March 31st to April 2nd: Augusta - It just sounds like a nice place really.

The theme of this blog is change. That's my pretentious way of saying that I've finally left Busselton! To give you some idea of the magnitude of this (before I shut up and never mention the B word again) here are some damning statistics. By this point I had been in Australia 56 days...all but the first 6 in Busselton. Do the math. That means by BT (Busselton time) was at 89% and my NBT (non-Busselton time) a shockingly small 11%. In order to give me NBT a much needed boost on March 31st I headed two hours south to the town of Augusta...I'm not sure why I choose it as my escape route but its been suggested to me that the name just makes it sound like a nice place so maybe there some shadey subliminal advertising at work!

I could have chosen a better day for it as the weather is pretty shocking, no rain as such but granite grey with a piercing wind that all but begged the eyelids to fall. My hostel, Baywatch Manor YHA, was only 3 minutes up the road from the bus stop. So of course I went down the road. Thankfully Augusta is a tiny speck of a place and it didn't take me long to hit its limits and bounce back the right way. During this journey I discovered that dropping anything whilst wearing my backpack is ill-advised...and can make me look a little...special. Basically the problem was that the pack made lowering down a slow process and this didn't sit well with the item I was chasing, a sheet of paper with my hostel booking on it, being rapidly carried away by the wind. Every time I got in position and started to reach down the bloody thing had moved. My fully thought out solution to this was to throw my entire body on the floor, stretching out as far as I could for the longest reach. Don't knock it, it worked. Graceful, however, it was not. I gave one man walking by a good laugh at any rate. As I looked at him and smiled he shrugged and said 'it happens to the best of us.' Quite. Welcome to Augusta!

Baywatch Manor was a contrast to the hostel back in that place I'm not going to mention again. What it lacked in homely chaotic charm it made up with truely first rate facilities. All the rooms - kitchen, dining area, living room etc...were massive, almost excessively full of what you'd expect and more and just to top it off the place was spotless but managed this without the sterile hospital feel. There were very few people there and I never really had a long conversation with anybody but nobody was rude and everyone aknowledged each other in the bedrooms and corridor (you only grasp how important this is when people don't.) It was the perfect place to relax a couple of nights away from any noisey hassel in comfort. It's not how I'd choose to spend most of my time but at this point it was exactly what I was looking for.

I only had a single complete day there and I invested it heading out to Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse. This was, not all that surprisingly, out at Cape Leeuwin which was a dozen KM south of the town. I walked, it seemed like a nice day for it. Actually it didn't...but it did become a much nicer day halfway into my journey, at which point my jacket found itself crammed in my bag alongside my sunscreen, food and water. Most of the route was a straight line by the side of the road but this was by the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park so I wasn't left wanting for stunning scenery. Just before the lighthouse I detoured into the park to look at an ancient waterwheel that served the lighthouse. I guess if you into that sort of thing it might have been impressive but my attention was held more by the rageing sea crashing onto the rocks as far as the eyes could see more than the wheel itself.

I booked myself onto a lighthouse tour and, there being a half hour before it gets started, had a wander around the grounds. There were three houses for the three lighthouse keepers and their families. One now functions as the giftshop/cafe/tiny museum whilst the other two are in pretty bad shape, the plan is to fix them up when cash allows. The keepers would man the lighthouse for 8 hours each day each and its hard to imagine living your life rarely leaving this place, in a way it must have been even harder/weirder for the wives and children...what exactly would you do all day? Avoiding the wind would be a near full time investment, its unrelenting and ferocious whilst I'm there and this is apparently a standard day, I wouldn't like to experience a bad one! This place marks the point where the Southern and Indian oceans meet so I gaze out at this invisible line for a bit. Just to get a better focus on its abstract nature I also observed it though one of the many handy binocular platforms that reminded me of childhood seaside holidays.

Time for the tour! I'm somewhat reassured to see two of my fellow tour-ees are both younger than myself and clad almost exclusively in black and spikes. I was thinking I was spending my day doing something best suited for those with clear memories of the 60s. OK so hair of any variation of grey wasn't present on anybody else on the tour but I choose to ignore this...and perhaps try and be a little less self-concious.

Once we were locked in (its still a functioning lighthouse so there's rules governing its tourist use) we began the ascent. We made it to the top in two legs, stopping briefly in the middle. As we went up our guide told us about the lighthouse and how it was, and is, run. As seems to be an emerging theme when I go on tours I found it interesting enough at the time but would be hard pressed to pass any of it on now. You never know, one day I may wake up and all my dormant knowledge about lighthouses, the Brisbane river and a thousand other little things may have come surging to the front of my brain and I'll dedicate my life to starting conversations with the phrase 'here's an interesting fact for you...' Alas, that day is not today and I shall as such leave you wanting for lighthouse trivia. Google it, you know you want to.

The pinicle (see what I did there?) of the tour was without a doubt the view from the top. You could see as far as your eyes would let you inland and out to sea and its really hard to be justice to the scale of the thing. It would have been all the more impressive had I remembered my glasses but then again they may have been janked away from me by the near-dangerous wind so that's for the best I think. My thoughts of 'well, it's a bit windy up here isn't it' are shown the naivity of their ways when I walk around to the back and its force at least doubles, though not nearly to the same multiplication as my grip on the side! Small, careful steps were called for...our guide told us nobody had died by falling off yet...but why should I be the first?

...what? Have you heard that joke somewhere before?

Safely back on the ground I considered a milkshake from the cafe befor dismissing this as a decadent extravigance, settling for some of the water in my bag and setting off on the long walk back. It had taken me two hours to get there from Augusta and although I expected I coul shave some time of that by avoiding tangents I must say I didn't relish the coming journey. I couldn't very well sleep here though so, ignoring the objections of my feet, I set off. About ten minutes into the walk a car pulled up next to me. It's one of the old guys from the tour and he very kindly ran me all the way back. This marks the second time in my life I've successfully hitchhiked and, like the first, I wasn't actually trying to do so at the time. It seems the ket to hitchiking is to...not.

Such occurances put me in a good mood and, coupled with my new favourite energy drink the Nerdz sweet tasteing 'INSANE ENERGY,' I was feeling in high spirits as I whittled away the remainder of my day checking out the sites of Augusta...in short there isn't much beyond an old cemetary and a jetty that I reckon I could spit further than but never the less I was happy enough and enjoyed the relaxed charm of it. Or maybe the energy drink had just made me a touch simple, you decide.