Well, as is always the case, an extended period without much to do has resulted in me slacking on the blog. I spent another few days kicking around Perth, not doing much, but did manage to get my tire situation sorted. Then it was time to head south. SCUBA at the Busselton jetty was really, really fun. It was a bit of a production renting the gear, getting our waivers sorted, and getting out to the dive spot, but the dive itself was just beautiful. It’s delightfully simple, just swimming out and back around and between the supports of this jetty. The pillars are covered in all kinds of incredibly colorful coral, which was a nice change of pace from the less colorful hard corals that I’d seen up around Exmouth. We also saw some fun critters, including an octopus and a couple of cuttlefish.

The next day I kept moving south, down to the Margaret River area. Margaret River is famous for two things—surfing and wine. While these are both things I enjoy, unfortunately in this case things worked out such that I didn’t partake in either. While the surf is world famous in Margaret River that doesn’t mean that it’s especially accessible to a mediocre-at-best surfer like me. There was pretty much no swell when I was there, which meant that the spots that I could conceivably have tried to surf were flat, and the spots that had waves were either overrun with hordes of much better surfers than me, breaking in two inch deep water over sharp reef, or both. So I drove around peeking at all the pretty beaches and cursing the frustration of being a casual surfer. As for the wine, going tasting is fun in a group but not especially fun or practical by yourself, so I skipped it.

I was very tired from a couple nights of short sleep, perfectly primed to get cranky. Which is exactly what happened as I started to realize I wasn’t going to be able to surf, and on top of that found out that, like all touristy places, Margaret River is pretty aggressive about squeezing out every last dollar and not letting you float around and free camp and whatnot. So I was in a bit of a foul mood when I mercifully found a national park campground (still more expensive than the standard ones, annoyingly) nestled in a beautiful area of Karri forest. Karris are a type of eucalyptus found around the southwest that grow very tall. After so much time in desert and scrubland it felt amazing to wander into real, bonafide forest. So after a good night’s sleep I kicked the crankiness and spent a couple of nice days relaxing and checking out the forest. I also discovered that this area has a huge network of caves, two of which I toured. They were spectacular!

After that I came back up to Perth to have someone investigate the intermittent check engine light I’ve been seeing on the van, which turned out to be nothing serious. On the way up I stopped in Bunbury to check out the dolphin discovery center, where you can stand in a shallow bay and the resident dolphins may or may not swim right up to you. As you can see in the videos the visibility was unfortunately terrible, but you could clearly see them above the surface, and it was a cool experience.

For this second stint in Perth I finally looked for a pickup soccer game, and have now gotten to play a couple of times. I have to say, it feels absolutely incredible. For weeks, if not months, I’ve been thinking about how much I miss playing sports. Getting back out there for the first time was honestly just bliss. I’ve tried to figure out what it is about playing ball sports that I love so much, even when I’m doing other fun things. My guess is that it’s the flow state combined with pushing myself to physical exhaustion. I love the feeling of running as fast as I can, stretching as far as I can, jumping as high as I can. And I love the total concentration that sports require, absolutely all of my attention focused on the movement of the players, where the ball is, “watch that run!”, no space for thinking about anything else.

So that’s pretty much where we’re at. I’ve made a couple of friends in Perth so I’m hanging around for a bit. I may do another little mini-trip to check out some of the other nice places further south and then come back, or I may just stay here another week and then start the full on eastward journey. You can find videos for this post here.