Land down under

06/11/11 – 08/11/11

After an overnight stay at Bangkok airport where I slept on the marble floor of departures, I boarded my Thai Airways flight to Perth. I was in for a shock when I landed. After seven weeks backpacking around Asia I had got use to hostel life out there, going out and buying all your meals, having someone do your laundry for you etc. Out in Australia this is all different of course as prices are more in line with what we pay at home due to the low exchange rate. Also the major difference out here is that people come to Oz to work so for them hostels are there homes for months at a time rather than for a few days. With hardly any sleep in over a 24 hours period the realisation of this hit me almost straight away when I walked through the hostel door in Perth. My first week was going to be a hard lesson in learning to change my routine.

After a well needed night’s sleep I ventured out the next day to explore the city at large sticking to the walking route suggested in my Lonely Planet guidebook. This led me up to King’s Park, a large series of gardens located on a bluff near to the city centre; from here I had great panoramic views of the surrounding country. Later that evening I met up with two of the people who had been on my Indochina Tour as they had just landed in Perth that day, to get into the Oz spirit we went out in the rain to buy some goon (boxed wine – traveller’s cheap drink) and catch up on what had happened since we last saw each over.

With a slight hangover the next day I once again when to explore the city, first I ventured into the National Western Australia Museum which surprisingly had an exhibition from the British Museum on at the time. It featured objects from around the world which told stories of our past, almost all of them where rare finds such as the old object ever found – a simply hand tool. With mixed weather I read that a nearby island had Joey’s on it so I went to explore not expecting to see much as rain was moving in, but luckily I did manage to catch a glimpse of two sheltering in nearby bushes.

One of the biggest shocks I have found out is that in some hostels you have to pay for the internet including wireless. So needing to hit the web I visited Peterpan’s, a travel agency which caters for backpackers where you can surf the internet for free. Here I bought an unlimited rail card on the three main train routes which cross the country as my means to travel rather than flying everywhere and missing out on seeing the local scenery. I decided that on the coming Sunday I would make my first journey to Adelaide to set myself up for a trip to see Ayres rock.