Penned 24^th September

Gareth: Here I am again, in a new campsite on another day. I’m plugged in with a cup of tea and tomato pasta supper resting nicely on the belly. Don’t want to take too long today so may be a bit briefer (which may come as a stroke of serendipity to some people reading)

21^st Sept

Left the free camp at 7:00 am, back on the road again, just can't wait to get on the road again.

Had a massive 6 hour drive with a couple of breaks to a place called Kalbarri. Here we wanted to do a walk called “The Loop” by Murchison River. We were a bit cagey when we realized we had to off-road 27km to get there, but Gareth enjoyed being a rally driver. Walked the loop which was about 7 miles, admired the red rocks, and took the tourist pictures at natures window. There were some lovely wild flowers to admire. As we climbed down to river we saw a cool lizard that we have yet to identify. Then we saw a kangroo all up close like, top banana. It didn’t seem to mind us snapping away at it for a bit. Not sure why this one was timid, all the others hopped off as soon as they caught sight of us. Alice also liked some funny caterpillars that hide away in what looks like grass seeds.

Another grand adventure. You're probably thinking, “come on, no day goes that smoothly in Gareth and Alice’s travels”. This post is boring. Well, roll your socks up you’re in for a treat. As we tried to pitch the tent at Wagoe Campsite in Kalbarri, Gareth broke the pole. This was a disaster as it was starting to get late and dark. Gareth ran around trying to use his brain to come up with an idea worthy of his engineer status. Friction Welding, Electro Discharge Machining, maybe some sort of super freezing strengthening process that can only be done in space. All these ideas were excellent except they all shared the same problem. They were all ideas produced by someone who was far too intelligent for this particular situation! Alice then quietly chipped in like a little mouse, “maybe we can use one of them circle things that you can screw and they tighten to hold things together, like they use to hold pipes onto taps”. Not sure what she meant by that, but she does make me laugh.  I told her not to worry her pretty little head and that I was working on a solution, I then tapped her on the bum, in a way that was sophisticated like James Bond…. That’s when the solution hit me like a bolt from the blue.  I suddenly remembered that there was a “jubilee clip” in the laundry room. BINGO!  And this is the clever bit, we could use this to barter with at a shop to try and get a new pole. Just before we were about to set off on the journey, Alice must have slipped and the jubilee clip fell onto the tent was tightened with a screwdriver and it fixed the pole. What an unbelievable stroke of luck. And that’s exactly how it happened, don’t let Alice tell you otherwise. The tent was fixed and I somehow pulled us through this moment of despair, like an engineering beacon of hope.

That night we slept well in a tent that was even sturdier than it was designed to be!

22^nd September

Gareth: Staying at Wagoe again today because we were a bit tired of driving and it has a washing machine (minus a jubilee clip, we had to hold the pipe to the tap (that was my idea)).

Went down to the beach after a long relaxing breakfast and a clothes wash. Some big waves were happening on the shore and this is where the moment illustrated below was created. "By the Power of Burnley.. I have the POWER!"

Even this picture wasn’t good enough to get rid of the swarm of flies encircling us. And I’m not suggesting that Burnley are s*!t….. I’m just saying what the flies are telling me. Also, I now realize why the Aussies wear corks in their arses. To keep the flies out!

We walked through and enjoyed the Kalbarri town centre where upon the frequent smell of fish and chips filled our nose and took Gareth back to his Friday school nights when the family would get fish and chips 4 times and a fish. And all was good. Decided to eat the egg sarnies that we had prepared for ourselves to try and resolve Gareth of his cravings. This was not enough so we bought 4 healthy ice creams in the local IGA.  Alice:  Gareth is convinced that it's more economical to buy a four pack of ice creams than 2 separate one's, however this means we have to eat 2 each as we have no fridge to store them in.  On this occasion it wasn't cheaper either but never mind!

Gareth: After this we took a walk along the windy cliffs of red bluff and mushroom rock where we became one with the whales again. Not only that, but saw millions of dolphins riding the waves…. Well not millions, but about ten. Pretty awesome.  

This reminded Gareth of the talk of that the preachy women gave at Monkey Mia dolphin show that a dolphin can get gang raped for 42 days. Alice then cut her hand on rock when producing this picture below. But she said it was worth it as it is now her desktop and facebook profile picture.

Alice took pictures of a shingle back lizard, which seems to be a regular occurrance these days.

Alice: It was another grand day in Western Australia and to top it off we were adopted by an elderly Aussie couple who took petty on our noodle dinner and offered us some lovely fillets of silver cobbler that we could have for breakfast.  They made a lovely (if a little unconventional) breakkie fried in bread crumbs and tasted a bit like chicken.

