Perth: (Pts Missing Until 170), March 29^th to April 3, 2007

The flight to Western Australia started out smoothly enough. We had the caravan stored away at Windsor Gardens Caravan Park in Adelaide. Paula Basehart picked us up and got us to the airport in plenty of time. No one was taking off their shoes so I kept mine on and got beeped back by security. I had worn my boots so I would not have to pack them and they had metal in them somewhere. Then they found a pocket knife I had forgotten in my belly bag. I should have had them check my whole pack then, but I just let them take the knife. On board, my pack hung up going into the overhead storage and a stewardess promptly decided it had to be checked and took it away.

Flying Virgin Blue was okay. We got a look at the dry Eastern part of Western Australia. The sun was going down as we landed. We already knew that we couldn’t pick up our van at the airport and even then not until the next day. We would have to book a hotel. I called the Emperor’s Crown Hostel, a place suggested in our Lonely Planet guide. They had a room for us and suggested we take the shuttle to downtown. I asked a security guy where to pick that up and he pointed to an area in front of the airport. We sat there with our luggage for almost over an hour. Hundreds of Rainbow lorikeets swarmed into the palm trees around us. They were loud. I felt like we were in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Finally we realized that the security guy had steered us to the wrong place. We had already missed a couple of shuttles, the shuttles were running late because some of them were broken down and we could have taken a cab for about the same price.

The shuttle ride was hectic. Lots of foreign students were catching rides to various youth hostels and backpacker places. The driver was on the phone trying to find a room for a 76 year old man who missed his train to Bunbury. The shuttle was a little bus with a trailer full of our luggage that zig-zagged back and forth through traffic. The Emperor’s Crown had lots of young people cooking their own meals in the community kitchen and using the computers. We were glad to find a private room with clean sheets and didn’t regret missing dinner too much. We watched a TV Show on cuttlefish. They are related to squid and octopus but are pretty intelligent and can change their colors and even the texture of their skins. They do all of this in rapid waves of light and dark when courting. A really weird end to a really weird day.