Dodging showers

Showers today, the one day I ride to the station. Managed to dodge the showers, but the gray skies and autumn colours made for some nice contrasts.

Brisk walks

Went for a "nice brisk walk" this lunch time. Co opted some friends to come see the oldest building in Perth. Wholly underwhelming, but there it is, just a little yellow box, next to the supreme courts. I guess you don't have to be big to be historic. My companions were Sim, Harry and Jason. We finished the little tour off along the river front. I was there on Monday and it was calm, and full of little jelly fish and small schools of puffer fish. Choppy to day though, but sunny none the less.

Smelly trees

I came out of the train station yesterday, and was unlocking my bike when I caught the scent of burning paper. At least that was what my nose thought. It was a pleasant smell, but sometimes smells come through wrong. You can be smelling something and thinking to yourself, "that's candyfloss" but there is something about it doesn't sit right. It feels a little skewed, makes you a little dizzy. It's a bit like looking at one of those optical illusions where you have to focus past the plane of the image to see the 3 dimensional picture and your eyes feel like they straining to see something that you can't quite resolve. Suffice to say it wasn't burnt paper. It wasn't until the next morning I realised what the smell was. I was riding past a stand of tall eucalyptus. The morning air is usually fresh and relatively still, and it was full of the scent of these gum trees. But this isn't the astringent, nasal smell I would have associated with eucalyptus oil. In no way did this reminded me of blocked noses and steam baths. This was rich, warm and spicey. It had a food like quality, as though it were more like the smell of something you would drink warm from a flask. I've recently begun riding to the train station. The heat has moved out of the morning air and riding somewhere doesn't seem like such a chore. The mere thought of it earlier in the summer could bring on a sticky vaneer of sweat. The suburbs around me are very green, with a large number of cycle routes linking paths and cul-de-sacs. Riding through the pockets of scent emphasizes the effect of smells on mood. I'm not an advocate of aroma therapy. The whole "smell to get well" movement seems to me to be another example of smartly marketed placebo. However, come Monday, there is no denying the marked difference in my disposition after riding the bus, with it's associate cocktail of perfumes and colognes, compared with riding my bike and the warm aromatics of the gums.

Celebrations and speciation.

Australia day.
On the 26th of January, after a hot steamy Saturday, we followed our neighbours to the southern foreshore of the Swan river just in the curve of Waylen Bay

From there we got a somewhat distant but definitely panoramic view of the incredible fireworks display that Perth put on for Australia day. It went on for half an hour! Resources are concentrated on the Australia Day display, the New Year display having much less spent on it. Understandably so, when Sydney spends so much on it.

Australia Day is celebrated on the day in 1788 that Captain Arthur Phillip founded a British penal colony at Sydney Cove at Port Jackson, New South Wales, (thanks Wikipedia). Actually that article has some really interesting stuff to say about Australia Day, like the fact that some Aboriginals call it "Invasion Day". You can see their point!

Bio-diversity hotspot.
I've been listening recently to a lot of podcasts produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I learnt from one called "The Science Show" (another fine example of Aussie literalism), that Western Australia is a bio-diversity hot spot. Large areas of the bush are made up of a dense patchwork of different habitats. If you walk through them, they change every 100 or so yards. This is unusual since you usually find this in areas where habitats have been subject to a lot of stress. For example the rainforests where the comings and goings of the climate have alternately shrunk down the forest to isolated islands, (allowing for periods of speciation) and then expansion of those islands, so the species that were once common are now significantly different to be sexually incompatible. But Australia has been geologically and glacially dormant for thousands and thousands of years.

Apparently, the cause is the impoverished soils. There have been no new soils spewed out from volcanoes nor glacial till left behind by grinding glaciers. And weathering has exposed and eroded down deep mineral reserves in such concentrations as to make the soil positively poisonous. But plant life has been here so long, it has had time to adapt. And part of that adaptation strategy is, when you drop your seed, you drop it close to Mum! The chances are if you spread your babies far away, they will fail to compete with some other species that is already well and truly settled and adapted to that area. Best stick with the parent in the neighbourhood that they have already made their home in. Which results in this dense and very varied patchwork of diverse species!

So when you hear on the news next, that Australian men and woman are staying at home until their mid-thirties, you will appreciate that this is just what Aussie species have been doing for millenia, and is just an adaptation to some seriously harsh environments.

Catching up.

Rottnest 17th Nov

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We spent a great weekend on Rottnest Island, which is about 11 km off the coast of Perth. It's a small island, no cars, you just hire bikes to get about. Sujata hasn't been on a bike for sometime, but her apprehension evaporated once we got going. There are really good roads and without cars to worry about we struck out manfully on Saturday night and rode at least one and a half kilometers (phew!) to Geordie Bay.

The beaches are sublime, just like every where in Western Australia. In fact it's very hard to find a beach that doesn't appeal anywhere in or around Perth. Then we returned via The Basin to the main settlement called Thompson Bay. We ate in The Lodge Hotel, which hosted a magnificent Thai buffet. The food was fantastic, full of great Thai flavours. For $40 a head we ate like puppies. The Lodge was nicer than the Quokka Arms where we stayed. The Arms were ok, the rooms comfortable and well supplied, but the Lodge was more restful and less funtional. The Arms also managed to forget about both our lunch and breakfast.

