Chrissy in Exmouth

 Aussies can't just keep a two-syllable word as it is. Abbreviations don't even always abbreviate. Hence, Christmas is Chrissy. I think we discussed this last year. When I've pointed out this strange shorthand to Aussies, they remind me that it's so they don't have to open their mouths as much - keeps out the flies. Whatever.

The last couple of weeks have been really busy in the best way. My old boss at the dive shop seems to forget I exist for a couple of months at a time and then something will jog his memory and suddenly I find myself rostered on. The whalesharks and humpback whales have finished their migratory season through the area but Exmouth is still located on one of the world's most pristine reefs, the Ningaloo Reef. So these days it's work as a snorkel guide, showing people the magnificent corals and sea turtles and rays in the Murion Islands. 

With the holidays coming up, lots of my coworkers on the boat were leaving town to head home for weeks (or months), and someone reminded Mark that I'm still in town. Since the shop is running day trips up until mid-January, I am getting the impression that I'm going to have lots of days out on the boat. This week I was a snorkel guide two days and ran a scuba refresher course (for certified divers who just haven't been in the water for a while to brush up on their skills in a pool) on a third day. I just got a text asking me what my schedule looks like for next week because there's already at least one day that they'll need me. So the zinc sunblock I've got will be getting some good use (and I need to remember to apply it to the back of my neck!!!)!

Christmas day at the pub was busy busy busy. We were only open for lunch (and Western Australian law says that you can only serve alcohol with a meal on Christmas), so we had a blast serving folks and belting out Christmas carols and generally trying to keep people cool and happy (it was just over 100 degrees). 

Serving beers at the Pool Bar

After we finished up service and cleared everyone out, some of the girls stuck around for a swim in the pub pool to cool off and recharge before heading out to our various parties. Jimmy, one of my coworkers at the pub, was hosting an "Orphan's Christmas" for folks who don't have family in town. So I spent the evening hanging out at his house, watching first the sunset from his roof and then star gazing from it. Bonus: Jimmy is also friends with a bunch of my coworker friends from the dive shop! So I got to celebrate the day with friends from both jobs. I called it quits around 10 so I could get to bed before an early morning working on the boat!

Sophie, Me, Tiarna, and Manager Jess

I've been meaning for ages to show you some photos of my old dude pals from the front bar so here we go!

Stu

Boonie

Welshie

Stewie

This seems like a good time to mention that I've gone blonde. I decided that if ever in my life I was gonna be a blonde, Exmouth was the place to do it. All these backpackers who come to town for the busy season in the winter and shoulder months (March - October) and work on the whalesharking boats (like I do) are blonde and look the same. We make jokes about it all the time that all the sharkers, male and female, have long blonde hair and bright blue eyes, and are generally indistinguishable from each other. So I at least buck the trend by having short hair (which isn't likely to change anytime soon), but otherwise I'm going with a "when in Rome" attitude! The photo with Welshie was mid-process before the second (!) round of bleaching, but the Stewie pic was about 20 minutes ago as I was leaving the pub from my lunch shift. I wasn't sunburnt (promise, Mom!), just rosy from spending 4 hours in the pool bar in 103°F weather. 

I'm working a split shift today, but it was so busy that I worked another 40 minutes after I was "done." So I have to be back in about 45 minutes. When I got home I basically just laid on the floor in the living room soaking up the aircon (an Aussie abbreviation I can get behind) and then got motivated to finish this post. I forget what grand plans I had to talk about other things (I'm still supposed to do that "tour of the pub" post and I think that was on today's agenda... oops), but I want to make some egg salad for dinner. SO let's call this farewell. Merry Christmas, sending love and joy your way from Down Under!

Rottnest Island

So fun fact: when the first European arrivals to Australia got here in the late 1600s, they landed on the West Coast first. Perth, and the Swan River, were settled early because of the easy rive access to the rich agricultural areas inland. The Dutch named Rottnest Island, just off the coast, as such because they thought the weird native creatures they spotted were actual rats; hence "Rat's Nest" in Dutch. In point of fact, those weird little marsupials are now known as quokkas ("KWAH-kuhs") and they're only found in Western Australia (Rottnest has a particularly large population). While they've got long tails, they're actually a type of wallaby, so they carry their young in belly pouches just like kangaroos. Apparently they've got a pretty big social media following because they smile - a trip to WA isn't complete without a quokka selfie, and I still hadn't gotten one. So the Tuesday I was in Perth I managed to convince Weronika to take another trip to the island so that we could explore and meet some of WA's most famous residents. 

