Saturday, April 22

We left the Britz outlet, and drove the car to Margaret River on a succession of highways: highway 4, to highway 3, to highway 2, to highway 1.  Our hotel was the modern sort, the kind where the person who would have been at the front desk has been replaced by a small box made in China, and the desk doesn’t exist, so both those guys are living in their parents’ basement writing comments on news articles castigating George Soros, whoever he is. Really. Did you ever hear of George Soros before he became the Go-To Jew to blame for the problems of the Western World? There were instructions on the box which kind of worked. Ultimately we got the pass code that would get us into our room which was very nice. There was a bottle of wine for us. The bedstands have coasters. They know their customer base.

We never drank the wine. We had wine with dinner. We went to Morrie’s. It is a popular place. This is a four day holiday weekend for ANZAC day, and since the restaurant is closed Sunday and Monday and for the Tuesday holiday — why do restaurants do that? the demand is peak at this time.

Sunday, April 23

We spent the day tasting wine at the wineries closest to Margaret River.   Leeuwin is a big name in the area, and had perfectly good wines.  We’d already had a shiraz from Voyager, and we tried a few others.  Redgate was a much more personal winery, the guy offering the tastes was the owner.  We’d thought we’d stop at Xanadu, but we’d really had enough, and just went back. Ray did most of the drinking, I only took tiny sips because I was driving.

“Cellar door” is the uniform term here for what Californians call a “tasting room”. I remember learning from my father, and who knows how the conversation took this turn, that some 19th-century literature dude had pronounced “Cellar Door” the most resonantly beautiful phrase in the English language. There was no mention of wine.

After we got back, we walked around town. We stopped at the tourist office and asked them about wine tours (so we both could drink), and they checked the Internet and told us that Wines for Dudes had an opening for the next day. They gave us a brochure for it, and also highlighted a bunch of interesting places on the map.

At their suggestion, we walked over to JahRoc galleries, which featured furniture they had made from local hardwoods, beautiful desks and tables and wine racks (along with other works by local artists). Unfortunately, Western Australia is banning the logging of native hardwood starting in 2024, and the gallery will be closing soon.

It was also interesting that the concept of “wine bar” didn’t seem to exist there. Maybe it’s a California thing. Restaurants with a fairly wide selection of wines by the glass is as close as you get.

We returned to the hotel and made reservations for the wine tour.

After we got back, we went to the Margaret River Tuck Shop for dinner, and were ignored for a good long time. Eventually somebody noticed that we had been lapped by other groups of diners and came to see if we had at least got a drink order in. Eventually one of the waiters explained that the printer had run out of paper just as our drink order was being printed, and got lost on the way to that little rotating thing with clips that tells the kitchen or the bar what’s up next. A little automation is a dangerous thing. Eventually we had fried prawns (complete with heads) and ceviche.

Do you eat shrimp cells? The older I get, the less patience I have for removing shrimp from shells and unless it’s really hard I just chew it up like a Chinese peasant. It’s only chitin. Today I learned, that the structure of Chitin was elucidated by Albert Hoffman in 1929, just when Alfred Kinsey was studying gall-wasps.

Monday, April 24

On Monday we were picked up by the Wines for Dudes bus. There were actually a few more female dudes than male on the bus. The “Wine For Dudes” tour guide, Jeremy, gradually devolved into talking about surfing and music more than about wine, which suited his clients. There were a lot of concert posters in the 1960’s fonts on the walls. “Wine for Dudes” sounds defensive, anyway; I suspect there is unspoken in Australian society the idea that dudes drink Foster’s. The clients on the tour seemed an ordinary cross-section of mature tourists. We were the oldest, but the others looked at least empty nest.

The first stop was at House of Cards, and at Gabriel Chocolate next door that was also doing tasting.  Tasting chocolate first is not the wisest move. Chocolate is actually a lot better than wine, and everybody knows it.

You can’t talk about wine, anyway. There is this whole alternate universe vocabulary. “Dark fruit” in winetalk is no closer to dark fruit in English, than “legs” are to legs. And the chocolate people next door talk the same way. 72% Madagascar. it was chocolate; we ate it (I got a cup of hot chocolate, too.)

