Saturday, January 29, 2005 (Perth - Australia)
Resting - whilst we still can. No savings - no
custom! Time for an upmarket hostel. New software for the laptop. Our favourite
little treat.
Day 327 (137). We’ve not yet started to
explore Perth or immediate surroundings at all so far. Perhaps this has also
contributed to the lack of any need for us to get out of bed each morning since
we’ve been here. Whatever it is, we’re both enjoying the ability to
lie in as long as we please. I’ve a funny feeling we should enjoy all of
this while we still can.
Other than
the odd day trip out of town, we really aren’t planning on going anywhere
whilst here in Perth. As such we had arranged to stay put here in this hostel
for the duration so as to take advantage of the cheaper weekly rate. We’d
already paid for the first three days but the reception staff had told us that
we could still get of that juicy weekly rate and save around AU$100 (€61).
When I went this morning to make the remaining payment for the week, however, I
was told that they would not be able to backdate the rate after all. This would
mean that we would receive no savings and I was quite put out by this. I told
him that the only reason we would remain here was to take advantage of the
cheaper weekly rate and that we would leave immediately is that were no longer
the case. Unfortunately, the drone behind the desk was a temporary myrmidon that
only had the capacity to repeat the same ‘rules’ over and over so I
decided not to give them the benefit of our continued custom. Accordingly, we
packed and left. As we left, I told the doe-eyed myrmidon to give my compliments
to the boss and to tell him that he had just lost five days rent as a result of
this policy. Whether or not that message made it all the way to the boss remains
doubtful.
And so, with all our bags
and foodstuffs now packed and locked safely away in the boot of the car, we sat
and went through the backpacker’s budget accommodation section of our
guidebook in search of another place to stay. With Sandy now getting up and
going to the bathroom fourteen thousand times a night, not to mention her
comfort to now bear closely in mind, I wanted to make sure that whatever place
we stayed at had at least an en-suite bathroom as well as air-conditioning. I
quickly exhausted all the listings the guidebook had to offer and then sat there
wondering if I hadn’t been a bit too hasty in getting out of the previous
hostel. It did, after all have, have almost everything we needed and was a
decent price, judging by what some of these other places were now charging. Our
only option now was to drive aimlessly around the backstreets of Perth in search
of another place to stay. Fortunately, Perth is riddled with backpacker’s
budget accommodations and we tried everyone that we past. None had everything we
needed and those that did were fully booked. Buggar! We eventually stumbled into
an extremely up-market looking place that looked like it might cost an arm and a
leg – which it did. Indeed, at a whopping AU$78 (€47,60), it was
well and truly outside of our grasp. To give credit where it’s due, the
extremely friendly and helpful woman manning the front desk did go out of her
way to try to call around at various other places to try to locate us a room.
She made half a dozen or more calls, after each of which she repeatedly told me
that she was very doubtful about our chances to find any available rooms here in
Perth at this time. Putting on my most pathetic and downtrodden look, I asked
(begged even) about any discounts for staying multiple days that she might
consider. The absolute lowest she could come up with was AU$70 (€42,70)
– which in any case was still well outside of our range. I was intrigued
by just how modern and new the entire place looked, however, and so I took up
her offer to ‘take a look around anyway’. Apparently, this place was
purposely built from the ground up to be a top-class hostel. The rooms and
en-suite bathrooms are well appointed and have much more in common with
four-star hotels than grotty youth hostels. Their kitchen is truly huge with all
modern appliances and plenty of smooth, metallic work surfaces. Hostels are
usually converted from a building that previously had a different purpose but
this place really does look like it was designed from the outset to be a hostel
specifically. There is a spacious Internet section with modern computers,
scanners, memory card readers and so on. There are comfortable TV rooms, one of
which is equipped with a large, flat screen, wall-mounted, plasma TV complete
with DVD and VCR and lots of comfortable couches. There is a dining area,
relaxing area, outside courtyards (one for smokers and another for non-smokers),
laundry room with plenty of modern machines and to top it all off, they even
have dedicated car parking spaces around the back of the building (parking here
in Perth can be a nightmare so this was a definite bonus). I was so impressed
with the place that I asked Sandy to come in from the car to take a look around
also. Whilst we were admiring wide-eyed at all the nice mod cons in this airy
facility, it suddenly hit me that we haven’t pampered ourselves for a
while. With that in mind together with a strangely emerging sense of wanting to
protect and take care of Sandy in her condition, I suggested that we eat the
additional expense and choose the remaining time we have here in Perth to
splurge a little in a more comfortable setting. This idea grew on us until
breaking point struck and I took up the receptionist’s offer to take the
room for five nights at AU$70 (€42,70) per night. Done! We moved in and
haven’t looked back.
