Fremantle to Albany

Fremantle to Albany
Friday, June 0, 2008
Because Friday was to be our last full day in Fremantle, we had intended to go to Perth for the day but Randy has been sick with a bad cold so we decided to just stay in Freo and wander around after breakfast and have an early dinner as well.
Although we went to the WA Maritime Museum, we hadn’t been to the Maritime Museum Shipwreck Galleries so off we went on the CAT bus. The Shipwreck Galleries are about—surprise, surprise—shipwrecks! The coast of southwest Australia is notoriously dangerous. One man said it was the brick on the doorstep of Australia, just waiting to trip someone up.
It was a beautiful day to wander in Freo and too beautiful to stay inside the Museum very long but it is a fascinating place. They had, among other things nautically disastrous, a video on raising an old engine from a wreck. You wouldn’t think that was very interesting but watching them take apart a piece of machinery that wasn’t even recognizable as an engine to me and put it together, believing it will actually run one of these days, was pretty exciting.
We walked around the park that is just outside the Galleries and across from the harbor enjoying the birds cavorting around. There are some particularly obnoxious-sounding ravens called, logically enough, Australian ravens, who sound like wounded sheep. And they are everywhere in Freo. I hope they are not everywhere in the rest of the Australian continent that we are visiting.
Anyway, it was lunchtime and lunch in a fish-and-chips restaurant in the harbor was a must. Kaili’s Fish & Chips is, according to several people, the best in Fremantle.Kaili’s sells fish and pearls. Interesting.
Saying they are the best fish & chips is not saying much in a town of 25,500, but is was good. However, for a town of 25,500 the bus service is spectacular. There are about 15 bus routes, counting the CAT bus (all the others have a charge but I don’t know what it is as the CAT bus was more than sufficient for our needs), and when we would sit at a sidewalk café and people watch, there seemed to be a bus every few minutes. It does make me wonder why Tucson can’t have an equally busy bus schedule, considering it has a MUCH larger population.
The harbor of Fremantle is extremely busy (it’s the harbor for Perth) and there are oodles of large, luxurious yachts in the harbor as well as all the working boats.
Dinner was outdoors (even though it’s winter here, the temperatures have been great and anyway they have those wonderful outdoor heaters!) at an Indian restaurant. We started at a restaurant on the harbor called Char Char Bull’s (who knows what that means) but they ignored us so long that we left. The prices in Australia, whether at a fish and chips stand or a nice sit-down restaurant with linen table cloths (we haven’t found one that has linen napkins as well), are close to unbelievable. $A16 (which is so close to equal to American dollars that I’m not even going to bother writing $A anymore) for a burger and chips (what we call French fries); $35-40 for a small steak; $23 for fish. Plus you pay for bread brought to the table or coffee or dessert or entrees (appetizers are “entrees”, what we would call the entre or main course is called “mains”) or pretty much anything except perhaps tap water. This is becoming a very expensive vacation. I can’t wait to fill up the car or the campervan we’ve rented. Petrol (gasoline) is $1.619 per LITER! As a rough guide, 4 liters to a gallon (not quite, but close enough) means petrol is about $6.25 a gallon. And we think it’s bad in the US! Plus we just heard today that oil went up $11 in a week. The Aussies figure every dollar up means about .10 per gallon up at the pump. Ouch. It could be worse, it’s over $9 per gallon in England.


Saturday, June 7, 2008
A leisurely morning of packing (Randy is such a great packer!!!) was followed by a trip to the Fremantle Market to buy fruits and veggies for our timeshare. Then the great adventure of driving the 250 or so kilometers to Busselton on the left side of the road.
