picked me up, dropped my stuff off at the hostel, and then took me to brunch in King’s Park, the huge botanical garden (plus a whole lot of natural bushland) that’s right next to the main city. I had deluxe pancakes with tropical fruit compote (passionfruit!) and delicious mascarpone – it was beautiful! As was the view of Perth from that vantage point.

The Swan River that runs through the city kind of reminded me of Lake Union.

I learned a bit about some of the funky Western Australian plants (Caroline is a botanist) and saw this giant bottle tree that had apparently been transported from the north of the state (all the way up in the tropics, near the Kimberley region) all the way down to King’s Park because it stood in the way of some new development and they didn’t want to chop it down (if only they could have done that with Arthur’s house and the Earth!). They had photos of the Great Tree Transportation, and apparently it was the farthest overland anyone had ever driven a giant tree (at least in Australia, if not the world, either way, it’s a weird but impressive statistic and emphasizes that Western Australia is, indeed, huge!). It only looked a little worse for wear.

I was pretty exhausted after two nights on a train, and so I collapsed in my hostel that afternoon, relieved to be in Perth at last.