I arrived in Australia at Perth Airport early on 9th February and picked up a rental car. My plan was to head south along the coast and then visit Perth on my return. The previous week I had been told that I needed to submit a US tax return for last year, something I wasn’t expecting. As this would take a couple of days, I looked for somewhere “cost effective” to get this sorted before getting heading off into wine country. I chose Bunbury about 175km south of Perth and checked into The Clifton & Grittleton Lodge. (I convinced myself I needed to stay in a hotel to have a good internet connection to do my online tax return – hostels tend to have notoriously flaky internet access)

The port city of Bunbury is the third largest city in Western Australia with a population of 75,000. It is the birth place of several well known Australian Football League players and Australian daytime TV presenters – other than that, there is not much more to say about the place.

When I arrived it was raining and very grey. (Great weather for tax returns)

One good thing about Bunbury was that it had a fringe festival on while I was there. It wasn’t quite Edinburgh but it gave me something to do in the evenings and I saw some good live music. My favourite was Timothy Nelson.

Needing a bit of a break from tax returns I set off for drive inland and found myself in Collie, an old mining town.

The Wellington dam was listed as one of the main visitor attractions!

The Collie river was very nice, even on a grey day.

However, the highlight of the trip was discovering Gnomesville, in Wellington Mill, on my way home. It started out in 1995 when gnomes were placed at a road intersection as a protest against the construction of a roundabout and visitors have added to it ever since. (The roundabout got built)

I also needed to find out if my dysentery had been cured. Registering for a Medicare number (UK and Australia have reciprocal free healthcare arrangements), getting a doctor’s appointment and waiting for test results meant I had to extend my stay by another 3 days. However, the sun came out (and the tests confirmed the dysentery was cured).

I visited the Dolphin Discovery Centre where the dolphins are very friendly and regularly come in to check out the humans.

I finally started running again and took to running along the beach at sunset.

Having spent nearly a week in Bunbury, I became quite fond of it. When the weather improved it almost reminded me of Miami.

I finally departed on 15th February and headed off for Margaret River.