23^rd September

Alice: After the lovely fish we headed into Geraldton. Today was a pretty unusual day. Not really traveling at all. If I told you we spent 5 hours in Macdonalds… Some people would say that is Ronald Heaven, others would see it as hamburgler hell, but this is where we spent most of our time in Geraldton. You see McDonalds in its corporate wisdom gives out free wifi internet with any paying customer, so, 2 teas, 1 large McAngus meal, 1 large Cheeseburger meal, 2 apple pies, 2 ice creams and 5 hours later we had sorted out our travel plans, car hire, cycle hire, flights, a bit of email and a bit of facebook, and posted the last two blog installments, and had eventually departed geraldton.

We spent the night at Lake Indoon which was very picturesque but swarming with mozzies!  This made Gareth panick and talk to himself a bit so Alice decided it would be better to spend the evening inside the tent instead of sitting outside like we usually do.  Thankfully both of us escaped un bitten.

24^th September

After leaving lake Indoon very early (we were told by other campers that if we left before 7am we wouldn’t get a chance to pay, we left guiltless as the toilets and showers were awful!)  we headed down to the Pinnacles at Nambung National Park which were pretty spectacular.  We also sampled our first lamingtons!  Which are lovely chocolaty, coconutty, spongy, creamy cakey treats that Gareth allowed Alice to buy because they were in the reduced section of the local IGA supermarket. 

Alice: We now find ourselves in a Christian campsite just outside Perth. Not sure how we got here, maybe God was directing us, or maybe this is the place Mr Satan wants me to do his laundry.  We have already been preached at, and I’m half expecting to be forced into a camp fire rendition of kumbayah mi lord. If I am, the words “I was cold I was naked” will be taken literally.  We have also been offered Christian reading materials to peruse over dinner and so far have been to scared to come clean about our atheism and sit smiling nicely and changing to subject at any chance we get!

Facilities are good, we have a big kitchen to cook and sit in.  It gets dark about 7pm so it’s good to have a place to chill out in.  As a result we are now up to date with the blog and you are reading in real time! As I type Gareth is sat watching the T.V. in the God Common Room eating the fruit from the forbidden tree (Apple). Tomorrow we are heading off down south to Margaret River and Bunburry then on to Albany and Esperance and back to Perth.

Missing you all and hope you’re enjoying the blog.

Blog out!

A and G xxxxx 

The Steven Hawkings Lookalike Convention

Gareth: Hello all, good news on the blog status, there seems to have been an abundance of new followers to this blog. From the looks of things The Steven Hawkings Lookalike Convention came across this page and they all must have thoroughly enjoyed and have joined. I can see this blog is reaching its intended intelligent audience.

Alice: Thanks for your post Frozzie, most of the time it's Gareth writing until he gets bored and I take over so it's a joint effort really. A lot of what Gareth writes though is not printable so has to be highly edited by me. Maybe you should imagine us reading it out to you in unison? We'll try and make it a bit clearer though.

Gareth: Penned on the 23^rd Sept (At Lake Indoon – which sounds like it should be in Scotland, although thinking about it when writing it just then, if it was in Scotland it would probably be called Loch Indoon, so it doesn’t really sound like it is Scotland at all)! Enough of these babbling contradictions.

Hope you are enjoying your autumn for those of you in the Northern hemisphere.  Are the days getting shorter and wetter while the nights get longer and colder? I think that’s the definition of Autumn? Well in three words to make you jealous with green hulk rage. ‘It is spring here!’

HULK SMASH!

And though we may have had a little pop at the bizarre Australian weather at first…  It (being the weather) comes round, and when it comes round, oh boy it comes round goooood!!!

Some people may ask “How can it be spring when it is autumn and autumn when it is spring?” Simple I say, we have visited Topsy Turvey Land – where you burp when you fart and you fart when you burp! I am literally writing this while wearing women’s clothing. It is mental here.

Being British I thought it appropriate to talk about the weather to begin with, and now onto tea.

I have had three cups today, none of them being loose leaf, not one silver service tea strainer in site, oh the horror!

So apologies if blog not flow like it been doing previously past, it’s cause I Tea!

Anywhooo, this blog shouldn’t be about the ramblings of a drunken baboon. It should be about the adventures of Alice down Gareth’s Rabbit hole.

And for I tell, turn the page, for this is where the story lie….

Page Turned…. ‘(Metaphorically)

19^th September – just realized there is loads to catch up on. Its going to be a 5 day mega blog. I can see the blog slipping into week blogs then month blogs as we go through the travels. If blog is too long let us know and I’ll just ignore you.

