Australia - Travels with Verne and Roy

All Aboard for Mandurah!

Though – or maybe because? – our passport is so dire and our currency so unreliable, one great thing about being South African is that we tend to migrate all over the world. As a result, we sometimes find old friends in unexpected places.

One such Durban school and uni friend of mine, Susan Lazenby (née Hopkins), lives in the beautiful seaside city of Mandurah, an hour south by train from Perth, WA.

You never have to wait long for a train from Currambine Station

Perth Transport‘s Currambine Station is 2.8km from our home in Burns Beach, and the train whisks you south to central Perth in 26 minutes and from there to Mandurah at the far southern end of the line; it’s $12.60 for a Day Rider all-day ticket.

Susan, Russell and family made the move from Joburg to Mandurah 22 years ago. When they arrived, the population was 40,003 strong – “We were the 003,” she says; now it’s closer to 90,000.

Sue taught in Mandurah for 15 years, and now heads up the English department at St George’s Anglican Grammar School in the Perth CBD (www.stgeorges.wa.edu.au/). But it’s school holidays right now, so she was free to meet me at the station and spend all day showing me the place that has become her community.

Teachers tend to know everyone, and everyone knows them. What’s more, Susan is a woman with wide and varied interests and a thirst for knowledge.

That’s how she knows all about this magnificent Morton Bay fig tree on Stingray Point, planted around 1930 on the site of what was to become the hotel Pensinsula, which closed in 2003.

It was another of those perfect mornings down at the beach – the infamous Perth wind hadn’t yet sprung up – and there they were again: hundreds of Chinese men, couples and families streaming down the footpaths through the dunes to the sea below.

They seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, and they were clearly on some sort of mission. The sea wasn’t especially cold that morning, though it can be here, and many of them were kitted out in full wetsuits, plus snorkels and masks.

Noordam Cruise – 14 days from Auckland to Sydney

What can I say about our 14-night cruise from 14-28 February on Holland America Lines’ Noordam? First of all, thank you, Roy, for organising it all and presenting me with the tickets as a fait accompli on my birthday in January.

Have you cruised? Did you like it? They – whoever “they” are – say that there’s a cruise for everyone. You just need to choose the right ship and the right voyage for you.

WA Road Trip: Part Five – Margaret River Vintage Wine Tour

We had two good reasons for booking a full-day tour: Roy was sick up and fed of driving, and I was sorrowful about having been driven past so many vineyards without stopping at a single cellar door.

Glenn, our guide for the day and also the driver of the 13-seater bus, arrived bright and early at our motel on a cloudy, cool morning that blossomed into the most perfect blue-sky day. And, with a total of nine stops between the 10am hotel pickup and 5.30pm drop-off times, our $115 each (including lunch) was good value.

Roy, happily positioned at the passenger door after five long days at the wheel

WA Road Trip: Part Four – Margaret River

Having travelled west from Albany along the southern coast of West Australia for about three-and-a-half hours, we decided (or, to be more specific, I requested fervently and Roy capitulated) to turn left and south to Augusta*, rather than right to Margaret River. Our destination? Cape Leeuwin, a spectacular spot with a lofty and photogenic lighthouse that dates from 1895.

* You can stop in Augusta for a coffee at the Deckchair (or Café Deckchair Gourmet), as we did, but be warned that if you order only one it might cost you $6 instead of the listed $5 price. That’s what happened to Roy. I needed to check my email, you see, but I was already jittery-full of coffee, and the minimum order for Wi-Fi access was $6. I suppose they’re sick of tapwater-sipping backpackers occupying prime chair-space…

WA Road Trip: Part Three – Hyden to Albany

Both Albany and neighbouring Denmark (50-odd kilometres to the west) feature picturesque bay after halcyonic headland after idyllic, white-sand beach, with one magnificent vista after another. We’d hardly driven into town before I’d resolved to come back here one day for a longer stay.

How completely different this coast was from the countryside we’d travelled through for four hours to get here, following the route through country towns Kulin, Lake Grace, Dumbleyung (watch out for the Dumbleyung Dunny!) and Katanning to the Chester Pass Road.

WA Road Trip: Part 2 – Wave Rock, Mad Dogs and Englishmen

I have no experience of mad dogs, but I do of Englishmen (being married to one) – and it’s simply not true that they go out in the midday sun. Not often, anyway, and certainly not by choice.

It was too early to check into the Wave Rock Motel in the town of Hyden (population 400), so, in 36-degree noonday heat, Roy drove straight through to the site of the famous rock itself, 4km further on.

WA Road Trip: Part One – Perth to Hyden and Wave Rock

Despite my being equipped with the latest, updated and fully revised Western Australia map book, Roy utterly disrespects my map-reading skills. He sneers when I turn maps sideways or upside–down, and rudely calls me Henrietta The Navigator.

A useful tool – in someone else’s hands, apparently

Western Australia Road Trip – Prologue

After three weeks with the family in Perth, I was itching to shake off suburbia and make a beeline for the bush.

In order to make this happen, I started speaking, in deeply wistful terms, about the simple joys of camping – how pleasurable it would be to travel self-sufficiently, to be able to stop on a whim, to cook over open fires as our forefathers did, to be at one with the glorious outdoors!

My Coral Coast Run, Perth WA

Nowadays, my regular morning run finds me on a stunningly beautiful trail along the southernmost part of Western Australia’s Coral Coast. So distinctively itself, it has an unforgettable sense of place and reminds me of absolutely nowhere else I’ve been or seen.