We've spent a lot of time on and around the water today. We started the day with a whale watching cruise around the coast of Perth and Rotttnest Island, as from September to November this area is known as Humpback Highway, and with good reason! It took around 30 minutes to get out to the area where the whales are normally seen, and for the next 3 hours or so we saw 4 or 5 different pods of whales of all ages! There were large males, females with calves and juveni...

Today we drove 20 minutes down the coast to visit the city of Fremantle, which although technically a different city is actually now part of the sprawling Perth suburbs. It has a very different feel to Perth though, very bohemian with very Victorian style buildings, which made it really nice to visit. We started off with a visit to Fremantle Prison, which was a working prison up until 1991 (when we were born!). We joined a guided tour which explained about the hi...

We've finally got our car! It's a Holden Commodore wagon, which is basically a really big estate car (with a 3.8ltr V6 engine) that we can sleep in the back of. We've also got a small tent that we can use at campsites, and have some bought some camping equipment that we got discount on by signing up to a store card. We got the car pretty cheap, $2600 because we bought it wholesale instead of from a retail garage, which just basically meant that we had to clean it...

We've had a busy first week in Perth, sorting out loads of admin stuff for our year here in Australia. Everything has been going smoothly, we've activated the bank accounts we set up from Guernsey and got our debit cards (no money in the accounts yet though!), set up a 'Super' account, which is for something called super annuation, which is basically a pension fund that your employer will pay in to when you're working and which we can claim back when we leave Aus...

We've finally made it to Australia! We're staying in a hostel a short walk away from Scarborough beach, in Perth's northern suburbs. The hostel is sort of like a house, but it's quite quiet and the people all seem nice so that's a good start. We haven't done much yet, except go down to the shops and the beach, as we're still recovering from the overnight flight. The beach here is really nice though, it's so long and the waves are huge! It's been pretty warm so fa...