Assignments, beer, dolphins, kangaroos, sharks, shooting stars.. It can only all happen in Australia!

G’day all,

After two intense days at uni consisting of 8hours in the library and two heated debates in separate history tutorials (one about Gandhi and the other about Idi Amin), I felt that the best way to wind down other than having a few beers is to write an update to my blog. I’ve just realised that I haven’t posted a blog about my ‘adventures’ for over 3weeks so this one might be fairly long, sorry!

The day after the previous blog entry (30th August) I had been at home all morning working and I think Dilip uncle and Ina aunty were a bit bored so they suggested going for a drink at the local marina. We went for what was meant to be just one drink but it ended up being 5pints on a Sunday afternoon! After this Sunday session we went out for a very average Indian meal in the evening and then I got a relatively early night.

I won’t bore you with the details of the next few days, because they just consisted of the usual routine of going to uni and my new favourite place, the library!!! Over the past 6weeks, I’ve spent so much time in the library, it’s becoming like a second home to me. However, apparently hours in the library wasn’t so good for my health because I began to get pretty ill and I was struggling to be fit (I make it sound like a football match) for my mid-semester exam on Friday (4th September). I thought the exam went awfully because it was so hard and it didn’t help that I was ill, but I got the results this week and I did much better than I thought! The day after my exam i was feeling pretty terrible so I went to the doctor and was told I had a chest and ear infection and could have got out of the exam the previous day had I seen the doctor before hand, that will teach me not to try and be a soldier all the time! Anyway, this meant I was on antibiotics (again) and that I couldn’t go on my Geography field trip, what a shame... Or not!

I spent most of the next week (it was our reading week) trying to shake off the chest infection while getting work done at the same time. By Thursday (10th September), I was sick of being in the house so being asked to go on an excursion to a place called Rockingham by a few mates seemed like the perfect remedy! Unfortunately, the day turned out to be epically bad... Rockingham is one of the worst places I’ve ever been to, don’t be fooled by the cool name, it’s Bogan (the Australian equivalent of chavs) central and there were people on the bus drunk by 11am! There was a reason we went to Rockingham, it was to see penguins with Mohicans. I’m sure you’re all wondering what on Earth a penguin with a Mohican is and I wish I could tell you but they decided to extend the penguin breeding season by a few days meaning we went all the way to Rockingham and couldn’t even go to Penguin Island!

So after this disappointment, we headed out of Rockingham and back to Perth city centre to try and find something to do. The weather in Perth was extremely miserable and we quickly discovered that there’s nothing to do in Perth when the sun isn’t shining. We ended up sitting in a travel agency for an hour and a half and the three of us came out extremely depressed realising how little time and money we have to travel considering how much there is to do in this amazing country!

I felt that I had had such an unproductive day so before heading home I decided to go for a haircut because Beni and Ina aunty had been pestering me to get it cut pretty much since I got to Australia. I should have known that it wasn’t the right day to get my haircut considering what bad luck I was having but once again I decided to be a soldier and it backfired on me, big time! I went into the hairdressers with hair reaching my shoulders (yes, it had got that long) and I came out with hair that barely reached my ears all because the woman was more interested in my “lovely London” accent than cutting my hair.

On the following Saturday (12th September), I went with Ina aunty to one of her friend’s house. The house was amazing, maybe a little too big for my liking but it had an indoor swimming pool, gym, sauna, pool table, table-tennis table and a 60inch TV screen in the TV room! We watched the film ‘Million Dollar Baby’, I saw it a few years back on the aeroplane either to Canada or USA but I had forgotten how good it was! After the film, I managed to watch my first bit of life football of the season, but unfortunately it was watching two teams that I really don’t like, well actually I hate one of them (Arsenal) and the other I don’t regard as a football team anymore, they’re more of a fantasy football team (Man City). Having said the match was incredible and it’s always good to watch Arsenal get beaten regardless of who is beating them!

The next week at uni wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, just lectures, tutorials and hours in the library including a 5hour stint on Tuesday (15th September)! The only thing that kept me going all week was knowing that I was going away with some mates for the weekend!

Finally Friday (18th September) arrived which meant my road trip up North to a place called Monkey Mia. I had a very early start to my day as I had to be in Perth city centre by 6.30am which meant leaving the house at 5.40am! I got to Perth only to find out that the bus wouldn’t actually leave until 7.30am, which meant I could have had an hour or so more sleep!
An hour later, we met our driver (Murray) who was a really nice guy and we embarked on our journey. There was 11people on our mini bus plus the driver. Our group made up 6 (5 girls and myself) of the 11 and in addition to the 6 of us there were four Japanese people and one Italian woman. We drove for about an hour and a half before stopping at a petrol station for a chance to get some snacks and a quick toilet break. This doesn’t sound very exciting at all but when we got back on the minibus, it wouldn’t start so we had to push start it. That was a great way to start the trip and was a little exciting but would prove to be very annoying the next time(s) it happened!

