It was an early rise to get to the airport for my 9.15AM flight over to Perth, I ended up getting there with heaps of time to spare partly owing to not realising how much more straight foward domestic flights are compared to international ones. I'd checked in on the internet the day before hand so all I had to do was drop my bags off and go through a brief hand luggage search, the whole process couldn't have taken more than ten minutes. Which left me loads of time to wait for boarding, something I'm getting rather good at if I do say so myself. I've had enough practise recently after all.

The flight took a little over five hours and what with there being a two hour time shift (from +10 back to +8) I arrived in the airport at half twelve. After a brief search I tracked down a local bus (much cheaper than the taxis and with a suitably smaller sign) and before too long was in the centre of Perth. Having my backpack with me I was much more interested in finding my hostel than having a decent look around, the later being soured by the formers weight. Thankfully it was only a twenty minute walk though I could have made it much quicker if I hadn't gone the wrong way down a massive road and then had to double back on myself.

The hostel itself, The Old Swan Barracks, was some contrast to the one back in Brisbane. For a start it was massive, tonnes of rooms across several floors. It also had a bar, which boded well for it having a more social edge. Just to jump ahead a bit and ruin the surprise I must report I didn't get to sample much of any such edge because as the night progressed I massivelt crashed and must have been asleep by about half nine. I did have an early start planned for the next day to be fair. During the coming search I wandered through the bar and came across a stage with a middle aged man on it playing a fair to poor cover of Wonderwall to general indifference and OTT howls of approval from those who'd obviously been on the booze since middday. Good to see some things are the same everywhere.

(....wait...no it isn't!)

The few hours after I dumped my stuff were spent planning and sorting out what I was going to be doing with myself in the near future...the next day in fact as I'd obly got a single night booked in the hostel. I have a hostel in Busselton a call that looked promising for finding a bit of work and lo and behold that was where I would be going the next day. Simple. Now just to get there. It turned out to be really easy to find the bus terminal from the hostel, although it was annoying to walk past several closer ones on route. Finding my way back proved to be more of a challenge but at least I got to see some of the lesser visited residential streets of Perth and it's not like I'm still stuck there now or anything.

Arriving back in my dorm I find a friendly but frantically searching man. I quickly determin (by that age old method of asking him) that he's lost his room key and so I held him look in a variety of places with the prefix 'behind' and 'under.' Having no luck after a while he shoots off somewhere and I stay put in the dorm. After a while I leave to go somewhere, put my hand in my pocket to get my key, find it...and another key. I've somehow gone and stolen the mans key! I have no idea how I've managed this, I guess I just accidentally picked it up one of the dozen times I've been back and forth to the room picking up and leaving various maps and such. I'm not sure really. What I am sure of is that on the list of making a positive impression 'stealing' rarely takes poll position.

I set out to find the guy. This is difficult as I have no idea where he's gone. And in spite of having been talking to him not a half hout before can't clearly recall what he looked like either. I went to all the obvious places in the hostel, kitchen, laundry, bar etc...which was a good way to get a good feel of the place but ultimatly didn't lead to me finding him. I repeated this search several times over the course of the afternoon/evening and left a note in the dorm saying I had his key and here's my phone number and, oh, sorry by the way. The thrilling ending to this tale is that he eventually came back and I gave him his key.

Stuff like this is exactly the sort of thing I've gone to the other side of the world to do!