Wanderung 33

Drive from Albany to Perth

We had to wrap up our tour of West Australia by driving back to a hotel we had reserved next to Perth`s airport, so except for a couple of stops to eat, we spent the day in the car watching the West Australia landscape roll by. As if often the case when we roam about like this, we found some unexpected things along the way. The first was an old Ford Falcon parked in our hotel's parking lot when we where getting ready to check out. The lady at the desk explained that the proprietor of the hotel owned the antique Ford, and he obviously kept it in immaculate shape. The second odd thing was a "telephone booth", which were quite common in my youth, but have become extinct as far as I know in the modern world of pretty universal cell phone service. Thus I was a bit surprised to see a phone booth beside the highway as we were driving along.

Another oddity in one of the little towns we stopped off in, was the Kodja Australian Rose Maze. Now I've heard of cornfield mazes, and English boxwood mazes, and even mazes where monks used to walk to gain calm and inner peace, but I have honestly never seen a maze contructed of roses. Consider also that West Australia is in general rather arid, so somebody had to take the trouble to keep all those rose bushes adequately watered, and there are quite a few of them in that maze. But I suspect that if you love roses, that is not a terribly onerous task for the proprietor to do.

I had expected the landscape to look more arid as we went inland past the coastal hill region, and that happened, but very, very gradually. The trees seemed to get both more scarce and somewhat smaller as we drove northwest toward Perth, but we never saw an area that didn't have trees both alongside the road and occasionally in the middle of the fields on either side of the road. The fields were however, all pastures or hay-cropping types of fields until we had passed the midway point to Perth, when the climate seemed to get slightly wetter and some of the fields were clearly wheat, and I think the winter wheat variety. After the midway point, the trees also became more numerous and larger, and we started to see some tree farms of what looked like Scotch pines to me.

We stopped after a couple hours of driving at Kojonup and visited the Information Centre there to ask about a place to eat. They said a bakery/cafe was just down the street, but they didn't mention that there were TWO of them, so we took the first one we saw. That was kind of a hole-in-the-wall dive, but they did have some food available.Monika had a small pizza that was good and I had a rather skimpy ham and cheese sandwich, and they were OK, but the second bakery/cafe we saw another block down the street looked much larger and nicer. Oh well.

What we did find in the Information Centre, however, in addition to some beautiful Aboriginal artworks, were some very nice tea towels with Australian birds printed on them, and a pillow cover with Aboriginal artwork on it. We thought the pillow cover would make a nice throw pillow for the living room, so we took it and the tea towels along with us as we drove onward. Some folks can travel and truly take "nothing but pictures", and we surely take a lot of those. But when confronted by truly unique things that represent a foreign country, we also try to take a few of those along as a more concrete memento of our wonderful times abroad.

Our second stop was Williams, and since we had only had a slight lunch, we we had the second half of lunch in the small "Rustic Rainfow Cafe" (the decor inside was basic but the food was quite tasty!). There I had a large beef baguette sandwich, and Monika had a chicken and mushroom pie, which made up for our earlier scant meal and kept us going for the afternoon.

Right down the block from the cafe was the old Williams Hotel, which looked very historic. Seriously, folks, take a look at the facade of the Williams Hotel and tell me if you don't itch to just run in there for a quick peek at how the interior looks and whether it in any way matches the classical architecture of the front! I wish we had had time to go inside, but we did not so if anyone reading this ever sees the interior of the Williams Hotel, please send us the pictures!

With the help of our Australian GPS, we found our way to the Quality Inn at Bayswater without a problem although we missed it the first time past because the facade was undergoing renovation and had scaffolding hiding it. Parking also was completely wonky, so we parked in front of a liquor store to sign in, and then drove around to the secure parking area in the back of the hotel.

We ventured out again to buy some rolls and meat for our evening snack, and found out that our hotel was right across the road from the Bayswater metro stop, which could be useful in the future trips out this way. But that was about the extent of my ambition after a long day`s drive.