Finally found the timeshare and it’s pretty nice although sparsely furnished. It’s a 2-bedroom unit and has a kitchen and 2 bathrooms. The bedrooms have a bed, nothing else. The closet has 2 drawers, that’s all. The living/dining/kitchen has 2 sofas, 1 chair, 1 coffee table, 1 dining table, 4 chairs. That’s it. Well, there is a TV. The kitchen also has bare minimum, the usual knives, forks, and spoons and 1 frying pan, 2 pots, and a couple of glass bowls we could use in the microwave. Not on the level of timeshares in the US but the location is fanatastic, very close to the Margaret River wine country so I can’t complain too much!
Sunday, June 08, 2008
The bed in the timeshare is very comfortable but I have now come down with whatever Randy has. He is feeling better—and therefore able to take care of me!
We went out to Naturaliste Cape National Park and took a short hike out on one of the trails almost to the tip of the cape and had our lunch in the shelter that was there. Well, we got to the shelter and the wind was blowing about 40 kph so we ducked behind some bushes to eat. What I thought was going to be a beautiful, romantic lunch was just a quickie. Too bad.
The cape is beautiful, though! We should be able to see whales migrating but didn’t see any today. Further south at Augusta we might.
Monday, June 09, 2008
I am not feeling well and so today was a stay-in-the-timeshare-and-vege-out day. Because of that we watched a lot of television. In Australia that means that you watch a lot of sports. They have sports here that I’ve never heard of and LOTS of other sports that are covered ad nauseum—however, to a sport fan this is probably nirvana. In the US the newspaper’s last three to five pages MAYBE are sports—Here the sports coverage is at least half the paper. There is tennis and cricket of course (we have yet to understand THAT sport), and Rugby Union and Rugby League (yes, those two are different but I haven’t a clue how. All I know is that they are really macho guys dressed in almost nothing tossing and kicking a ball around), and Aussie Rules Football (also wearing almost nothing— no wonder they think our football players are wimps!), and soccer, of course. Not to mention the occasional American sport like hockey and baseball.
Then there is the sport we watched tonight.
We think it is called Netball but nothing is certain in Australia. It looks a lot like basketball but there is no backboard behind the net—it’s just a net on a pole—and the players apparently cannot dribble the ball, it must be passed from one to another. The other weird thing? This is the first game I have ever seen where an INDOOR game was called on account of weather. Rain to be specific. Apparently the stadium leaks and it was pouring cats and dogs and therefore leaking onto the netball floor. Every few minutes play would stop so the towel people could come out on the floor and wipe up. At first we thought it was just the normal wiping-up-sweat towelling of the floor. But the poor women who were covering the match (a national championship, no less) kept having to talk and talk and talk (no comments about women’s talkativeness, please) and finally they told us that the game which was 33-16 had been called and the score would be shown as a tie!!! How would you like to be the team on the 33 side of that score?
We were watching TV because I was not feeling well but also because it was raining cats and dogs (see above). When we watched the local news we saw that there was a rather bad tornado in Rockingham, about 150km north of here. I am so glad that the first 10 days we were here was so nice!
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
The weather is a bit better and so am I so we’ll go out and do a bit of wine tasting. Probably tomorrow we’ll go do the Treetop Walk outside Albany.
Tasted several wines, all reds, and bought a couple. To ship a case to the US is $250. That is mitigated by not having to pay the GST of about 25%. Whoopee. That means we’d have to pay $1000 a case to make up the cost of shipping. I hope I can convice Randy that the wine here isn’t worth it.
We went to Jindalup Fauna Park, a “mom-and-pop” zoo. The woman who greeted us is quintessential Australian friendly; we must have chatted with her for 15 minutes before starting around the “fauna park.” There were kangaroos just wandering around the grounds. Well, really they were just lying around doing nothing. Except for the ‘roo that was in the reptile/fish house just lying around. We let it out and it seemed very happy as it hopped quickly out from the dark reptile area to the bright, light outdoors!
They also had a bunch of caged birds and quokkas (a marsupial that we were supposed to see a lot of on Rottnest Island) and rabbits and a “butterfly house.” The butterfly house was more properly a lizard/crocodile/butterfly house, certainly an interesting combination. But they do all like warmth!