We picked a fairly crappy day to go, actually. The wind was way up, the swell was way up, and the 30 minute ferry ride was basically like riding a rollercoaster. The deck hands on the ferry spent the whole trip checking on passengers and handing out sick bags, and I spent the whole trip standing so I could watch the horizon. Fortunately, since living here, I've taken to carrying seasick medicine in my backpack all the time so that I'm always prepared if someone wants to go on a boat. Safety first. So I made Weronika take some and I took some and we were groovy. 

The wind was accompanied by intermittent downpours, but part of my sales pitch to W was that we'd go to the island and rent bikes so we could see it that way; when she went in January, she used the hop-on-hop-off bus service, so seeing more of it at close quarters was appealing. So we dressed in rain gear and avoided the worst of the rain in the early morning by stopping into the overpriced café for a hot chocolate, and then we just sucked it up and hoped the rain would clear up over the course of the day. 

Rain...

...sun, ten minutes later.

As the morning rolled on, the rain dissipated and we embraced riding our bikes into the wind as our nature-provided daily workout. We wanted to bike the whole 22k loop around the island, and as we made our way west, I started noticing little signs in apparently random places along the road that reminded visitors not to get too close to the wildlife. After maybe my third sign, I started looking more closely and realized that they must get posted in places where the critters nest because, tucked away in some brambles, I spotted a Mama Quokka and her baby!

Turns out it's really not hard to take quokka selfies...

...they're very curious...

...it's just hard to not get totally photobombed as you go!

I learned quickly that the little critters are totally unafraid of humans, they're happy to hop around if you just sit down on the ground to spend time with them, and it's hard to remind yourself that they're not pets when it feels rather like a small house cat has just rocked up to visit with you. 

We spent nearly an hour hanging out with the critters, watching them eat and scurry about and just generally live their curious little lives. Eventually we conceded that we needed to get moving if we were going to continue our circuit of the island, so away we went to the West End.

King's Skink

Osprey rook through binoculars

By the time we battled the wind all the way to the West End of the island, we were running low on time to get back. We had an hour and a half to return, but the wind was in our favor. Weronika is sensible, so we didn't stop to check out the sea lion colony "because we still have plenty of time." Instead we hopped on our bikes and put the pedal to the metal back to town. Her idea was clearly the right one because by the time we stopped to hang out with some more quokkas near town, we made it onto our 4:30 ferry with just ten minutes to spare. 

Wednesday and Thursday were a blur of errands, hanging out with the girls, and soaking up the last days of vacation. Grant was working night shift on Thursday, so when he got out of work at 5am on Friday, he scooped me up to drive me to the airport. We got to hang at his house over a cup of tea and a chin wag (awesome Aussie-ism for a long chat), and then it was time to fly back to the Great Hot North of Exmouth. Awesome Southern Holiday: complete!

Jacarandas in bloom

My personal chef for the week

Perth weekend

 Weronika, you may or may not remember, makes beautiful food. Her particular love is breakfast, but I suckered her into learning how to make pierogi during Covid lockdown. Bless her, she froze some the last time she made a batch, so that was our welcome back to Perth meal on Thursday night. Yum! Those pretty quickly led to a food coma, which was good because I had made plans to go diving on Friday morning with my friend Ollie. 

We met up at Bulk Jetty so I could help film the site for Ollie. He's working on his Divemaster certification and has to do his mapping project, but his site is more detailed than mine was. Because his is a jetty, he needs to know exactly how many pylons there are. And where various fallen debris has created artificial reefs for critters. And where good points of entry and exit are. My wreck dive site was much simpler (thank goodness). So anyway, we hopped in and quickly realized that the visibility (viz) was awful. Maybe 2m when it was good and 0.5m when it was bad. So after a 25 minute dive we called it quits. The best parts of the "dive" were the 25 minute delay we had because my regulators didn't fit on the air cylinder he brought me (equipment mismatch) so we had to go to his house to grab a spare set (so we got to chit chat) and the hour after the dive that we spent hanging at Perth Scuba, catching up with old work friends and gabbing some more, while we waited for air fills. Great start to Perth Holiday Day 1!

After diving in the morning and gabbing for the early part of the afternoon, I scooped up Weronika so we could go catch the Fremantle Markets which are only open on Friday/Saturday/Sundays. I bought an adorable bathing suit (I am not allowed to buy any more bathers. I'm not. I will not.) and we grabbed some sushi to go. Hung out back at Redcourt Road and then I headed back to Nat and Mick's to get ready for dinner. We were going out for Italian food with some of Mick's friends and I needed to get my gear cleaned up and ready to go for the next day. Great evening with lots of laughing and heavy pastas (carb loading before more diving, or that's what I told myself anyway).

