West is (so not) best

It's our last week or so in Australia and when we booked our mammoth trip back in January we had a spare flight, so we whacked it in to finish our Australian tour on the West coast, in Perth. What a mistake.

I don't think I have any pictures of Perth (I nicked this one off Flickr - sorry to whoever took it.) And there's a reason for this. It's rubbish. There's nothing going on. The supermarket shuts at a 5 on a Sunday. And if you're the wrong side of the train tracks you'd be forgiven for thinking that you were in deepest, darkest Texas. The people are strange. It's weird. And I don't like it.

That aside, the YHA hostel is pretty nice and it has a pool. And yes, the weather is STEAMING. I'm brown, brown, brown again. So it's not all bad.

Anyway, Duncs and I took a 6 hour bus down the coast and spent a few days in sleepy Margaret River. That was nice. Except there's NOTHING to do there except wine tasting. And because I'm not drinking, we didn't do any of that. We just lay by the pool.

So anyway, we've been all like "it's cool, it's only for a few days and then we fly to China on Monday where it's cheap and we can be proper travellers again, whoopee!" That was until Friday, when we got an email from Ady asking if we'd had any problems getting our visas for Asia. Visas for Asia?

We need visas for Asia?

We need visas for Asia.

Yep. You've guessed it. We don't have visas for Asia. So we spent a stressful Friday in sleepy Margaret River, phoning the embassy, changing our flights and kicking ourselves that we now have to spend another 2 days in rubbish Perth. But it's all sorted now. Kind of. Tomorrow we'll get our visa and Wednesday we'll be on our way to China. All minus 8 degrees of it. Ouch.

In the meantime, the best thing I've got out of Perth is this book by Allen Carr. I was reading some book on how women are competitive (it wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know) but swapped it when Duncan magpied this at the hostel. I read it in a matter of hours. It's BRILLIANT. Allen Carr tells me that my fear of flying is totally rational and anyone who claims that they've never been a tiny bit fearful of flying is either lying or a fool. Ha. He then went on to rid me of my FOF (Fear Of Flying.) Bring on the flight to China on Wednesday. I've clearly been brainwashed and am totally up for it.