After that we went to the Eagle Rest Bird Rescue to watch their 1:30pm version of “free flight.” Their “free flight” is a bunch of wild black kites who realize that free food is available every day at 1:30. They also bring out a bird on the fist and allow the audience, including children (while we were there) as young as about 5 to also hold them on their fist. The bird today was a “barking owl” and it truly did sound like a barking dog. It was absolutely uncanny! When we walked by the cage, we kept looking for the (rather annoying, in fact!) small dog. They apparently don’t start “barking” until they are about 4 years old—the bird on the fist was only 3 and the handler said she occasionally “woofs” but doesn’t yet “bark.”
I have to say I was disappointed in the “show” but glad someone is trying to rescue birds of prey here in Australia. Their primary focus is the Wedge-Tailed Eagle, a sub-species of which they say is the most endangered eagle in the world. The Tasmanian sub-species has 40 individuals left in the wild and yet Tasmania still—technically—offers hunting permits for the bird! Tasmania says it will never actually give out the permits, but just the fact that a permit to hunt the most endangered eagle in the world is on the books is appalling.
By now we were very hungry and ate at a pub in Margaret River. But it was 3pm so that kind of killed dinner appetites!
My cold is getting worse, my nose is stuffy, I have a sore throat, and I’m coughing. And it’s raining again. I’m having so much fun.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Still sick but feeling better so we headed off for a day of wine tasting and doing touristy things.
First off, we went, reluctantly, to a sheep-shearing demonstration at the Shearing Shed in Yallingup. I love these names—if I can pronounce them! Although we were reluctant initially, it was a wonderful experience, up-close and personal as they used to say for the Olympics. Very interactive, the guy doing the demonstration had one visitor climb up and tromp on the wool (kind of the way they used to press grapes) to compress it into the bales; he had some of us feeding the lambs; and some sweeping up the wool—which, lest you think that a menial job, is an entry level position for teenagers that pays $170/week! He didn’t let anyone attempt to shear the sheep, however. I would have volunteered!
After the sheep-shearing demo we got to watch the sheep dogs working. He has 3 Border Collies (16 years old, 9 years old, and 3 years old) and 3 similar aged Australian Kelties (or Kelpies?), a cross between a dingo and a border collie. The border collie goes out and herds the sheep back to the shed and once they are back at the shed in a small corral, the Keltie walks over their backs. Yes, walks over their backs. I never got a good explanation as to why this is a good thing, but he said that if he didn’t have the Keltie, he would have to have a jillaroo or a jackaroo (girls or boys) helping out. Some things non-Australians are destined to never understand.
As a souvenir, he gave anyone who asked a sample of the wool. I wasn’t going to take any but he explained how great raw wool is when you are hiking and get a blister! The fibers are naturally about 4 inches long and have lots of naturally-occurring oils to cushion your incipient blister. He told me that when I went on my tour, to ration the wool because everyone would want some! We’ll see.
The wool certainly feels different, very greasy/sticky, sort of. Like you had put lotion on your hands before it’s absorbed. I think it is lanolin in the sheep wool and I believe that sheep-shearers have very smooth and soft hands because of the lanolin in the raw wool. There are still full-time sheep-shearers; they are itinerant and if they’re good, they keep coming back to the same sheep farms year after year. one has been shearing for the Butterlys, the Shearing Shed family,, for 28 years. A sheep-shearer, since the advent of electric shearing, can shear 150 sheep a day at $3 per sheep. Before electric shearing, only 50 per day. The stomper of wool would make $200 a day but now they have a machine (but only for the last 20 years, before that, the only way to compress the wool into the bales was by foot stomping).
We’ve been to a few wineries so far and usually we are the only ones there; I suppose it’s because it’s winter and it’s the off season. That will change when we go north where it WILL be the season, especially when school holidays start. Luckily, shortly after the fall/winter (hard to believe it’s winter!) school holidays start in WA (Western Australia) on July 5, we will start on our “swag” (camping) trip and all our stops are pre-arranged.
