9 Feb Day 151 Darren befriends an octopus in Mandurah, we reach Perth and Darren goes off for a 2 week fishing trip in Cape York (Gt. Barrier Reef)

This was our last day together before Darren left to go on a fishing trip in Cairns that evening. A holiday from a holiday is how I described it. He was deserting me for 2 weeks to go out on a 64ft boat from Cairns, up to Cape York for a total of 10 days fishing. How could I have possibly refused him? He had booked it last February, while he was off work after his accident. How could I have told a chap who could barely speak that I didn’t want him to go and have fun for 14 days? I couldn’t. But that did not mean I was happy about being left in Perth for 2 weeks. FORTUNATELY my dear colleague from Sydney, Megan, who now lives in Perth, had said a year ago that we could put the caravan in their driveway while D was away. So we did this, and I put myself in her spare bedroom for a week, with a view to staying with my sister-in-law for the other week. But I get ahead of myself. We still had a day to enjoy, and after awakening at Martins Tank Lake in Yalgorup National Park (a heavily saline, very warm, muddily shallow lake with little to recommend it), we headed back to the newly opened Perth Bunbury Highway that now goes from (and this will surprise you…) Perth to Bunbury. It was fun watching our GPS having confused attacks as we, according to it, drove across fields and over rivers towards Perth. We soon realised we should have taken the coast road, however, as we decided to go back to the coast, to Mandurah, for a swim and hopefully a shower. Mandurah is on the coast, but is also built on a large estuary, and we bathed by the old Mandurah bridge. Darren went for a snorkel and later emerged from the river carrying a small plastic oar. He put it up on the grass and when we went back to it, there was an octopus beside it, which must have been living within the hollow of the oar handle! Darren took it back to the water, and then proceeded to torment it by filming its every move while he chased it in the shallows with his snorkel on. And people ask why we don’t have kids… You know when you arrive in a place and you just get it? Mandurah was like that for me, and it was fairly reluctantly that we left to get to Perth by the agreed 1 o’clock.