Settling Down for a While

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  Busselton, Australia
Sunday, February 13, 2005

A series of fortuitous coincidences have come to my aid. The Internet station at the hostel in Bunbury kept malfunctioning, so I kept going back to the front to see if it was working. Then the guy at the desk asked where I was heading and I said I was going to Donnybrook to look for fruit picking work. But everytime I called, they kept saying, "call back in a couple days and things will be picking up, I'm sure," which I found frustrating. So the Bunbury hostel guy said "Oh, this guy from the Busselton Backpackers called me a couple days ago looking for workers for grape-picking starting Tuesday," and I said, "Is he still looking?" and it turns out he was so on Saturday morning I was heading, not for Donnybrook as planned, but 50 kilometres south to Busselton, which is actually better since I originally wanted to pick grapes and Busselton is on the beach, so in my spare time there's something to do other than stare blankly into the distance.

The ride down was better than the ride down from Freo to Rockingham, despite being almost twenty five kilometres further, because I wasn't pressing against the wind the whole time. It was south on the highway for a long time, through the tiny (and I mean tiny---the town centre seemed to consist of a town hall, a library, two houses and a public toilet) town of Capel, and then I took the "alternative" route to Busselton off the higway and onto a tourist drive through a lovely pine forest and a gentle breeze. The fifty four kilometres seemed to go fairly quickly, although near the end I wanted to stop and stretch every twenty minutes. It ended up taking just less than five hours to make the whole distance.

Busselton isn't exactly a big, jumpin' hot spot of a town. Its claim to fame is that it has the southern hemisphere's longest wooden jetty. It extends two kilometres into the sea off the sandy beach, which is pretty nice, and there's supposedly good snorkelling and fishing around the jetty; but beyond that and, as my Dad learned when he looked up Busselton on the Internet, a "butter churning museum" (fascinating!), there isn't much here. But the hostel is a little yellow house with a nice backyard on a side street and right now I have a room to myself as it's just me and the girl that works there, Alexa, staying there; she's very nice and friendly and it's good to settle down somewhere and unpack my stuff completely for once.

I start grape-picking on Wednesday morning, bright and early.

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