Selling up

 08/02/2013
 A couple more boxes ticked as we prepare to leave Australia. We filled our carton with stuff we won’t be needing and posted it back to the U K. ( And it was bloody expensive!) No luck with selling our books , the one shop in Freo that looks like they will buy them all depends on the man that actually owns the shop and he wasn’t there. . We will try again tomorrow.
  The train service into Perth is an excellent service, cheap and regular, so we left the van in the station car park and went for a ride into the city. We needed to speak to the people at H S B C ( our favourite bank) about some details, and hopefully we got the right answers, we remember getting so stressed out with them nearly two years ago when we were trying to get our money from HSBC UK to HSBC Australia. It had  proved quite difficult and we got the impression they thought we were laundering millions of pounds, when all we wanted was our money to buy a bloody motor home. In Perth we found out about public transport to the airport, no problem, but finding a hotel next to the airport is a problem. We have looked on the shiny thing and not found much so we will drive out there tomorrow and see if we can book in somewhere handy. We could do without too much driving as the temperature is going to soar over the next couple of days, reaching 42 C. We think it’s going to be a might chilly in New Zealand!

 09/02/2013
  A very stressful day as we struggled to find any sort of accommodation for Monday night. We assumed we would spend the night in a Hilton type hotel at the airport with check in facilities. Not so. The nearest hotel to the Perth International terminal is some 10 to 15 K’s away and every one we tried was full. Full on a Monday night? It appears all these hotels have conference rooms and are constantly full with miners coming in for trade courses. Perth seems to have lost the plot when it comes to accommodating tourists. From the city centre there is limited public transport to the Airport. No rail link, a shuttle bus you phone for and one bus, No 37, otherwise it’s a taxi for $60.
 After driving up there and begging a room from several hotel receptionists, to no avail, we gave up and drove off to Rockingham to get rid of our stuff at the cash converter.
Once separated from our worldly goods we had a coffee in Rockingham then a beer in one of our favourite haunts in Fremantle, the Little Creatures Brewery and finished with a few cents change from the money we received from the sale of our chattels.
Freo, when we visited here ( not visited with! ) some years ago seemed to be the poor relation of Perth but since the mining boom in WA, has caught on quickly. It always was a really nice place but has had some serious renovation work done and now looks very prosperous. Hence, Little Creatures are now selling their beer at $10 a pint ( £5-70 in real money ). One pint there then we drove back to our van park, plugged in then wandered over the road to EDZ SPORTZ BAR, a typical Aussie pub where a schooner or two didn’t break the bank.
It has been a torrid day, lots of driving for not much. We have virtually given away all of the stuff that has served us well over the last 20 months and we felt stupidly emotional about it. No doubt we will be even more emotional when it comes to parting with our cubbie on wheels on Monday, well it has been our home for a lot of the time.
The one good result we have had  is to find a room via the shiny thing, for Monday night, it is a hotel in the centre of Perth. Tomorrow we may get drunk!