After about an hour of driving we made it to our first real stop, the Pinnacles. The best way to describe the Pinnacles is a clustering of rocks randomly sticking out of the ground. Similarly to Stone Henge, nobody is actually sure how these rocks got there but there are many Aboriginal stories of how they got there, including that they are actually people who have been turned into stone. I doubt very much that that is the case but what I have no doubt about is how beautiful the Pinnacles are and that the mystery of how they got there makes the place all the more interesting!

After half an hour of climbing on rocks and taking silly pictures, I guess that was bound to happen going away with5 girls, we got back onto the bus to head to our next stop. Less than 15minutes into our journey, the bus broke down again so we had to push start it again! This time the novelty had worn off and I was beginning to feel like James May from Top Gear with all these problems with our mini bus! We got the bus running again but none of the electrics worked, so no AC, no radio and no speedometers, so our driver pulled over and called back to the place where we had left from. They told him to wait on the side of the road and they would send a new bus, what they didn’t tell us was that it would take 3hours for this bus to come! We waited on the side of the road for 3hours having a picnic and sharing useless knowledge with each other to pass the time.

When the new bus finally arrived, it was too late to do any of our scheduled activities so we headed straight to a town called Kalbari where we would spend the night. As the tour company felt bad for the inconvenience of the bus breaking down, they decided to buy us Dominos Pizza for dinner, my eyes lit up at the thought of Dominos, but I was extremely disappointed with it and it’s nothing like Dominos in England! We arrived at the hostel and had a few drinks before hitting the sack!

The next day was another early start but I was quite excited about the day ahead. My excitement was temporarily brought to an end because our new bus wouldn’t start in the morning! It turned out that Murray had left something on in the bus and after a jump start we were on our way and had no more trouble with the Minibuses for the rest of the trip! Our first stop of the day was at a gorge called Z-bend gorge. From its name you can tell what it looked like, but the view was truly magnificent! It seemed like a (much) smaller version of the Grand Canyon but in my opinion much more beautiful! At the gorge we were offered a chance to abseil down a 30foot cliff face! Only two of us ended up doing it and I was so glad that I was one of them! I’ve abseiled before but when I was about 10years old and it was off a climbing wall at Cub camp not a 30ft cliff face! The hardest part of abseiling is the beginning bit when you have to lean back over the edge of the cliff as if you’re about to lie down on an imaginary bed. Once you have overcome the fear of lying more or less flat 30ft above the ground, it’s pretty easy! It was an awesome experience and I would love to do it again from a greater height!

After the gorge we headed on to our next stop which wasn’t far away. We stopped at a place called Natures Window, which we were told was a ‘hole in some rocks’. I didn’t see the point of going to see ‘a hole in some rocks’, that was until I got there. It wasn’t just a hole, it was really a massive window and the view through it was absolutely stunning! I think the hole had been formed by a combination of weathering and erosional processes but I won’t go into the geographical details because I’m sure you’ve got better things to do with your time!

From Natures Window, we headed off for a barbeque lunch and to see stromatolites. Stromatolites were the most important thing on this planet for the start of mankind. The Stromatolites are rocks in the sea, but they’ve been around for billions of years and it was their chemical reaction with water that produced enough oxygen for the first living organisms to survive and billions of years later, human beings inhabited the Earth all thanks to these Stromatolites which can only be found in Western Australia and somewhere in South America. Unfortunately, when we got there the tide was too low to be able to see the rocks actually produce the oxygen but it was a surreal experience none the less!

We got back onto the minibus and headed to Monkey Mia where we would spend the night. We had another barbeque in the evening, but this was not as good as the one at lunch, because the meat and vegetarian food was being cooked on the same barbeque. I told Murray that I didn’t like what he was doing, but considering there was no other food, i had to go against my principles and eat it. After dinner, we had some drinks and we were joined by a very drunk group of guys from the UK (2 Irish guys, 1 Scottish guy and 2 guys from Hull). They were a group of friends but because they were so drunk spent the whole time arguing about absolutely nothing, it made me realise that that is the exact reason that a British football team would never work! It was very amusing for us to watch, but being a proud Brit, I was cringing the whole time!

