I'm still in Margaret River, having a pretty good time. The weather keeps oscillating between freezing cold, raining and sunny and warm about every 15 minutes but aside from that it's really cool here. Besides, my car is up and running again - or at least it was yesterday.

The people in the garage seemed to be pretty embarrassed when I picked the car up, the mechanic shaking his head and saying that he really can't understand how he could have missed something that big and indicating that whatever he was talking about apparently was of the size of a small trout. Well, he does see to miss quite a few things (the fellow is not the youngest, you know), because, after I had driven the five meters to the petrol-pump, I discovered that the tank-cap was still lying on my roof! But hey, it's driving. At the garage they also recommended that I should get a new carburetor, but then said that it wasn't all that important and that it's not something that will actually make the car stop running in the middle of the desert.

Giant trees and a trip to the beach

After I had picked my car up again, one of the surfer-girls from the hostel persuaded me to take her to the beach. "Do you know where it is?" "Of course I do - I've been here for two weeks." We got lost twice ("Sorry, I'm sooo bad at paying attention!"). But it was all good fun and she's a great girl, so no worries. Unfortuantely it was pretty windy that day and the waves were very high, so that she couldn't really surf a lot. It was really tough weather, so I only stayed for half an hour, watching Diana and Claudia get wiped out time and again.

Since I had already left the hostel I figured I could just as well go on a little daytrip. So me and Esther, a non-surfing girl, believe it or not, drove a bit south of Margaret River to a Karrib tree forrest. Karrib trees are incredibly tall, slender and beautiful trees, with a very light wood and driving through a forrest of them just makes want to stare at them. It's got to be awesome going on a trek through a forrest like that - nothing but green ferns at groundlevel and the canopy 60 meters above you.

Where is Doug, Dude?

I think I should tell you a bit more about Margaret River, the hostel and the kind of people that are here.
Margaret River - or "Margaret" for short - is really a pretty small to almost medium-sized town. There is the main street with a supermarket, a video-rental, three cafes, two pubs and two restaurants (one Italian and one "posh"), five surf-shops of the kind that have permanent "big clearance sale"-signs fixed to their awnings, a book-shop, a book-swap, three or four shops where you can buy wine from the region (one actually called "Winos") a roadhouse (but we all knew that before) and a tourist information office. At the busstop you see signs for "free puppies", "direct farm produce" and "horse manure, 4$ for a bag of 16 pounds". It's small but not tiny, the sort of place where you go for a coffee and to shop if you live in the area, but not quite big enough to have a cinema. In the evening, big guys that have large beards and a beerbelly and wear shorts and walking-boots to the pub win playing pool against the surfers and listen to ACDC. And there is a lot of surfers here!

They are really a funny lot, surfers. Of course I've knows surfers back home, but I've never really been surrounded by them. They are cool and friendly and great fun to hang out with, but I just can't believe how obsessed they are: After a day on the beach these guys will actually rent a surf-video and watch it on the tv in the hostel. It's mad! Or take the two girls that went to the beach yesterday: They actually hitchhiked the 15 kilometers back to Margaret River from the beach. Hitchhiked in their wetsuits with two surfboards. Actually I don't know what I find more surprsing: that they did it or that they were picked up. And something else is funny: These guys here honest-to-god-seriously call each other "dude". And I thought that was just a vey bad cliche! But they are a lovely lot. One of them just came back from Kalgoorlie, where he was working in the mines for a month. The good news was that apparently it's not difficult at all to get a job there, even if you only want to stay for such a short time, and the money is really good. He made 1.000 AUD/week (after tax) operating some drill 200 km outside Kal. And since you can't spend money out there, you save most of it.

Yesterday we all went down to the local pub and had a great time. The band was quite good, though a wee bit weird: They were playing some sort of mix of Ska, PunkRock and Heavy Metal and they were doing that with a trumpet, a sax and a trombone in addition to the usual base/guitar etc. setup. Was quite interesting. Naturally we all got a wee bit tipsy as well so that I decided to stay another day in Margaret, just hanging around, writing into my weblog and realxing.

Jusht a tiny ship of wine, pleashe...

This is getting a seriously long report but I still want to say a word or two about the winery-tour we did the day before yesterday. It was actually quite good and probably good value considering that you get lunch with it as well. Given the choice I'd probably not do it again, though. After all, the tastings are free anyhow so you are basically paying 55 AUD for a ride around the wineries. And unfortuantely it is true that after the 30th wine, they do start to taste the same. But it was good as an introduction into Australian wines, so I don't regret doing it. There were two things I found very surprising about Australian wines:
1. Alll the wineries here are switching from natural cork to screwtop corks - even the boutique-wines!
2. They Australians mix a lot of their wines! Most wines here are not "Merlot" or "Chardonnay" but for example "Merlot Shiraz" with the first named wine being more than 50 percent of the grapes in the bottle. I can't remember having ever seen this in Europe. But when I mentioned it to a wine-maker he simply laughed and said "That's 'cause they are not telling you. Take a Bordeaux, for example. A Bordeaux is a blend of four different wines." He told me which ones, but I forgot all but Merlot.