As we were waiting to go through the security checks at Heathrow, I glanced behind and saw a guy that looked a bit like Michael Clarke (Aussie cricketer) a couple of places behind me. Reasoning that the World Cup (which Australia had won) had only just ended in the Caribbean, I thought it couldn’t be - going through London seemed a little like going the long way round. But then Andrew Symonds (another Aussie cricketer, with pretty recognisable dreadlocked hair) came through a side bit right by us. As he walked through, the chap in front of us offered a good-willed ‘congratulations’, only to be sneered at in reply. Slightly baffled by this confrontation, Angela asked whether I knew who that guy was. I told her, and she looked suitably non-plussed. “Oh. I thought he just worked here or something. It seemed a bit strange that someone was congratulating him.“ I tried to impress on her how big a deal this guy was - “he plays for Australia!“ Nothing. “They’ve just won the World Cup!” Then, around the corner came 3 more players, including the captain, Ricky Ponting. Disappointingly, he wasn’t actually carrying the World Cup itself through security. For some reason, I’d always imagined that’s what people would do if they won major things like that. Seeing as our flight was eventually heading to Sydney (though we were getting off when it stopped in Singapore), I’d assumed that they’d be on our plane. Unfortunately not (though I didn’t actually find that out until about 11 hours in to the flight. This hadn’t stopped me from telling the guy next to me that the cricketers were up front in 1st class.)
Along with Ben and Ellie, we puzzled over how exactly the Singaporean police enforce the last one.
We had plans to catch up on our jet lag and sleep-in as late as we needed to, but unfortunately the Sultan Mosque had other plans for us. Shortly after 5:30 am, we were awoken by some strange singing. My first thought was that it was a songbird (speaking of songbirds, how’s that annoying mocking bird-frog in the yard, Dad? Have you “taken care” of it yet?). Ollie (rather sharply for such an early hour) pointed out that it was the dawn Call-to-prayer at the mosque. After about 10 minutes, our friend stopped singing, but it wasn’t until much later that I was finally able to fall asleep.
Waiting in the taxi queue at the airport a few hours later, Angela thought she’d enquire about the tipping etiquette. Big mistake. The hobo that had somehow found employment looking after the taxis at the airport was incensed by the very idea. “Bloody Americans!! Another bloody stupid idea by them to get us all to pay more, so the bloody employers don’t have to pay any wages! It’s a bloody disgrace.” Slightly taken aback, slightly jetlagged, we just stood there, thinking that he’d said his piece. Oh no. As though we’d attempted to defend this scandalous practice, he suddenly turned around again; bright red nose and wrinkly cheeks poking out through the grey scraggly mass of beard and hair that had seemingly overtaken his head. “Look, just you pay what it says on the meter. No more, no less, alright?” With one last exasperated sigh and shake of the head, the issue had been laid to rest. Welcome to Australia.
On Saturday, we were really looking forward to moving in to our own place. A guy from our hostel (a Yorkshire lad whose choice expression when describing any situation from an unfavourable to an awful one was “bloody nightmare”) had a rental car for the weekend and offered to drive us with all our stuff. Gary was there in his cleaning gear (including hot pink rubber gloves) to greet us. He was short, with greasy black hair and looked like he spent a few too many hours in the weights room, and, as you may have guessed from the pink gloves, was obviously quite stylish. Before we saw him in person, Ollie bet he was either really fat or really skinny. He maintained that he was partially right. Although we didn’t get to meet him, we found out that Eddie is also short with greasy black hair and muscles he’s pretty proud of. He has the same gloves! But Gary and Eddie aren’t twins-- they’re the same guy.
We’d already paid a deposit and Gary insisted we pay three weeks rent upfront. We said that it wasn’t possible and gave him a week’s rent and told him we’d pay the next two on Wednesday when we were paid at work. Surprisingly, he didn’t scream “I want my money now, bitch!” at us, and simply said we were to have it to him by Wednesday (for reference please see Will Ferrell‘s video, “The Landlord”). Shortly after, Gary and his rubber gloves set off. We started talking to some Irish girls who were also living in the house share. They explained to us that the names Gary and Eddie can’t be used interchangeably-- sometimes he’s Gary, and other times he’s Eddie. One girl even said that she called one time and Gary answered so she said, “hi, is that Gary?” and he said, “no, I’ll get him” and the same voice came back on the phone 5 seconds later as Gary. They said he’ll try to scam you out of any money he can for any reason, like leaving your bedroom light on (upon our arrival, we were presented with a little booklet of rules that Gary, in consultation with Eddie, had cooked up for us). Aside from a 40-something year old weirdo who was constantly sitting in the same place staring at everyone, the other tenants seemed really nice. They didn’t have many positive things to say about Gary or the house itself though.