The next day (20th September), we got up extra early and went to the beach at about 7am. You may think that it’s a pretty weird thing to do so early in the morning but every morning between 7 and 8.30 at Monkey Mia, dolphins come right up to the beach to be fed! We were some of the first people there, shows how keen we were to see the dolphins, and the dolphins came a few minutes later. They were literally swimming inches in front of us but unfortunately we’re not allowed to touch them. Some people that work at Monkey Mia picked out people to feed the dolphins but unfortunately none of us were lucky enough to interact with these incredible creatures!

After seeing the dolphins, we had breakfast and then set off for another day on the road. We stopped at a place called Ocean Reef Park. It’s basically an outdoor aquarium but the fish that are there have either been caught by mistake by fisher men or were injured in some way in the wild, so they’re nursed back to health and then released into the wild. We were lucky enough to see a shark feeding show but the rest I felt I had seen loads of times before, although turtles still fascinate me! We moved on from here and made a short drive to a place called Eagles Bluff. It’s just a lookout point into the sea, but from this point you can see sharks and stingrays despite being so high up, I guess that gives you an idea of just how clear the water is! It was so windy up there, I could pretty much do the MJ leaning forward dance from the smooth criminal, that we couldn’t stay for long.

From Eagles Bluff, we went onto a place called Shell Beach. The whole beach is made out of shells and it’s just absolutely beautiful. The tide was so low, that you could walk about 20metres out to sea and the water would barely reach your knees. However the water that was there was so clear, it looked like it could have come straight out of the tap. We spent quite a while on shell beach before heading off to the 140acre farm where we would be spending the night.

We got to the farm and had a ‘homemade’ dinner. It was a very strange experience because we ate dinner in what used to be a sheep shearing barn house and they still had all the equipment used to sheer all the sheep in the barn. After dinner, we were taken out into the farm by the owner of the farm and Murray. They drove us to an outdoor observation point and we were told to look up in the sky. I wish I could describe to you what I saw but no words will do justice to just how beautiful the sky was. With just the naked eye, I could see hundreds possibly thousands of stars in the sky and it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. We were out there only for half an hour but I could have spent hours gazing at stars. In the half an hour we were there, I saw three shooting-stars and considering I had never seen one in my life before then, it was a pretty special moment and something I will treasure for the rest of my life. Following this incredible experience, we had a camp fire and some beers. Once again I found myself engaging in conversation about African politics, it was only stopped by the farm owner telling me that “the England cricket team are the biggest cheats and the most arrogant cricket team in the world”. I told him that we didn’t deserve to win the Ashes, because the Aussies played the better cricket but the Aussies have no right to call any team cheats or arrogant!

The following morning (21st September), I had another special moment; I saw my first living kangaroo (I had seen a lot of dead ones on the side of the road) in Australia and got to feed him! From the farm we went to a place called Hutt River Province. This is effectively a country within Australia set up by a guy called Prince Leonard because he didn’t like some taxes that the Australian government had imposed in the 1970s. It was quite a strange experience but the prince was a really funny guy and very proud that his ‘country’ is one of the few provinces that is recognized worldwide. If you’re a citizen of Hutt River Province and have their passport, it is accepted by most passport controls around the world!

We went from here to some sand dunes near a beautiful beach. We were making up for missing out on sand boarding on the first day because of the issues with the bus. Sand boarding was pretty fun even though we weren’t allowed to stand on the boards because these weren’t the boards that you can lock your feet into. After this experience, I definitely want to try sand surfing as well as real surfing where you actually get to stand on the board.

Our final stop of the trip before heading back to Perth was a wildlife park. Similarly to Ocean Reef Park, they take in injured animals and nurse them back to health before releasing some of them back into the wild. We got to see loads of kangaroos and feed them, Dingoes, a crocodile, some very strange birds and many other creatures. We had lunch here and after lunch there was a snake handling session. I saw one of the snakes and walked away from it all, a bit of a de ja vu from when I was four years old and ran away on a school trip to Whipsonade zoo when they brought out a snake, except this time there was no running (just swift walking) and no tears (just a lot of fear). From this wildlife reserve we headed back to Perth, the road trip was over.

I had an absolutely amazing time on the road trip, saw and did some amazing things and met some wonderful people. I was already very fond of Australia before this weekend, but now I can quite happily say that I love this country and I cannot wait until I go on my travels in six weeks time! As you can imagine, going back to uni to the reality of assignments and lectures was pretty difficult over the past two days, but I’ve just got four more teaching weeks and then a week of exams before freedom for almost 3months!

I hope all is well in England,
Until next time,
Lots of love,
Mihir