Good Old Dawesville

I spent four days of last week at home minding sick children. (And every time I tried to use Blogger last week it was busted.  How dare this free programme I use not be available when I want it! What a flipping liberty!)  So I didn't get nearly enough exercise last week and by this week I was quite antsy.  I needed something faster than the usual stopstart stroll with Tammy as she pauses to sniff every bit of footpath grossness.  I needed something more interesting than the familiar sights offered by my local streets.

So yesterday morning, after finally dropping two well children off at school, I headed straight to a spot that I'd been meaning to explore further.

Mandurah is full of suburbs that have an older, established part and a newer, all-built-at-once part.  Some people prefer the old bits of town and some like the new.  Three guesses which parts I like. (I can't tell the houses in the newest areas apart. I have promised the children that if I do succumb and buy us a house in one of the shiny new suburbs, then I will help us find our way home by employing the same technique we use to help us to identify our belongings on baggage carousels: I'll tie a huge red woollen pompom to it.)

The place I headed to yesterday morning was Old Dawesville.  When I arrived there it was only 8.15am.  It was raining and cool and deserted and fabulous.  Due to an unusually high tide it was also somewhat picturesquely flooded.
 

I set off uphill. Old Dawesville has an eclectic assortment of newer homes dotted amongst the remaining original beach shacks.

 

 
Both sorts of homes have glorious views across the estuary and all the way to the hills many miles in the distance. (Yup - saw dolphins.)
 

 

Unlike the scorched-earth look of the new suburbs, Old Dawesville has established native flora and is heaving with wildlife, including a peewee casually pretending to have one leg,
 

 
a butcherbird that made me get a Leonard Cohen song stuck in my head,
 

 
and the biggest spider I've seen outside a museum drawer.
 

 
 I pounded down tree-lined pathways,

past washed up boats,

past the many picnic settings left on the shore - some now draped with flotsam and jetsam,

and some that had been claimed by the flood -

and past more birds.

I got a bad case of the "I could live here"s.

My thighs protested and my face turned the colour of my raincoat (raspberry), as it does. A kindly old chap used the flooding as a conversation-starter.  It turned out that he really just wanted to know whether the startlingly bright colour of my face meant I was likely to soon need the services of ambulance, as kindly old chaps often do.

I noted that not all the locals are so friendly.

But even so, on a soggy, foggy morning I decided that Old Dawesville is good. Very good.   So good I could even see why some people might be sorely tempted to spend several hundred thousand smackeroos more than their entire house-shopping budget to buy an uninhabitable asbestosy hovel there.

Mucking around in boats, again

A couple of months ago my children and I were lucky enough to be kidnapped by a friend and taken out for a day on his boat.  On a scorching hot and sparkling blue day we explored the beautiful Peel Inlet then cruised out into the Indian Ocean through the Dawesville Cut, negotiated swells up the coast to Falcon and waved at our host's wife as she sat outside their house overlooking the ocean.  Seeing Mandurah from the water gave me a totally new perspective on this place; it was an absolutely wonderful, "this is why we moved here" day.

So I wanted our recent visitors to also experience Mandurah from the water.  Their visit gave us the perfect excuse to try out the second of the three local boat hire options I'm interested in. (The first was kayaking.  We loved that so much we ended up buying kayaks.) This time we hired a pontoon boat and took ourselves on a self-drive tour of the estuary.  There are two companies in Mandurah who hire out this sort of boat to day-trippers.  We chose the company below.

As there we six of us I had intended to hire a six-seater boat but these were all booked up for the day.  Instead my sister and I negotiated an excellent deal on a far swankier and more spacious 10-seater boat - then my partner arrived, realised he and the proprietor had met and the deal got even better. There below, like a shiny floating patio, is the boat we hired for four hours.

We loaded our picnic, snorkeling gear, four cameras and a million other things on board.  We were given maps and various route suggestions, driving instructions and a safety briefing and then we were off!  We decided to go down the Peel Inlet towards the Dawesville Cut; we went via the canals as there really are some things about this place that you just have to see to believe.

We all had turns taking photos of each other,

and driving (and sneakily tucking into the picnic).

We cruised around spotting dolphins, fish and birds and admiring the stunning scenery.

At the south end of the Peel Estuary near where it joins the Harvey Estuary, we parked the boat, ate our picnic and two of our party snorkeled.

We had a tiring

but glorious day and hopefully showed our visitors one of those "this is why we holidayed here" days.  But much as I enjoyed this outing I wasn't tempted to rush out and buy my own boat this time - hiring a boat occasionally seems a far more sensible option. 

On the way back an example of boat hire option three cruised past us.

Yes, there are companies here who hire out houseboats - and other companies who sell them.  Given the lack of success I'm having on the house-hunting front, I suspect I'm going to be sorely tempted to do some major shopping the day after we try out that option.  I wonder if they come with trailers...

Pig melons (and Blogger is revolting)

Ever since we moved here I've noticed many different versions of the same curious sight: huge crops of melons left to rot on roadsides, in vacant sections, and tangled through neglected gardens. These pictures are of the bumper crop piled around the "For Sale" sign in a vacant section at the end of our street.

I suspected these melons weren't edible as nobody collects them up. Fresh fruit and veg is so incredibly expensive here that I'm constantly surprised that scurvy isn't the No.1 health issue, so I hoped to discover that these melons were indeed edible but the subject of an urban myth - like the glorious crops of feijoas I saw many years ago in Queensland that were left to rot because people thought they were poisonous.

The WA-set novel I'm currently reading mentioned "pig melons" so I typed that in to Mr Google who rather unhelpfully replied "Did you mean to search for Big Melons?" Er, no. It turns out that the melons we've been seeing are indeed referred to as pig melons. They are originally from South Africa and are now a rampant weed around these parts.