Saturday morning was an early one because Nat and I were going diving on Perth Scuba's boat, Blue Destiny! We met Ollie and Simon there and had such fun catching up with more old work friends who were on the boat that day. The viz still wasn't great (all the rain we'd been having washes silt and crap into the water, so it wasn't so surprising), but we saw some octopus and I caught my very first cray! She was too small to keep for eating so I let her go, but the glow of accomplishment stayed with me :) Obligatory after-diving drinks at Little Creatures in Freo and then home to Nat's for an afternoon nap on the back yard couch. 

Weronika had work on Saturday, but we agreed we'd attempt to be social and go out dancing with some of her coworkers. So around 10pm I rallied myself off of the couch (hard to do after a beautiful dinner of bangers and homemade mash) and went to collect her at work. I had MORE plans to go diving Sunday morning, so I wasn't totally sure how late I'd make it but agreed to give it the old college try. I scooped her up at work, along with her co-worker, Martina, and her newest housemate, Elisa, and we migrated to Martina's house so the girls could get ready. Into the city we went, found some parking and got in line to enter the bar. I've been living in a country town for so long that I forgot something critical: Western Australian liquor law says that only a WA drivers license or ID OR an international passport is acceptable for entry into clubs. So after waiting in line for 30 minutes, we got to the front and Weronika and I both didn't have our passports. Oops. The downside to this was that we didn't get to go dancing. The upside is that I was in bed by 2am and not a half-decent night's sleep before diving a third day in a row!

Sunday morning Club Dives at Perth Scuba were always my favorite because they do a sausage sizzle on the BBQ at the shop before heading out. Working them used to be awesome because I got to see lots of my buddies, but going as a patron is even better. I got to catch up with a bunch of my old buddies, like Colin Baker, Hugh Mooney, Eric Steele, Barb Johnson, and the trip instructor/guide, Martin Crossley. We went for a dive at North Mole (my old mapping project dive site!) and managed to not only get lost, but also to lose Ollie. Oops. We all made it A. to the wreck and B. back to shore in the end, but with less air than usual from all the under water laughter :) I met up with some friends from Exmouth who were also in Perth on holiday - Flo and Emily - and we grabbed a late lunch at the Freo Markets. Some kind of Turkish wrap that was amazing. I was missing out all those years when I didn't know what falafel was; so glad I rectified that. 

Weronika and I had plans to try and go out dancing Sunday night but after three days in a row of diving (after 4 months of going diving exactly one day), I was totally, totally exhausted. My gear got washed and Nat and I spent the evening at home, laying low. We hunkered down on the couch and I finally got to watch a Kiwi movie Nat has been telling me about for AGES, Hunt for the Wilderpeople. It's got Sam Hunt as one of the stars, plus a little Kiwi boy with all the sass, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. So many feelings, so much laughter. It was awesome. Rent it if you've got the chance. And then feel a little teensy bit of jealousy with the knowledge that some of the scenes from the movie were filmed near the town where Nat lived for 10 years in New Zealand. 

My replacement roommate in Attadale

In theory, Ollie and I were going to try going out diving on Monday morning as well. That did not happen. I threw in the towel. Instead I spent the day running errands around town and soaking in the joy of being near my Perth People. Mick and I hung out around the house in the morning and he helped me figure out what the heck all the cell phone company jargon means (I need to switch providers, so help me). Then I wandered around with Weronika, going to the grocery store, getting some shoe soles fixed that I brought down with me from Exmouth (no cobblers in Exy), and generally just enjoying myself. 

You may have noticed a distinct lack of Wiebke in these proceedings. Girlfriend was decidedly under the weather and basically quarantining herself with forays into the kitchen only to make ginger tea and eggs. By Monday, though, she was starting to feel human again. I think, actually, she was still feeling like crap but she didn't want to miss out on more friendship time. So she rallied herself for the girls dinner we had planned for Monday at Salsa Rossa! My frequent readers will probably remember that as the restaurant that took pity on me post-Covid and hired me despite my zero experience as a waitress. Weronika still works there and basically runs the joint because she's amazing.

Nat, Wiebke, Weronika, Elisa (the newest housemate at Redcourt Road, who just happens to be a delightful human) and I all went. And we all ordered the gnocchi! Y'all. When you visit me in Western Australia when the borders open and the US gets its act together enough with Covid that other countries will let you in, I'm gonna take you to eat at Salsa and I'm going to encourage you to try this gnocchi. It's like cloud pillows in your mouth. It's 10/10 one of the things I miss most about my short-lived time working as a waitress there. We opted to head back to Redcourt for dessert afterwards and Elisa busted out some Christmas Pannetone that her family sent her (she's Italian), and we had some leftover birthday cake, and generally just rolled around on the floor feeling fat and so so happy. 

Initially this post was going to be the whole week in Perth, but I've realized I just have too much to say. So this was the boring post with lots of probably-not-that-interesting information about eating and running errands, and the next one will be much more fun and will have more photos because on Tuesday, Weronika and I went to Rottnest Island and saw quokkas! Until then...