Thompson Bay, a very small collection of cafes, restaurants, shops and facilities is the main settlement. For the number of people that come to Rottnest, the place is amazingly quiet. Walk 200m out of town in any direction and all you have is quiet rolling bush on ancient sand dunes, the wind and the sky. In the middle the land is flat with 4 or 5 shallow lakes. The island used prison labour (mostly black) to run a roaring trade in salt from the lakes. History is kept very alive by dedicated teams of volunteers who man a musuem and run free walking tours.

We saw rays in the harbour, dugite snakes (7th most poisonous) long black things but not interested in us at all, a sea eagle and many, many quokkas. Quokkas are little wallaby type things with rat like tails. They have a very dozy expression and wander about the bush and the town in equal measure. It is as though they are stoned, and everywhere seems like everywhere else to them. Entirely unconcerned by people, one actually saught us out for a stroke whilst we were cycling.

Sunday we cycled down the east and south coast about half way across the island and looped around through the middle back to Thompson Bay again. We took in Salmon Bay which really is a fantastic looking stretch of surf. Kira and Raya shared a trailer on the back of my bike. Kira loved the chance to take in the countryside. Raya slept, still at the age where the nomad genes in us turn on and say "we're moving, boring, go to sleep".


Whale watching 4th November

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We really did see some humpbacks fluking (sticking their blowholes out to breath and then bringing their tail flukes out of the water and arching them through the air). But they were some way off the boat and judging scale in the water with nothing for comparison is difficult. It was also frustrating to be unable to get closer, I mean without the 40 tons of metal we were bobbing about on. To be able to swim up to one of these elephants in the sea would be a lifetime experience. But we were tantalzed with their tails, waving effortless "goodbye", whilst straining for another glimpse aound the shoulders of others. We'll plan do to it again on a better boat. The Rottnest Express is quick for getting to the island, but not the best design for unhindered sea staring activities. Great day out though, the kids romped about on the boat, the weather was ... (have a guess). And we poked around D-shed in Freemantle Harbour afterwards in the market and cafes.

OOOO H-H-Hot

Someone turned the sun a couple of bars over the weekend! 31°C on Sat, 36°C on Sun and 39°C today! And it's that hot holiday abroad heat, where the only action that makes sense it to fall over on to a soft surface, outside in the shade, near water with a beer. We have no pool, but a surfeit of friendly neighbours and well met mums from Raya's playgroups and a huge public baths just 2 minutes walk.

Our furniture arrived last month and the house lost its "Holiday Home" air. Getting our mattress was strange. Lying on it for the first night, we were both taken straight back to our bedroom in Kingston. Our bodies remembered the feel of the mattress. The physical memory of our old bed was there.

Suji had our first encounter with a Redback today. It dropped off the roof on to the washing line. She dutifully took a rather shaky photo of it, and then sprayed the bejeezus out of it with kil-o-bug.

12th August I can see for miles and miles and miles and ...

I know everyone says it, and I know it's stating the obvious, but this country is so big! We drove out to Wave Rock this weekend. It's 350 kilometers east of Perth, in the Wheat Belt. We split the journy over Friday night. It had been raining all Friday, articulated lorries overtaking at over 110 kph!

Friday night in Merriden. An old bank that had been converted to a bed and breakfast, newly opened 10 days ago. Built in 1930 and full of very carefully selected stuff. The towns seem quiet, the streets wide and the shop fronts with period facades.

Another 2 hours along perpendicular roads that run so straight, the only thing that breaks them up is the crest of the hills. On each side, to the horizon, is young, green wheat. Very similar to rural England, except the hedged boundaries are 5 or 10 kilometres away. Many of the fields have sheep scattered about. Saw no live kangaroos, just two victims by the road.

Spent Saturday night on the site of Wave Rock in a cabin. Saturday evening we walked around the 'Wave' and up onto the top. The wave really does feels like its about to crash onto the beach. The curves capture the movement of a breaker, so much so it seems intentional, carved.

The sides of the out crop aren't steep. From the top of the granite basolith you can see from horizon to horizon. It's only when confronted with the view, that the scale of things sank in. The horizon behind appears thousands of miles away, and the horizon in front seems just as far. All green wheat fields, dotted hedges, trees, small areas of scrub. In the massive dome of the sky, clouds are moving, one or two drag a grey smudge of rain below them. No mountains, no valleys, no real features. Just acre after acre of rolling countryside, truly massive.

The night is cold. Sunday morning was a struggle to heat up the inside of the cabin. But after breakfast and a scramble in and around the Hippo's Yawn we set off down the country roads back to Perth. York was a good place to break the journey. It had a sense of history with Victorian facades in the main street. It also had people wandering about, which was a novelty. All of the towns we'd passed through so far were deserted, except for a very large black dog advertising the world record for the longest queue of a dog in a ute. Apparently there were over fifteen hundred dogs in utes (o_o), (that's 1500 dogs and utes, not 1500 dogs in 1 ute).

Here's another spider piccie, zoom in and have a look at the alien head on its bum!