Not 24 hours after our arrival, Ollie and I were already contemplating an escape. Suddenly “only 5 weeks” became “a whole 5 weeks.” We went to Fremantle for the afternoon, and to pass the time while sitting in a café, started to make a list of pros and cons of our leaving and going back to our old hostel . This soon became a serious task and a points system was introduced to clarify the importance of each item. Here it is, verbatim:
Cons:Lose one week’s rent (5)Lose deposit (9)No private room (7)More expensive per week (3)
Pros: Clean kitchen and bathroom (5) Save money when we go away on weekends (4) No critters (5) Closer to train station (1) TV, DVD player, x-box (4) No Gary and Eddie (5) No stupid rules (3)No having to clear up other people’s stuff (4)No more weird stares from creepy Irish dude (2)Great feeling from being naughty and running away (3)Good blog material (1)
It became clear what we had to do - the pro’s had it 37-24.
So that was that. As you can see, we really shone in our mission and so narrowly escaped. The film documenting our bravery and skill should be coming out in the next year. If we hadn’t made the wise decision to leave, we’d still be stuck in a dirty house and would probably be pretty miserable. Although it did mean we lost our deposit and a week’s rent, I’m happy we left. We now have an endless supply of plates and cutlery, managed to escape the many bloody nighmares that we had to endure (critters and weird stares, in particular), and have hopefully been provided with some decent blog material. After a stressful week, we decided to treat ourselves and headed down south to the Margaret River wine region for a weekend of wine tasting.
We signed up to a wine tour for the next day, which, although billed as a ‘half-day’ tour, still managed to take us to 5 vineyards, a cheese company, a chocolate company and a brewery. Andy, our driver and tour guide, looked more like the sort of bloke that enjoyed the odd keg of beer rather than the odd glass of wine, but he did seem to know his stuff. He threw plenty of wine facts at us as we careened around the dirt tracks between the vineyards, and I was left clinging to the hope that my knowing the names of a couple of grape types would see me through without too much embarrassment. I thought if I could throw in a couple of ‘mmm……fruity’ comments, or mention something about tannins then I’d be able to cover my tracks.
We spent another day driving down to Augusta, which is right on the coast about an hours drive further south from Dunsborough. Here, we saw the point at which the Indian and Southern Oceans met, and had also hoped to see some migrating whales. It was only when we got there that it occurred to us that we might not actually be able to see them from the shore. The road back took us through some really nice forest and, nearer to Dunsborough, past some massive caves. We stopped at Mammoth Cave for a look around and an argument about which ones were stalactites and which ones were stalagmites.
So, after work finished on Friday afternoon (where we were given a grand send-off party by a grateful Plumbers Licensing Board,) we went back to the hostel and packed ready to set off first thing the next morning. I had one last score to settle though. The week before we had made a lasagne and left half of it, labelled, in our bag, in the fridge to have for lunch at work the next day. When we came down in the morning, half of that had disappeared. A couple of days later, the same thing happened with a bread and butter pudding I’d made. I decided that if someone really had to have our leftovers, I might leave a little surprise in there for them. So, a Friday night trip to the chemists was made and, a couple of hours later, a delicious laxative-laden bread and butter pudding was lovingly left in the fridge, labelled exactly the same as the one before and left in the same spot. You can only begin to imagine my disappointment when we came down the next morning to find that the hostel mouse had decided to just take a spoonful on this occasion.
Angela was pretty excited about the main attraction at Monkey Mia; wild dolphins that came to the beach every morning for a bit of showing off and half a bucket of fish. Apparently it all began one evening 40 years ago with a fisherman’s wife throwing the scraps of her husband’s catch to a pod of dolphins she saw nearby. The dolphins re-appeared the next day and they’ve been coming back almost every day ever since.
We arrived in Coral Bay in the early evening and checked in to our hostel. Coral Bay is a town built around a bay, with it’s main attraction being-- you guessed it-- a coral reef. It has the Ningaloo reef (the world’s largest fringing reef, as far as I can remember) on its doorstep. That evening, we booked into a glass bottom boat/snorkelling tour of the reef for the following day. We picked up our flippers and masks before getting on the boat and then set off. The water was a bit murky, but we still had a good view of the coral.
While returning our snorkelling gear, we signed up for a kayak/snorkel trip for the next day. We were both pretty excited about this trip, because we thought it would make us proper adventurers. Our kayaking started in the afternoon, so we decided to try to make it to Turquoise Bay in the morning. The bay turned out to be further away than we’d anticipated and we had to turn back before even reaching it in order to make it to the kayaking on time. It turned out to be a 300 km detour in the end.
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