Perth on a shoestring

We start this blog on a festive note, with a picture of the Western Australian Christmas Tree, snapped at our recent visit to Kings Park Botanic Gardens:

I read in today's newspaper that Perth-ites get their Xmas trees from Britain, although I think this would look rather fetching with some tinsel and lights? Xmas celebrations have begun in our houseshare, we now have a plastic tree, but it is very difficult to get into the festive spirit when it's sunny and warm. Although, Western Australian has had a fair bit of rain, which has ruined the grain harvest, making our place of work very quiet. I've been getting into trouble at work with pronunciation of Australian place names. They pronounce their 'a's as 'ah's, so Avon as you and I and the rest of the sensible world pronounce it becomes Ah-von, Albany becomes Ah-lbany, and Malaga becomes Mah-laaaah-gah (with a stress on the lah). The grain depot we work at is pretty big, in fact it deals with 40% of the grain harvest in Australia, which I usefully found out whilst on hold to the IT support helpdesk. They have lots of big grain silos, and trucks drive in here from out in the country to drop off the grain that the farmers have grown. This grain gets put into the big silos and then is later sent on to the port where it is shipped out to whoever has bought the grain. It's quite a seat-of-the-pants business to be in, this company we work for has similar grain depots around Western Australia, and for the 9 months when the harvest isn't happening, they plan which areas of the state they think will have the most grain and plan the storage at their sites accordingly. At any time, bad weather can decimate the crop in an area, so the company no longer needs the storage there, but the crop may be better than expected somewhere else, so they have to move all the gear to that area, and that could be 1000kms or so. As it happens, the entire grain harvest has been hit by a very wet summer, so the harvest hasn't really got going properly yet, it's happening in fits and starts and with lots of trucks bringing in damaged grain.

Jo and I are two essential cogs in the 2008/09 grain harvest machine: I weigh the trucks and Jo empties them. The other cogs are an interesting bunch. Amongst others, there's Murray who used to drive trains and who has a nice line in put downs of the management, Michael who has a very cool camper van which he and his Dad converted from a passenger bus and who goes out prospecting for gold at the weekends, big Bruce whose other career is shearing sheep and brings in to work oranges for us all, even bigger Ben who is a very good Aussie Rules Football player one rung away from the top level who has the most enormous lunches thanks to his Mum, Stuart the very hard working youngster who drives a funny yellow car, Kate the cat who has nine lives and can make countless mistakes, lie, cheat and deceive without getting fired, David who drove buses and once blockaded his depot with one, Glen the manager who has worked here for 17 years even though he is only 32, and Sally who I once mistook completely and entirely and for quite some time for another girl. Then there's all the assorted truck drivers, a very diverse bunch whose names I can't remember and whose occasionally colourful comments I'd rather forget. Jo has seen cats and dogs in their cabs.

Jo comes home covered in grain dust – she tells me oats is particularly itchy. The grain gets everywhere: I wake up in the night to find small balls of canola (oilseed rape to the Brits) in the bed!

A truck gets emptied at the grain depot.

There are two shift patterns, days (6.30am til 3pm) and nights (3pm til 11.30pm), and we alternate every week, which is stupid as you can't get into any sort of groove. We don't like the day shift as you have to go to bed at 9pm to get any reasonable shut eye, and it also means we are doing the same hours as all of our housemates so we can't get any peace. Most Australian houses are massive bungalows, and ours is no exception, although the fact that there are 10 people in it, whilst making me feel better on my positive contribution to population density, means there is no peace and quiet. We have an eclectic mix of housemates, Ben the gentle kiwi giant who usefully works at an off licence and can frequently be found asleep on the sofa at 2am, Fabienne and Carolin from Germany who, also usefully, work at the gourmet salad bar in the mall and who on one of their only day trips out of Perth came back as red as beetroots from sunburn, Phil and Katie from southern Ireland whose accents I have just tuned into after 5 weeks and who have seemed to take a curiously large amount of smart clothing on their travels with them, making us look decidedly dowdy, Cecile from France who has just gone home, and Sarah and Andrew from Australia and Canada respectively.

Despite our very limited funds, we have made a good go of spending most of our weekends out and about doing something. Perth Zoo have proudly bought two tiger cubs into the world, so we went to see them, but they did a very good job of hiding from us. As did the numbat, the animal emblem of Western Australia, very endangered and by the zero sighting at the zoo you'd think they were already extinct. We weren't leaving without some kind of picture, so here's one from outside the numbat enclosure:

The elephants were great, here's one having a pedicure:

We also drove out to Dwellingup, about 70 kms south of Perth. On the way we noted the high number of ridiculous personalised number plates, things like 'black car' and 'old aunty'. It must be cheap to get these plates for such lack of thought to be put into naming them. We knew that Dwellingup was a nice area of forest and a famous walking track passes through, and were happy to discover the Lane Poole Forest Reserve, managed by the WA Department for Environment and Conservation, which had camping set amongst the forest and the Murray River, which we swam in in the morning – a bit chilly but nothing on English rivers! You wouldn't believe how noise-free this place was, it was like it was just me and Jo there in the forest. It also had some of those free-to-use gas fired barbecues that we'd seen in every park, beach, and just about anywhere else out in the open. We'd come prepared this time, so we trotted down to them with our snags (Australian for sausages) and beer, but unfortunately these were the only barbecues in WA with no ignition switch, and we didn't have any matches or a lighter. One other couple were unsuccessfully trying to light the gas with a mosquito coil which they'd lit from their car lighter. Luckily for everyone, a lady came by with some matches, and we gleefully got on with our cooking. The other couple were warming up some home made Thai Tom Yum soup, which I thought was a very good idea and will be trying soon, you can't have sausages all the time, can you! Can you?


Not quite MasterChef, but just as fun

Last weekend we rode to Kings Park, which is right next to the CBD. All the Aussies at work were aghast that we'd ridden, it was quite a steep hill up there but I can't understand why they were making such a fuss. Maybe they thought we had ridden all the way up the steep hill, when actually we pushed our bikes. And we pushed them down again too, not trusting our brakes. It's nice to find a place like Kings Park so close to the city centre, it had some great views of Perth.

There was also a guided tour of the Botanical Garden led by an expat Geordie called Dorothy with a wry sense of humour. On the odd occasion she would pick a flower or leaf off a tree, then whisper that she shouldn't really do it, which I thought odd, but then maybe she was trying to give us as good a tour as she could. She wasn't a huge fan of the guy belting out Nesson Dorma for the free concert, and I had to agree. I think he should have used a little imagination and sung some songs which mention trees or birds, how about 'Tie a yellow ribbon' or 'Blackbird' (Beatles)? But then, maybe he was singing what he was told. After the tour, we got on our bikes and rode around the park, stopping off at the DNA Tower:

Last week we went to see the film Australia at the cinema, at the end we were surprised to hear the Aussies in the audience all clapping! Very patriotic I thought, I couldn't imagine a British audience doing that for a British film (notwithstanding the fact they don't make British films anymore). But then, there was clapping at the end of an American film we went to see last weekend, so the patriotism jury is out on that one so far.

We have lots to look forward to – an Australian Christmas, driving from Perth to Sydney, the Australian Open tennis, seeing various parents and siblings, and, of course, our flights to New Zealand at the start of February. At the moment, despite the grasping Australian tax man, we've saved enough for about another month of travelling, the plan being to work until just after Xmas to earn us enough money to travel for 2 months. Unless we drink it all one weekend.