Onto Perth & Beyond!

Early morning we packed up and made a quick dash to the exit from Leeman and onwards to safety. Well it probably wasn't a bad place but we didn't feel that comfortable and decided to leave at 7am, bound for Perth and the garage.

After been told to drive at 90kph for fuel effiency and less noise, I found myself with numerous road trains (or as we call them, 'Love Trains' as they pass by - sad aren't we?!) tail-gating me with just the grill of their truck in my rear-view mirror. As the road back to Perth, Highway One, is a single-lane for part of the trip with overtaking lanes provided every few kms, I found myself been overtaken by these huge love trains. Then to my dismay I had the luck of trundling along at the advised speed (the limit varies from 100 to 110 on highways and some freeways but often drops down to 50 for towns etc) when I looked in my rear-view mirror to find the grill of a pis*ed off truckie staring at me... After a few minutes of speeding to 100 and looking for a place to stop, I felt that I had created enough distance between the van and the love train behind us to slam the brakes on and pull over.

Now it's not that exciting for you lot I guess but in Western Australia most of the places to pull-in are usually unsealed paths that drop a bit from the main road so it wasn't exactly a comfortable stop but we did it just in time for the road train to fly-by and rock the whole van around for a second or two. Then I gladly pulled back onto the road and made it to Perth and our rental companies garage.

After we told them why we were there, they fixed the problem and we headed off to Freo to a lovely campsite, Fremantle Village, that has probably been the best campsite we've stayed at up to now.

That evening we met up with Gem's mate, had a couple of bevvies at the Sail & Anchor (including Chilli Beer which is very spicy!) and then onwards to San Churros for a coffee and some churros to dip in warm milk chocolate - San Churros is probably my favourite thing about Perth/Fremantle as the coffee is good, the environment is Spanish and the cakes and churros (Spanish doughnuts that are shaped like a twig) are wonderful. If anyone wants to open a franchise in Sheffield, please do.

The next morning we visited Freo Prison for our tunnels tour with our own guide, Matthew, a lovely chap from Adelaide with an eccentric style of humour that suited me well. As we were on a early tour and it's low season in WA, we had Matthew to ourselves and he really made the tour interesting.

We descended about twenty metres or so down a narrow set of ladders before crouching and moving around the tunnels that were dug out to provide clean water to the prison and then for Fremantle town. We were dressed up like Forensics from CSI except for our torchlights strapped to our helmets and I'm glad we had those helmets on as I smacked my head three times on the wooden beams above our heads!

After paddling along the tunnels in a small plastic boat and experiencing how dark it truly is when the lights are off, we realised what it must have been like for convicts and prisoners to work down there. And sometimes they were forced to have weights around their ankles if they'd broken any rules. I'm sorry but I can't provide any more 'interesting' facts or details about our tour as I'm about to do our tea on the Barbie (not the doll).

Goodbye for now, Rich.