Then we tasted wine at Skigh.  We then went to a small room in a large restaurant, Swings and Roundabouts.  First we were given bottles of Cabernet Merlot and Malbec, and a graduated cylinder.  We tasted each independently, and then made our own blend of the two.  After that, it was pizza, fries, and salad, and that filled us up for the day.

After lunch, we tasted wine at Montague, which had the best-tasting of the day.  The tour wound up at Beer Farm, but we were too full of pizza and wine to have any.

Tuesday, April 25

ANZAC Day. 108 years since the counteroffensive. Look for more holidays like this one.

It rained.  Also, we had to do the laundry, which was a little interesting in that the payment was done via ApplePay in an app.  We even set the temperature of the water and dryer using the app.  But it beat looking all over for change.  We’d arrived in Australia with A$100, and spent all of it except A$10.  Everything else was with credit cards, almost all contactless.

We then spent the day hanging out in the hotel.

We had been working quite diligently at using up the leftover food from the camper van.  There were still many Weetbix, so we’d bought milk.  There was still peanut butter, jam, and honey, so we’d bought bread.  We made it through most of that, and the remaining salami, cheese, and crackers, and cookies.  But there was still leftover rice, and there was still a bottle of wine we’d bought in Perth (and another the hotel had left for us).  So we went to the local doner kebab place, got a doner wrap and some tabouli, used the microwave in the hotel room to make some of the leftover rice, and had it with the takeaway food.  Not a bad meal.

Wednesday, April 26

It was time to leave Margaret River.  We stopped at Wooditjup National Park and walked on the Chimney Trail, through a lot of pretty gum trees.  We drove to Gracetown, which seems to be a surf spot, and walked to see the Philosopher’s Stones, an overhanging formation in the tide.  You have to see it at low tide if you want to get close. We continued driving to the Canal Rocks, a rock formation on the coast which has had “canals” created through it.  And we looked out at the ocean from the base of the Cape Naturaliste lighthouse. They have an ordinary metal chain link fence, but someone has cut holes in the pipes which act as a wind instrument in the perpetual wind. 

On the drive back to Perth, we stopped to eat at Flic’s Kitchen, a tasty restaurant in Mandurah. All these choices are powered by Internet sites, hence, google. They had an Australian take on Navajo Fry Bread. Scallops, swordfish, rhubarb custard tart. The usual. We continued to the Ibis Budget Perth Airport hotel.  I then went to get some cash for the Timor tour, and returned the rental car.  I wasn’t able to get as much as I needed, but figured we’d pull through somehow.  We got a few hours of rest before getting up at 3:30 for our 6:30 flight.

Thursday, April 27

It seemed to be a day of inspections, starting with the Uber driver who wouldn’t start driving until the little seat belt light turned off. Ray’s seat belt needed to be released and replugged, and that did the click, I mean trick. The Qantas terminal in Perth was very busy early in the morning, largely miners bound for destinations I’ve never heard, all around the west.

One of the X-ray machine operators pulled me aside for a Random Explosive Check. You can see her logic. If she had randomly selected one of the gilet jaunes in his fly-in day dungarees, she would have had to go through the whole rigamarole of patting down because miners and nitrate residue — but an American tourist, a swab, a bit of banter, and on my way.

Our flight was pretty on-time, and we had a fairly tight connection. We proceeded in Darwin to “International Connections”. Nobody else was there right then, so the security people could raise their thresholds. One guy looked at the labels of all the liquids making sure they weren’t more than 100ml. Another went through my pack, and wanted to rescan it without the bars of soap we’d bought for our friend Carla. And then the Immigration guy took a long time with my passport and asked a lot of questions.

We made it to the gate for our flight to Dili, and there was nobody there. No passengers or ground crew. The coffee lady assured us they would be there, and eventually, they were. We flew on an Embraer jet which was maybe 40% full, with 4-across seats which were noticeably wider than the 737 we flew on from Perth.