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Hello from Cairns!
We arrived here yesterday after a 'luxurious' 2 weeks in Perth staying with Stu's family. its now making staying in hostels seem so much worse! We stayed at his uncles on a very typical australian street, very much like Ramsey street on Neighbours to our excitement. We had a big introduction to stu's family on our first night and most of them stu had never met before so that was cool.
The thing that strikes you most about perth is the lack of people-theres just nobody around! the beaches are perfect with sand and good surfing so at home they would be packed but as long as its not the weekend you almost have the beach to yourself. stu hired out a surf board but the waves here are a little bigger than devon so it took him a while to get used to it! the seas much colder here than what i was used to in thailand but its so hot that its refreshing.
We were treated to a few days away in a town called Margaret River with stus cousins, 4 hours south of Perth. it was our favourite place in australia by far. its the wine making region so you can spend the day (which we did) driving between wineries and vineyards sampling some incredible wine. i really wish we were going straight home after that so we could stock up!!! also theres a chocolate,coffee,olive,fudge and cheese factory-plenty of sampling! any way we are now wine coniseurs and stu came back 0.5kg heavier! :)
theres one thing about the australian people that annoys us the most and thats their abbreviations!!! fireman=fireys, afternoon=avo, breakfast=brekkie, 4-be= 4 wheel drive! also when youre going on 4 hour drives you want to listen to some good music but the radio is sooo bad!
On the way up to stu' cousins for a bbq, we saw our first kangeroo-well first live one anyway cos there's quite a lot of dead ones at the side of the road! i loved it, it was just hopping across the road so we went to a national park the next day because we thought there would be some there. which there wasnt. instead tho, there was some koalas which were pretty cute hanging off the trees. there was a huge lake there where you could hire out boats which we wanted to do but the water levels were too low so we couldnt, so i was a little disappointed.
we spent a day at the next town south of perth called Freemantle (freo) to the australians which reminded me of Bath/France a little bit. there was lots of street performers and markets, disappointing markets in comparison to Thai markets tho, mainly because you couldnt haggle them down!
when it came to leaving Perth and the family it was a bit sad because we'd got used to having home comforts again but now we're back to hostel life and picking up our campervan on saturday morning, 2 days earlier than planned but it means we get the freedom of being able to drive ourselves to places instead of paying for the expensive trips. we've seen the same model camper as what we're getting which is fairly small so i think its gonna be a cramped 8 weeks!
we'll keep you informed on how the camper goes! lauren x
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