Sunday 26th November

Hello journal readers! Thought we'd update the jounral whilst we've got some free net access, which also means you haven't got to sit through a whole essay like yesterdays effort!

We've had an awesome day today, got up really early and caught the 7:30 ferry across to Rottnest Island which is just off the coast, 30 minutes away. Rottnest Island is 11km long with only one town situated right near the harbour. The rest of island consists of special species of fauna, lizards and Quokkas, a small marsupial unique to Rottnest. The island has had a number of uses over the decades including aboriginal and colonial settlement, a prison and also for military training.

We decided to rent some mountain bikes for the day to see all of the island and ended up covering a few miles cycling in the end including some hills which proved harder work than what we thought! We stopped off at a beautiful part of the island called Little Salmon Bay, which looked like something out of the film The Beach. It had golden white sand and azure water interspersed with coral. We put on our snorkel sets that we had bought the previous day and swam out amongst the coral. There were some really big fish amongst the reef including a couple of tiger fish, which as the name suggests feature striking tiger markings along their flanks. We spent about an hour swimming with the fish before becomming a bit cold in the water. We've taken some really beautiful pictures of the bays around the island as we cycled around and we even saw some of the famous Quokkas, which were surprisingly tame as we could walk straight up to them. They look like miniature kangaroos but with much smaller ears in contrast to the rest of their bodies. We also saw our first snake lying in the middle of the cycle track and watched it slither off into the scrub. Some passing Aussies told us not to go anywhere near it as it's brown colour suggested that it was one of the more venomous varieties.

We behaved and only had pot noodles tonight while watching a guy in the hostel bar play a didgeridoo, a dobro, a guitar and a drum pedal. Pretty impressive (entertainment, not the food!) and some of the songs he played with the didgeridoo and dobro sounded really haunting.

We're off to our room now to read some books and hopefully tomorrow we'll find out if we've managed to be successful in our campervan booking! As from tomorrow we'll be in a different hostel called Australian Backpackers near the railway so i'm not sure if we have net access there but if not we'll update again as soon as we can as hopefully after tomorrow we'll be heading North towards Shark Bay and Broome in the campervan! (Fingers crossed!)

Take care everyone!