Hello everyone,

as I am waiting for the bus to take me to Albany, my last stop on the tour around the southwest of Australia, I thought I might as well make use of my time and update my blog, so here it comes.

After leaving Bunbury, I went to Busselton, a tiny town in the southwest. But it really had a nice feel to it. The hostel I stayed in was Busselton Backpackers and Sam (the owner) made everyone welcome. Well, I was the only person arriving that day! The hostel is cosy and everyone in there knows everyone else by name. Really nice for a change. On Tuesday night, I had the female dorm all to myself (another nice change) and enjoyed a relaxing a quiet night's sleep. On Wednesday, I went diving at Busselton's Jetty. The jetty is over 2km long and the longest one in the southern hemisphere, so my guidebook tells me! The dive was absolutely amazing, even though the water was rather freezing! I had to wear a 5mm neoprene wetsuit, booties, gloves and another vest to keep me warm! But once you got into the water it was so worthwhile. The soft coral around the jetty was superb and the fish life so varied. And the best thing was that the fish didn't seem to be scared so you could just swim amongst them without them rushing away! Brilliant.

On Thursday I moved on to Pemberton, which is an even smaller town further down south. Well, I shouldn't really call it town as it is much smaller than the average English village but in Australia everything is a town, so there you go. I spent 2.5 days here, quite active ones I may add, but am now ready to move on. On my first day here (Friday), I took the little tourist tram through the Karri forest and went to the Gloucester Tree, which you can climb, if you are brave enough. The tree is 61m high and the provided steps are T25 bars drilled into the tree. That's it. The only thing that I could think of when climbing the tree was: I hope they got the calculations checked and reviewed before they built this!!!!...

But I got to the top and the views were fantastic and so rewarding. Absolutely brilliant.Yesterday, I hired a bike and went off exploring. Unfortunately, there are no real maps of the area and it is a bit difficult to estimate distances... To the extent that I almost started to panic when the part of my loop took me almost 1.5hours and then was only a quarter of the loop!!!! But it got a bit easier after that as the first bit was off road and all my energy that I was trying to put into the pedals seemed to get absorbed by the gravel on the road. In total, the bike ride took me 3.5hours and I was feeling rather shattered afterwards. As a consequence of all this, I started unwinding with nice bottle of Riesling in the garden at 4pm.... I don't think I have to mention that I was fast asleep at 9pm, do I?

So today, I just relaxed in the sunshine (might as well, it's getting into autumn and then winter!) and read my guidebook to figure out where to go and how long to stay. I also discovered that apart from all the missing photos from Australia, I haven't uploaded the photos from Sukothai or Ayutthaya yet (shame on me) but I will do that when I get to Perth, together with all the photos from my trip around the southwest, promised. But until then, as always, take care and keep smiling, everyone!

Yvonne
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