Via Mr Google I also found interesting accounts of people having pig melon fights and dropping them from great heights. These seem to be the only good uses for these melons as while they are not actually poisonous, they apparently do taste appalling - some accounts say that even pigs won't eat them. I think I'll just stick to buying the few species of locally-grown fruit that are in season, walking past the $18.99 per kg bananas, and occasionally paying $3.60 to treat the children to one small feijoa each.

(And if this post comes out looking all odd and spacey, that is because Blogger is currently revolting. Today is my second day house-bound with a sick boy and I finally thought I'd get a chance to put some stuff on here, but Blogger says "No". Maybe it is time to crank up the sewing machine instead. It knows how to behave itself.)

The children are revolting

As I sort through all the photos of my sister and niece's recent visit I keep spotting ones on a similar theme. My daughter and niece are both aged 12 and my son is 11.  They work hard at school, are involved in various sports and after school activities, lead fairly busy lives and are all growing like topsy.  By the end of a long hot school term my children were exhausted and whenever I quizzed them on what they wanted do during the school holidays they replied "nothing" or "sleep in" or "just muck around". 

But given that my sister and niece had travelled all the way from New Zealand to visit us in a place they'd never been to before, "nothing" wasn't ever going to be an option. I had a list! Thankfully our children were eloquent yet reasonable in expressing their requirements, and as a result we adults settled on a sequence of big day/small day/big day/small day outings with the odd nothing day thrown in for the children.

In addition the children occasionally revolted and stole some rather gorgeous nothing moments on those big days.  Some of these nothing moments are shown here.  The photo above is of my niece relaxing at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.  Below are all three children recharging at the Urban Orchard in central Perth after spending the day at The Museum of Western Australia.

Here they are enjoying a scenic cruise down Mandurah's beautiful Peel Estuary.

I have to admit that I had to steal a quiet nothing day alone at home at one stage too while everyone else went kayaking.  When I saw the photos that came back from their outing I felt like less of a wimp when I discovered that my sister had required a nothing moment that day too.

Technical difficulties

I've been having a spot of bother with the computer again. Early last week the computer got itself "cleaned up" and ever since then I've been unable to find, edit or upload any of my zillions of photos.  That'll teach me for going out.  After several hours of tinkering and a few scoldings from the children for having a pottymouth, I have hopefully got it all back to normal.  Right now I reckon I've earned a big cup of tea and a lie down, but soon I'll get back in the swing of popping those photos up on here. 

In the meantime here are a couple of pics I snapped last weekend in Dunsborough.  

We like Dunsborough.  It's a classy joint. Yup, that is gladwrap and condoms all over that car. (Siblings - clock the phone number. Spooky!) All along the side of the car it said "Off to the big city" where one can only hope that the owner of that car did not experience technical difficulties of any description.

Diurnal dilema

All my life I've lived fairly close to a coast.  My childhood holidays were spent twisting knee-deep while hunting for pipis at low tide and recovering from being dumped by waves at high tide.  I've snorkeled, swum, sailed, strolled, deck-chaired and liloed at coastlines in the Pacific Ocean, the North Atlantic Ocean, the North and Celtic Seas, on both sides of the Tasman Sea and at several spots around the Mediterranean Sea. Given that I have the rockpool-loving gene, I've also spent a fair amount of time waiting for low tide so I can peer into exposed watery worlds. Above are some other people I share that gene with.  A year ago we holidayed together at Waiwera and explored the coastline there.

So I thought I knew a wee bit about the highs and lows of coastal life.  Then I moved here to the edge of the Indian Ocean and learned something new.  It turns out that every coast I had ever been to had a trait in common, but that trait does not exist here. 

We discovered this fact after falling in love with the reefs and rockpools that jut out from various points along Mandurah's coastline.

After several perplexingly unsuccessful return trips to explore them, we looked up tide charts online.  Initially we thought a drunkard had plotted them as the scant and random predictions made no sense to us.  The truth is that the regular daily pattern of tide in/tide out/tide in/tide out that we've always known simply does not apply here. This coastline is one of the few in the world to have diurnal tides, or one cycle of high and low tides a day, whereas all the coasts I'd ever lived at or visited before have semidiurnal tides, or two cycles per day. 

Who knew?  Lots of people it seems, just not me (chart above from here). I was feeling a bit of a dunce until I met various locals who thought I was telling porkies with my crazytalk about places with two tide cycles a day.

I had hoped to take our two visitors to explore this coast's rockpools.  Sadly the tides are against us at the moment as low tide is currently falling in the early hours of the morning.  The shorter visitor is quite tempted by the idea of a torchlit midnight rockpooling expedition, but I'm just pleased there are plenty of other options here for making our own fun.

Visitors are coming!

This evening two visitors are arriving to stay with us for two weeks.  Yippee!  In preparation I've been ensuring the house is less of a health hazard and planning an itinerary for them.  We'll be heading up to Perth and out of town a bit, but the Mandurah-based part of the list reads like a brochure you'd pick up from the visitor centre.

We'll go on some scenic walks - that is Creery Wetlands above and Lake Clifton below,

admire the flora

and the fauna.

We'll catch some local wildlife,

and eat it.

We'll go dolphin spotting

and attempt to photograph them.

We'll cool down at the beach,

at Just 4 fun,

and at Aqua bubble.

We'll kayak

and hire a boat for a daytrip down the estuary.

We'll eat fish and chips in a scenic spot and say "This is perfect.  All we need now are some dolphins".

And then the dolphins will appear. (True.)

Heck I'm sold.  I'd go on holiday here! More houseguests are welcome at any time...