Anyway 19^th Sept

Bit tired today cause of the three cans of brown Emu booze we drank. (see end of last post) The cans were 375ml instead of the standard UK size of 330ml, which probably pushed us over the calculated edge! Set off to Carnarvon for a brief stop and refreshment then onto Coral Bay.  Unfortunately it was too windy to snorkel so Gareth chased seagulls for half an hour while Alice didn’t

There were a lot of dead Kangroo’s on road and the sad fact is that we see about 30 dead kanga’s to every live one. But on the plus side it did bring in a lot of BOP’s  as we like to call them, or Birds of Prey for us to feast our wildlife loving eyes on. As the birds were devouring the roo’s we were devouring the wedge tailed eagles with our eyes. Also saw a dead eagle as well, cause they gorge themselves on the roo’s so much that they can’t fly away when a truck comes. Anyway, to cut a long rather depressing story short Gareth has a lovely new three quarter length roo coat and an eagle hat (just like Jamiroquai)

Drove on to a campsite called Bullara Farm which was a small quarter million acres.. This was very dusty and the wind didn’t help. We got dust in our eyes and in our food, for the health conscious however, dust contains very few calories so this didn’t affect our weight too much. At the farm there was a small blonde girl there standing on a pile of bricks, covered in dust with no shoes on, Alice thinks this is probably exactly how Ang looked when she lived in Kalgoorlie.

There were lots of cows at Bullara Farm which were very close to our tent, this kept us awake mooost of the night, so we were udderly shattered in the morning. Butter bit of food, and a cup of tea with ‘milk’ sorted us out, we rubbed down our calves and ran away from all the hulabullu, Errrr? Hamburger?

This brings us very nicely onto the 20^th September

20^th September

Got away early and drove to Exmouth this is the furthest north we would travel in west Australia. Here is the Cape Range National Park, which was hot and windy, so we were wary of the weather dangers and threw on a load of suncream and hats and carried 3 litres of water. We may look young and pretty, but there are a few wise unburnt heads on these shoulders. Here we started the day by whale watching, as you do! At first we thought it be impossible to spot a whale in such a vast Indian ocean, but spot them we did. There must have been about 20, or 5 really fast whales playing a rather funny game. Under the sea we didn’t have a clue what was going on, they could have been lots of lobsters in one big whale fancy dress costume, but to us it was spectacular, and even if it were lobsters operating some sort of mechanical whale costume I would be equally impressed. The best Whale came right out of the water about 500m away from us and did a big belly flop. No lobster could create that effect without some heavy duty special FX. I’m not sure but I don’t think lobsters have that capability yet, correct me if I’m wrong.

We dragged ourselves away after a couple of hours knowing that there was a gorge walk trail just a couple of miles away in the Cape Range National Park. On the way we saw an emu with 8-9 emu babies (chicks). Awwwww. Thinking about it, Rod Hull’s arm was a successful contraceptive device, by the look of things Emu has been rather busy since Rod died.

The Mandu Mandu gorge walk was brilliant 5 mile hike round the craggy rock faces. Here we witnessed nature in its extreme. Alice was in her element. First we spotted the infamous endangered black-footed rock wallaby. Alice spent a good 10 min photographing these beasts, before something very unexpected happened, out of the corner of our ears we heard a faint leafy rumbling, and out he popped. I’ve never seen anything so large. It was a big (pardon my French) lizard. This engaged Alice for another 10 min of furious photo taking. We later found out this was called Varanus Giganteus (which I think means huge arse) or in normal language Perentie Lizard (a species of monitor lizard Alice has just shouted at me. I’m only right next to you love, calm down) Words cannot describe how big this lizard was – although a good start would be about 2m from top to tail. Have a look for yourselves (pictures not to scale)

After such a thrilling day I couldn’t bring myself to spend any money so we stayed at Lyndon river west area free camp costing zero aus dollars. Here we ate a questionable Irish stew and bread. Nothing like the lovely stew Eimear cooks for us. Very disappointing. So today wildlife good, food bad, with heavy wind.

Just realized I have been smashing away at this keyboard in this cramped tent for about an hour and a half and the battery aint gunna take it captain, she’s gunna blow. Indeed I said this would be a 5 day special mega post. But I have failed my lovely audience. I think I got carried away with all the gibberjabbering. Going to bed now. Will try and catch up with the rest tomorrow night. Goodnight mon amis, the sleeping bag becons.

Bog Off!

A and G xxxx