Into the Great Unknown

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Now, at last a blog to bring us up to speed! At the moment we are in Esperance, a seaside (yes Dini - SEA!!!:P) town in the south of Western Australia and our last proper stop before we head off across the very very big Nullabor Plain to Adelaide - to give you an idea of how far it is - think London to Moscow! It's likely this will be the last place we have access to the net for a while so our next blog is very likely to be written in South Australia, a whole new state where they grow wine and have lots of sharks - although if the water temperature here is anything to go by, it's not likely we'll have any shark encounters! It's pumped straight over from Antarctica and trust me, it feels like it!

Our Last Days in Perth

We left off on the last blog with Emily leaving, we didn't really get up to much in the time between that and leaving Perth, it way mainly just a week and a half of me working and Ben pretending to look for work! haha! But of course we did have a few major events and the first one was Christmas! We spent the day with the Fletts, our surrogate family in Perth, and apart from me getting a little homesick (it was Christmas!!) in the evening we had a great day. We started the feasting with a BBQ'd breakfast (very Aussie!) and scambled egg with salmon in for the meaties. Then (or maybe before) we opened our pressies, so had come all the way from England and some from Perth! They included a new camera (wohoo - ours had a very slow, very painful death), camping goodies and lots of English chocolate smuggled probably illegally through customs. I have a theory on the whole chocolate thing - the Aussies don't want you bringing chocolate in because their chocolate is so utterly crap!! If everyone bought in chocolate willy nilly the Aussies would discover this and all hell would break loose!
Lunch was seafood and salad - with new seafood Sarah tucking into the oysters and mussels, but I'm still not quite ready for prawns! Seeing as a year ago I couldn't face anything that weasn't covered in batter i reckon I'm doing pretty well! In the afternoon wer played with our new toys and went to the beach - on Christmas day - crazyness! It was a scorcher so a dip was definately required as soon as one stepped out of the aircon!
Dinner (typical Sarah - categorising by food) was a proper old Christmas dinner complete with turkey, brussels sprouts and pig in blankets! Ben even had his own very yummy looking vegetarian platter! Yum, I love Christmas!

Boxing Day
Boxing Day turned out to be the hottest December day ever, the 7th hottest day ever and Perth was in fact the hottest place on Earth! We certainly felt the 44.2 degrees and it was a day of lazing around and crawling down to the sea.

New Years Eve
New Years Eve! I worked until 8 on New Years Eve at the pub and Ben came and met me. We had plans of going into the city or something but after a few drinks (Just one more then we will leave!) that were placed in front of us without any more leaving our pockets we decided to stay! (The band played Jimmy Eat World so that convinced me- and Fall Out Boy ... shhh!) We ended up having a good night and meeting some random very drunk people who kept buying us JaegerBombs which are the grossest thing ever - Jaeger on it's own is yummy but it's with red bull.. oh yuck! We left the pub suitably merry and shared a falafel kebab on the way home - that $7 was all we spent!! I was opening up the next day but I diodn't mind - it was the equivalent of 16 squids an hour - not bad for very easy pubwork! Ben spent the day floating in the sea, the perfect hangover relief.

Southbound Festival, Busselton

We left Perth on the 4th Jan, after a very nice goodbye meal of Itas lovely beef rendang and a tofu concoction - now we are back to tinned chopped tomatoes and instant noodles! I picked up some new glasses - they are very groovy and kinda makes me glad I lost mine on the beach on Christmas Eve, apart from the vast amount of money that jumped out of my pocket to buy them! Our first destination on leaving Perth was Busselton where we worked at the Southbound Festival as fridge stocker and drinks ticket seller. It was a good festival, very small compared to the ones back home, but the Kings of Leon played (I could watch from my till!) which was good and Groove Armada (which was not so good - we were expecting more, and to my untrained ear it sounded like the "crap dance music they play on 2-10fm"( to quote Ben!) It did get better towards the end though! So we had a couple of days of eating fetsival food, collecting rubbish to get drinks vouchers, watching bands, sneaking to our car to drink beer (they wouldn't even let booze into the campsite) and sleeping in our staff tent with free towels and soap!

Esperance

Next stop was our current (Ben taking over) haunt, Esperance (after a day in Albany, which was lovely, but we'll skirt over that). Boasting Western Australia's best beaches, they like to tell us in every brochure. But they're not wrong, they are incredible. White sand, that at sopme beaches feels jusdt like snow, and the clearest waters you've ever seen. We now have a lot of photographs of beaches. So we've been camping, waking up to birds twittering in the trees above us. Actually, that reminds me. Between Albany and Esperance we were camped at a nature reserve next to a beach, and all day the weather was in tents. It felt like someone had left the oven door open in bakeries worldwide. The wind was scorching, and to compliment the heat there were multiple bush-fires raging away in the distance as we drove to the campsite. That afternoon into the night the heat wouldn't subside even when the sun went down, and we witnessed an incredible lightning storm, first off in the distance, then above us, and then off into the other direction. It lasted a long time and we lay in our tent sweating, with just the mosquito net shut, watching the pitch dark night sky illuminated every few seconds by bright flashes of lightning. At this campsite there were these nasty little flies that liked to eat my legs, and masses of dragonflies that were equal in proliference to the flies!

Anyway, Esperance. We witnessed kangaroos on the beach, and something nibbled my feet at another beach. WE climbed Frenchman's peak, which was only about 280metres high or so, but a 3km walk and had incredible views over cape le grande national park.

Albany had a rock that looked like a massive dog's head. It was called dog rock. The bakery nearby was called Dog Rock bakery. The IGA supermarket nearby was called Dog Rock IGA. The motel opposite was called dog rock motel. The rock had a collar painted on it. Sorry there are no photos at this present time.


So now we set off for the nullarbor, but the weather outside has actually gotten really nice, so we may go and find the slide that's situated just off the shore at the main beach and go and have some fun before we set off for the desert and hope that our car has no more nasty surprises like the other day when it wouldn't start until the tenth attempt! Wish us luck.

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