Advertisement
Published: October 7th 2008
Rottnest Island
A shipwreck. One of many.Okay, well the bear I saw on television, but the quokkas and giant pelicans are legit. We are leaving for Bali in about two hours which is quite exciting, but before we go I wanted to wrap up our trip in Australia. We ended up spending 2 weeks in Perth which was both good and bad. Bad because it was rainy and not nice out most of the time so we spent a lot of our time in the hostel and didn't get to go up and down the coast as we had planned. Good because Perth is a very quirky and enjoyable city.
Yesterday we went to Rottnest Island. It's about a 30 minute ferry ride from Fremantle (a super sweet town just across the river from Perth). Rottnest Island is home to the famous quokka, a very strange, bouncing, kangaroo/rat type creature. Actually mostly tiny fat kangaroo with a rat tail. We rented bikes and went quokka hunting. The island doesn't have any cars and is where a lot of people from Perth rent cottages for the summer or whatever. The island looks flat from the ferry but is deceivingly hilly. Nadine, the bike I had would put
the shit streak to shame. It only shifted when it wanted to so I almost got bucked off a few times when it would decide to shift 10 minutes after I had shifted and had forgotten that it hadn't yet shifted. We got about 1/3 of the way around the island before realizing that it was quite a bit bigger than we had thought and the only spot to get lunch was back where we had started. Lucky for us though, the road that cut back across to "The Settlement" brought us our first quokka sighting.
The quokkas are almost tame because people kept feeding them and not surprisingly the first quokkas we saw were by a garbage can. There was a Japanese family that was absolutely terrified of them. Not Stephanie. If she comes down with mange, I will know where she got it. Besides looking mostly diseased, the quokkas are quite charming. Except when they jump up onto your lunch. It was a stealth attack. Okay, that's a lie. We watched him try to jump up on the bench and fall off but figured he wouldn't be dumb enough to do it again. Nope, we were the
dumb ones. We will be in quite a few peoples photo albums as it was the only quokka around the lunch area and was more or less in our laps.
Enough about quokkas. The water off of Rottnest is beautiful shades of blue. I guess that's the Indian Ocean for you. Apparently the island is known for it's snorkeling and diving because of the clarity of the water, but as you have probably figured out, I did not participate. There are lots of birds on the island and some of my favorites were the family of ducks. They were in water probably about 6 inches deep and the mom was feeding on the bottom. The babies were trying so hard to reach the bottom that they would paddle their little feet so hard that they would do somersaults. Quite endearing.
Our bums were too sore to get back on the bikes after lunch so we decided to sit on the beach and read. There came our next wildlife sighting - GIANT pelicans. We first saw them across the bay and they looked like blow up rafts they were so large. Later I got to see them up close
and not only are they fairly terrifying looking, but they are huge. One stood up next to me and it came up to my chest. It was taller than the 7 year old boy who was harrassing them.
So, that pretty much wraps up Perth. As you've read, it is quirky and weird and stuck in the 80s (I forgot to mention earlier that in Perth you hear Michael Jackson playing everywhere, every day. Another homage to the 80s I suppose). If you haven't heard already, I plan on getting a work visa for Australia after traveling so you all better start planning your trips down under to visit me next year. Remember - summer = winter and vice versa. Hope all is well with everyone back home. Stephanie and I are still getting along perfectly. We are perfect travel buddies.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.075s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 11; qc: 48; dbt: 0.045s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