The weather has been cool (it IS winter!), with highs about 20°C (68°F—I am able to remember the celsius equivalents by just remembering that 59=15 and every 5°C=9°F so 20°C is 68°F, 25°C is 77°F and so on); by the time we get to Darwin and Broome and Alice the highs will be 33°C, quite a bit warmer!
Anyway, the rest of the day was wine tasting and a walk on the longest timber jetting in the Southern Hemisphere! The jetty is apparently a BIG tourist draw (after all, we felt WE had to walk the 2 kilometers out to the end!). Busselton is very proud of their jetty and it is a walk that is so long that a rain squall passed between us and the shore while we were out there.
Because we had such a hard day, we had to stop at a pub for another Aussie beer. Randy had a draft VB and I had a Carleton. I hate to tell my son and son-in-law, but I liked the Carleton draft better.
We finally filled the car with petrol. The good news is that the petrol pumps are very fast. The bad news is that Randy made the mistake of timing the fuel pump—$1 per second! Yes, $1 PER SECOND. Our car is quite economical, about 40mpg. $1/sec is for petrol, not diesel. Diesel will be even worse. The fill-up was $88. Ouch. We have another 2 months of driving. Double diesel ouch.
Dinner wine was Watershed Shiraz 2004. Fabulous! Tomorrow we are off to Albany (pronounce AL-ba-nee not ALL-ba-nee. We were corrected.)
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Today we drove about 400k to Albany (remember the correct pronunciation!). Really we came here because we want to walk in the treetops but the weather is (still) crappy but supposed to be less so tomorrow, so we’re staying in huge luxury in Albany. We were just looking for a B&B and got a house. A 3 bedroom house with dining room, kitchen, living room, family room, a garden patio, the works. I feel as if I am back in the 1950s, however. The house reminds me of my grandmother’s house in Alameda, California, where I lived in the 1940s and revisited in the 1960s. Anyway, it is very comfortable and we could have a huge party here if we wanted to. Too bad we don’t know anyone!
The day started looking great, sunny, a few low fair-weather-Q, but rapidly deteriorated and we spent most of the day driving in intermittent rain. It cleared a bit when we had lunch at a rest stop outside the information center in Walpole, WA. Walpole is just shortly before the Tree Top Walk but the weather was so bad and forecast to be better tomorrow so we went on to Albany.
As I said, we drove over 400k—in all those kilometers we passed 3 cars and 2 trucks going our direction. Just in case you didn’t realize how lonely it can be out here. And this is the populated area of southwestern Australia!
The Visitor Information places here are so wonderful! They are, unlike our Tucson Visitor Center, a one-stop help place. In Tucson we will give you brochures and tell you about great restaurants and hotels; here (and apparently in every Visitor Information Center in Australia) they will actually call the hotels/B&B/restaurant/whatever and not only get you a reservation but you pay for it at the Visitor Center so you don’t have to do anything else.
In our case, we went to the Albany Visitor Center and she called several places and bargained with one guest house to get us the best room (room? We have a whole house!). It was all paid for there so we could go about doing what we wanted to do which was see the whaling museum without worrying about getting to the hotel to pay for our room.
So, off the the whaling museum. As an aside, several museums in Australia that we have seen so far change their logo that includes the word “Museum”—notably the Australian Maritime Museum—so that the letters ‘use’ in Museum are highlighted as if with a magnifying glass. I think it’s quite creative.
The whaling museum is gross. There is no way around it, killing and “flensing” (skinning) whales is gross. There are color pictures, there are movies, there are highly creative uses of holograms in explaining the whaling life. But it’s gross. Our guide even said that she had worked with offal in an abattoir and the whaling station was worse. She is the same age as Greg, my son, and her 3rd grade trip in 1978 (the Albany whaling station closed in late 1978) was to the whaling station to see what they did and she said she still remembers the stench. But, she said, it didn’t make her into a vegetarian.