I was up again today before dawn, and was picked up outside the hostel. As the bus filled up I realised that there were 14 girls, including the driver/guide, and then myself and Alex the Scotsman. We all fell asleep for the first leg of the journey, a drive to "Historic Bussleton Jetty", which is, umm, really old and really long, and really rather boring. Alex and I had a long talk about places we'd been/wanted to go to, before being herded back onto the bus by Tammy (real name Tamantha, honestly) for the next leg. We went to the Bushshack Brewery, which had a load of wierd and wonderful beers, all of which I tried - there was chocolate, passion fruit, mango, two types of strawberry, and some other more conventional ones. The strawberry cream soda (embarrassingly called Screamin' Creamin') was my favourite. There was also a round pool table, on which Alex and I played two embarrassingly poor games. Slightly drunk, we went to Ngilgi cave, which has some wierd rock formations in it, and an 'Adventure Tunnel' which we tried out - just a small tunnel, unfortunately, not quite slippery enough to slide down.
The group I'm in is alright, the Europeans are all pretty friendly, but there's a group of 6 or so American students who sit at the back and don't really interact with everyone else. The journeys mostly consist of sleeping between stops, it seems. Tammy the guide is a little strict, but otherwise OK. At Augusta we got to our hostel and met up with another group, who are doing the 5-day Esperance tour - this is the same as ours for 2 1/2 days, then they branch off to Esperance when we go back to Perth. Their guide, Rick, is a lot more relaxed than Tammy, and their group immediately seems like more fun. It's 6 guys and 6 girls, as well as a Thai girl and her parents who are also on the bus. I chatted to a girl named Jessica who made me guess where she was from, having told me I probably hadn't met anyone else from her country before. After loads of guesses I narrowed it down to a country which shares a border with Chile, and I named all the ones I could remember and still didn't get it. Turns out I had completely forgotten the existence of Peru, which was the answer - she's Peruvian but lives in Sweden, and is pretty cool. After our BBQ Alex, Jessica, myself, the guys in their group and a nervous Korean girl ended up having a discussion about secret tattoos, strip clubs, and various other slightly risqué topics, with varying degrees of participation. Hyo, the Korean girl, left in shock a couple of times but always came back smiling. Their group is pretty international - there's Mickael and Nicolas (Reunion Island), H (Norway), Sam (Switzerland), Walter (Austria), Jerome (Holland), Jessica and Hyo as mentioned before, Emma (England) and Megami, Mio and Sukiko (Japan).
Day 179 (Friday 11th) - Augusta-Albany
Yet again we were up before dawn, and headed off for breakfast at our first stop - the Bicentennial Tree. This is a 60m high, umm, tree which has iron rods hammered into it all the way up to a viewing platform from which you can look out across the forests. The climb is somewhat tricky and dangerous, but definitely worth it. We stopped in Walpole for lunch, where I bumped into the other group again. Jess ran over to me, grabbed me and took me over to them, proclaiming "Here's Matt!" Apparently she had been asking where I had gone since the top of the tree, due to some confusion about which group I was in. Noone in her group entirely remembered my name, so her questions were met with blank looks and replies along the lines of "there is no Matt", so understandably she was pleased to see me as it made her seem less wierd. We had a BBQ lunch and headed on to our next stop, the only thing I knew about Western Australia before I arrived, the Treetop Walk. This is a steel structure suspended between huge poles in the Walpole national park, which runs 40m above the ground, through the tops of the tingle trees, giant Eucalypts that form a huge forest here. We soon figured out how to get the most bounce from the walkway, by stepping heavily in time with each other at the right frequency. This was so much fun that we ddid the walk again, just to see how much bounce we could get. I reckon we got an amplitude of a mere or so on the big walkway, which mildly annoyed the middle-aged couple trying to cross at the same time as us. We rushed through the Ancient Empires walk, which has loads of hollow trees, and returned to the bus again. Next stop was Elephant Cove beach, where we met the other group again and went for a swim in the Southern Ocean. Alex, Sam, H, Hyo and I were jumping off some rocks, when I got a bit caught in the current (after Tammy's warning of "don't get caught in the current, it'll take you straight out into the ocean"). This was a bit scary, as I was washed out of sight behind the rocks, struggling as hard as I could to get near them. Eventually I managed to get a purchase and climb back up - all this time Hyo had been standing on top merrily laughing, thinking I was just dicking about.
