Day 9: The Turning Point

After getting a tip from another camper about where to best stay overnight without paying we checked those places out. We eventually parked our van at a marina, roughly 10km outside Albany, mainly because of the nice scenery.

And our fellow camper was right! No ranger was in sight when we woke up at 6am (!). No, we didn't get up this early because it's so much fun but to be safe. Those two times when we got caught by the rangers they showed up between 6.30am and 7.00am so we thought 6.00am to be a good time to get up and leave. At least the sunrise was quite pleasant.


Until noon we explored the town of Albany but there wasn't much to see. Albany might be the largest town in the region but it's still kind of small and absolutely nothing was going on there while we were around. We drove up a mountain to have an overview of the town which was quite nice but that was pretty much it. Oh, the only other highlight was me driving on the wrong side --which is the 'right' side which wasn't the 'right' one in this case :)-- of a 4 lane city highway! There was no other car around, thank god. I must have forgotten for a second that people here drive on the left side of the road.

In other news, we wrote our last two blog-entries at the Albany Mc Donald's. They offer free wireless in their 'restaurants' across Australia. But we weren't the only ones trying to get online. Along with us there were about ten more backpackers who wanted to use the internet - and only two sockets. So some brought their multi socket extensions cords and what not along with them. As a result, there were about 8 laptops and several cell phones hooked up to those two sockets which looked quite funny. The manager didn't like that too much, though, and nearly kicked us all out.

We left the golden arches at noon to drive back to Denmark on a different route. Of course we found a few more real nice beaches. One of which was a beach called at William Bay. What makes this beach so famous are huge rocks that sit right next to it. Due to their size someone very smart christened these rocks Elephant Rocks.

And the day was already over! We quickly drove through Denmark and looked at the waves of Ocean Beach (still very small) and then drove further along Highway 1 towards that little sh***hole I mentioned the other day: lovely Walpole. This place is too small to do any illegal camping so we checked in at a camping site. Not a good idea. There were no young campers around at all. Instead we found ourselves surrounded by a bunch of bogans :) Thank god there was still some goon left.


PS: This entry is dedicated to our two loyal readers from Melbourne, Kat and Chris. Keep it up guys! :)