Thursday 2nd November – Rottnest Island

I awoke to find good news in my email inbox.  Joe from Campers Inn has finally got back to me and the RV sale is still on! It’s due to take place on 10^th November so I can relax and cross my fingers for some money to suddenly appear soon after that date.

Now for our next day’s exploring and I’ve started to notice something. We’ve come to visit this absolutely massive country….. only to keep leaving it to go and visit islands! But I guess we won’t be doing that anymore when we get our camper.

We had pre-booked online on the 1015am fast ferry to Rottnest.  It’s a 30-minute crossing and we are booked on the 425pm return ferry.  So, we’ve got just over five hours to explore the island. 

Rottnest is completely vehicle-free, apart from the buses that take tourists around the island and the hundreds of bicycles that visitors use.  We had both of these options, but I wanted to get to the furthest point west on the island for a chance to see migrating whales and sealions. The leaflet warned that it would take between 3-5 hours to do the whole island by bike.  Bus it was then!  But we still didn’t stop all day.  We agreed on our stopping points, alighting first near the island’s main lighthouse, Wadjemup, for a tour and a climb to get the highest possible view. 

Wadjemup lighthouse

View across the island and, below,back over to Perth

The cute residents of Rottnest - a quokka

Then it was on to West point and, despite the driver telling us that we had missed the whale migration, it turned out he was wrong! Not only that, we saw lots of sealions and dolphins too.   

Sealion - I think he's waving at us

A passing humpback whale

Getting up close and personal with the locals!

We hopped back on the bus to make it to Geordie Bay, recommended by James as a beautiful place to stop for lunch. It turned out we had probably missed some of the best snorkelling spots on the south of the island but we didn’t have time to do another circuit of the island, so we had to ‘make do’ with this…! 

Having just 15 minutes each in the water we made the most of it but I had left my underwater camera on the shore so can’t show you what I saw in any case.  We dried off rapidly to ensure that we caught the final bus of the day back to Thompson Bay to catch the 425pm express back to Freemantle.

Check out my chicken parmi' folks

As planned, this got us back to the Allens’ house for 5ish in order to shower, change and grab all of our belongings and drive north again to Edgewater.  Back at Lisa and Kens’ place we found them chilling on the sofa after two exhausting ‘rest’ days of doing up a friend’s garden, for free!  They looked like they needed a good meal.  They took us to a local pub where we enjoyed our first experience of what I’m reliably informed is an Aussie classic – Chicken parmigiana (or ‘chicken parmi’ said in a strong Aussie accent preferably!).   

Monty - I think he wants me to throw his toy for him...

After dinner and a couple of drinks we decided to head back to theirs so we could enjoy some wine and show them how to play a new card game we had been shown over the summer. Black jack (not that version!) or ‘prick’ which is what we have chosen to call it because that’s generally what you end up calling the person to your right whose job it is to make your go as miserable as possible each time round!  We kept the game going as late as we dared.  Ken and Lisa had another hard day’s gardening to do early in the morning to beat the midday sun and we had an appointment to collect our wheels for the next four weeks.  We’ve had a great time staying with friends and family here, in the UK and in Europe, but this will be the first time we’ve actually had our own living space together since we moved out of the RV in July!  How we manage confined in a much-reduced living area again for a month will soon become clear I’m sure!