Our time at Elephant cove was cut short, as we had to get on to The Gap and The Natural Bridge, where we walked around, clambered on the rocks and stayed for sunset with the other group. We went on to Albany (seeing quite a few Kangaroos along the way) where we had a massive dinner and I asked Tammy about the possibility of switching to the other group for the next three days, thereby extending my tour to the 5 day one. It turns out this is fine, I can switch at any time, so I checked with Emily, rang Qantas, and from after breakfast tomorrow I will be on the other bus! I told the others I was swapping, which was met with a surprising amount of joy from my new group, and we went to the Tangled Head pub for a few drinks. We were kicked out at midnight, and Walter and I gave Emma and Jess shoulder carries back to our hostel for some reason, which I pulled off with less effort and injury than I was expecting. At the hostel we met a bloke, possibly called Matt, with a thick ginger moustache who was cycling around Australia for charity - 16000 km or so, I think. Drunker than I thought, and dreading getting up at 6am, I went to bed.
Day 180 (Saturday 12th) - Albany-Esperance
We went off to see sunrise at Mt. Clarence, and on the way we listened to Two Little Boys as Tammy told us the story of the ANZAC Memorial atop the mountain. I was the only one in the whole bus who knew the words - not sure if I'm proud or ashamed of this. We had breakfast on Middleton Beach and then the buses were swapped (the clutch is buggered on Rick's one, so the more experienced Tammy is to take it back to Perth) and so was I - I ended up right in the front seat next to Rick, and therefore not only was I uncomfortable in the only non-reclining seat in the bus, I was also far away from any japes happening in the middle. No need to worry though, as everyone was asleep before too long. Our next stop was Castle Rock, which involved a long climb up a rocky hill. On the way up we encountered the other group coming back down, with Alex and Tammy carrying a lolling Patricia - turns out she had slipped and banged her head on the rocks, and was in rather a bad way. As we passed she looked up and said "Ooh look, Matt's back" in a dreamy fashion.
On the way up we passed Balancing Rock, a huge granite boulder seemingly precariously balanced on another rock, and then proceeded up to the top, from where there were awesome views around the whole area, which was very flat and surprisingly verdant. We headed to the Castle Rock Winery next, for lunch and some wine tasting. I bought the best tasting one from the barrel of "earlier vintage" (for this, read "old stuff we couldn't shift") wines, and we started on the 5 1/2 hour trip to Esperance, along a single lane highway with red sand on either side, which was dead straight for 10s of kilometres at a time. We passed through endless expanses of bushland and sheep farms, huge grain silos and Aluminium mines. I talked to Rick at length about Physics and renewable energy sources (he was interested, I promise) before arriving at our hostel in Esperance just after sunset. The place is covered in little signs giving us warnings and directions about what we can and cannot do, and is apparently owned by a rather cantankerous fellow, who we encountered later. We are all in one enormous 20 bed dorm for the next two nights, which should be cool. We had awesome Lasagne and got a few beers in, and played the Red/Black drinking game (Will this card be black or red? Wrong? Drink! Joker? All drink! Someone opens a new bottle? All Drink!). Everyone joined in, even the quiet Japanese girls, which was awesome - they are a lot more fun than they would have us believe. Despite Jessica's claims yesterday that she didn't drink, as it made her do stupid things (i.e. stripping in a pub on her last tour, apparently. Her friends didn't stop her, but did take pictures, which is what's important), she cracked into two bottles of Riesling from the Winery we visited earlier. Just as we opened our last beer and were about to go out, the owner came in and told us all to be quiet, as he was trying to watch TV in the lounge area and we were being way too loud, and told us "If you want to drink piss, go to the pub. If you want to be rowdy, go to the pub. Very simple, just go to the pub." It was only about half 9 and we weren't being too rowdy, but Rick advised us to just grab our drinks and leave, which we did. It was an incredibly long way to the pub, along the chilly seafront. We were supposedly going to the pub for Karaoke, for which we put in requests but we were having too much of our own fun to notice when our names were repeatedly called out, so we missed it all.
The pub closed and we had to move to the club next door, however I was turned away for wearing flip-flops, in spite of all Jess's protests and indications at her feet, clad in flip-flops. The Maori bouncer actually said that there was one rule for guys and one for girls. While Jess was getting her stuff from inside, he started giving me tips on how to get her, what I should do, said I should take a chance and so on. We walked back along the beach, which was unbelievably cold. We stumbled into the sand and bushes a few times, as we were more than a little unsteady on our feet. When we got back Rick, Kim and Julia (guide and Canadon from another group) caught us up, and after they had gone Rick told us they'd just done a naked run along the pier, apropos of nothing. And this is his job.
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