Sunday 30th December 2007

Our alarm went off nice and early this morning, so that we could get ourselves ready and then go out for a day on Rottnest Island. We had some breakfast, got dressed and then walked down to B Shed, on the harbour, where we needed to catch the Oceanic Express. The queue was already massive, so we went for a quick look around the markets in E Shed instead. By the time we'd joined the queue and then got to the front, we realised that we'd not got our tickets - and so in the time it took Nikki to sort them out, we missed it! It didn't matter too much, another ferry turned up about fifteen minutes later.

The journey over to Rottnest was quite an experience. It's 18km from Fremantle and we chose to sit outside in the fresh air and regretted it almost immediately! The sea was really choppy and we got absolutely soaked by the waves as the catamaran cut through them. It was probably a good thing that we were sat outside actually, because I reckon if we'd have been inside, which was downstairs, then we'd have been underwater half the time. As we were getting off, we did see a lot of ill-looking people.

Rottnest Island is only small, but has about 62 bays and beaches, so we bought a bus pass, which allowed us to hop on-and-off all day long. We didn't see all the places but we did see quite a few places, and did the following things...

• Parker Point: We sat and had a picnic that Nikki had made in a little cove we'd found. It was a really beautiful spot, with boats mored just off the shore.

• Salmon Bay: We found some huge sand Dunes and after finding it impossible to read (because of the wind blowing sand in our faces) we decided to have races to the top. I was a bit mean to Emma, because I reached the top well before her and as she was struggling I threw myself at her - much like on an episode of Gladiators - before dragging her back to the bottom. When I did eventually let her get to the top, we had swimming races back to the bottom, which Nikki managed to capture on video... we look like a couple of crabs!

• We took a walk up to one of the lighthouses that are on the island, and then sat and looked out over Rottnest Island. Because we were quite high up the views were fantastic. We even seen some Quokkas, which are the small animals which gave the island it's name (people thought they were huge rats, naming it Rats nest Island, before it changed to Rottnest).

This afternoon, we were leaving one of the bays and thought we'd walk along the road for a couple of minutes, waiting for a bus to pass... but it didn't! I'm not sure if we'd taken a wrong turn somewhere, but we ended up walking about 1.3km back into the main settlement area... Emma was not happy! We hung around the little town area and had ice-lollies, before going for a meal in one of the restaurants - DOME. The meal was absolute rubbish! I had cannelloni, which I think was made of rubber instead of pasta. Nikki had a Caesar Salad, and Emma had a lasagna. They both agreed their meals were equally disgusting!

We didn't have long to wait for the boat going back, so we went and sat on the wall by the port. It started to get really windy, so we thought we'd go back to DOME for a cup of coffee - hopefully they'd get that right... WRONG! Emma's was ok, but mine and Nikki's was almost stone cold - it was barely warm and when Nikki took it back, the woman said it was as hot as she could get it... without burning the milk! What a wally. It's safe to say we'll be avoiding DOME for the rest of our time in Oz.

Apparently, the journey back to Fremantle was quite eventful, with people screaming and breathing into sick bags. I say apparently - because I slept the whole way. Only waking briefly to give dirty looks to some child who's screams were annoying me.

Rottnest Island was nice, but what an absolute load of rubbish DOME was!