Roadtrip: Days 10-12

Tuesday morning was murky; overcast and chilly ("a bit fresh" as Aussies say). I was up early to chat with Mom and Dad and then we stayed at the Airbnb til checkout at 10. From there we headed to the Margaret River Bakery. The food there was beautiful and the set up so homey; random couches scattered about, re-purposed wooden boxes as side tables, and most of the seating was in a windowed-in porch area so the light and airflow were perfect for a leisurely meal. I had some roasted mushrooms with fresh-baked sourdough toast and avocado and it was SO good. After brekky we hit to road south to Augusta. It was really blowy (windy) all day, but we made some stops to admire the views:

Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse

We spent the afternoon strolling around town and checking out little shops, but everything in Augusta closes pretty early. Small town life. So we grabbed some takeaway food from a little grocery store and went to eat our spaghetti with sunset views:

Sunset in Augusta, where the Indian and Southern Oceans converge

Back to the Airbnb and an early night to bed - driving and having fun is exhausting! Next morning we decided to head back north. It was even murkier Wednesday than it was on Tuesday - rainy and cold and windy - so our stop in Hamelin Bay to try and check out the resident sting rays (Weronika just couldn't remember their name so she just stuck with calling them "flat fish") was unsuccessful. We were there for maybe 30 minutes getting sand blasted and decided that maybe heading back into Margs and posting up at a cafe for the afternoon would be a good idea. So that's what we did! Back to the Margaret River Bakery.

While we were hanging at the bakery we called around to make reservations for a food and wine pairing meal that Nat had recommended at Hay Shed Hill Winery. The restaurant is called Rustico and they do a fixed price 5-course meal for lunch every day. So we booked ourselves in for that at 3pm and called it an early dinner. And man, what an early dinner it was. The food was so clearly made with such love and care - this was food art, not just food to sustain the body. Our menu consisted of:

Course 1: 

Abrolhos Island Scallops (the Abrolhos Islands are about halfway between Perth and Exmouth on the coast) with cauliflower cream and candied jamon (I have no idea what jamon is, even after eating it) 

&

Fried Goats Cheese with orange blossom honey

Course 2: Tempura Prawns (they don't call them shrimp here, despite Outback Steakhouse misleading us for years with their "shrimp on the barbie" commercials, they're prawns) with an avocado tomato salsa and chipotle aioli

&

Crumbed Eggplant with confit garlic and romesco (no idea what that is either)

Course 3: Roast Pork Belly with burnt apple jus

&

Pear Rocket (they call arugula rocket) Parmesan salad with candied walnuts, and mustard dressing

Course 4: Braised Beef Cheek with red wine, cauliflower and beetroot chutney

&

Roasted mushrooms in a sweet sherry cream sauce with sourdough toast

At this point we were full to our gills. The waitress took pity on us and offered to box up the 5th course for takeaway, bless her. So we took our lovely final bites to our next Airbnb in Dunsborough. We got checked in and immediately headed out to try and catch the sunset because we hadn't gotten a really spectacular one. The Augusta one was beautiful but it fizzled out when the colors would have been the most dramatic because of a low cloud bank. So we were really hoping for a good one. And let me just tell you, Torpedo Rocks did not disappoint:

Epic. Back to the Airbnb for our final course and a Sean Connery James Bond marathon. I managed to stay up til 11 on Wednesday because of the Bond movie, so we happily slept in on Thursday, our final day on the road.

Course 5: Dessert Pair of chocolate torte and Lemon meringue 

&

Cheese Board with bread, lavosh, quince, fruit, and blue, soft, and hard cheeses

Zero, one of our Airbnb hosts

Our Airbnb, with veranda for morning tea

Thursday morning was every bit as lovely, warm and sunny as the previous two days had been chilly, wet and rainy. We had decided to head back to Perth Thursday afternoon rather than get up early Friday for Weronika to get back in time for her evening shift. So we were excited to spend the last day exploring the beaches near Dunsborough that she had on her to-see list: Sugarloaf Rock, Eagle Bay, and Castle Rock Beach. As we were driving we also popped into Bunker Bay and its adjoining Shelley Cove and loved those, too!

Sugarloaf Rock, in Yallingup

Splendid Blue Fairy Wren! She was so vibrant, the photo doesn't do her plumage justice

Shelley Cove

By around 4pm we were ready to get a move on so we stopped in Dunsborough for some pies, some tea, and got rolling. We made good time getting to Perth and were welcomed back by this sunset:

Perth skyline over the Swan River

So the roadtrip was a raging success, Weronika didn't kill me, and I still had a week of vacation to go!