A habit
that we seem to be getting more and more into now is buying several different
kids of fruit and chopping them up into a fruit salad for lunch or a quick
snack. Today’s batch consisted of watermelon, papaya, grapes, a banana and
an orange. Lisa is going to be so proud of
me.
Amongst the arsenal of stuff that
we carry around with us on this trip is the Apple Powerbook laptop on which
I’m now typing. This little gadget provides me with the ability to do
three main things: write my daily journals; manage our ongoing travelling
budget; and manage our digital photography library – which is quite
extensive. For the purpose of the later, I use a program that came with the Mac
called iPhoto. Even though it has it’s flaws, I find the integration
between iPhoto and our photo web site is extremely handy given the nature of our
travels. We’ve become quite fond of this little photo management program
and Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have just released a new suite of products,
iLife, which includes the newest version of iPhoto. Eager to get our hands on
the new software, we walked into the city to find the same Apple retail outlet
we past yesterday to see if they might have the new software in stock already.
It’s due to be released here in Australia today. We played with the
software for a while in the store and asked plenty of questions. Unfortunately,
we both seemed to know much more about the software, both old and new, than did
the store staff. It was actually quite embarrassing. Due to some sort of supply
problem, however, there were no copies of the new software available to be sold
so we had to leave empty handed. Perhaps we can pick up the new software when we
get to Melbourne in a week or so.
We
had thought about visiting the local botanical gardens sometime today but
finding and relocating to a new hostel drained a lot of time and so we decided
instead to just relax for the rest of the day instead – we’re
getting good at that now. We collected some provisions from the supermarket on
the way back to the hostel. Armed with the steadily growing knowledge that
we’ve been extracting from the various pregnancy books we’ve been
reading, I found we were both shopping more from a nutritious point of view for
Sandy’s health more than anything
else.
When we first went to the
supermarket on the day after we arrived here, we bought some puff pastry and
minced pork to make our favourite snack of homemade sausage rolls. The lack of
an oven in the hostel in which we were staying, however, had meant that we
weren’t able to make them. This new hostel has several ovens and so Sandy
cooked up a batch, which formed the basis of our dinner this evening. After
polishing off dinner, we spent some time talking to relatives online. I have to
say that the urge to tell everyone of our little secret is growing apace and I
found myself unintentionally dangling carrots in front of Ree-Ree as we chatted
over the Internet. Sandy thinks that women have a special in-built radar that
they use to discover that people are pregnant and thinks Ree-Ree might very well
be onto us by now. We’ll see. Now that we’ve had an ultrasound that
has shown everything to be as it currently should be, we are rapidly running out
of excuses to keep the secret going. Sandy wants to break the news on
Valentine’s Day but we will be back with Ree-Ree for a whole week by then
and I doubt we will be able to hide it, intentionally or otherwise, for that
long.
The rest of our day consisted
of generally lounging around the various rooms in our new hostel, continuing to
extract more and more information about what makes a pregnant woman tick from
the volumes of books we’ve now accumulated.
Posted: Sat
- January 29, 2005 at 11:41 PM