First Day in Western Australia

May 8, 1993

Mileage on Odometer after NZ: 2684.7

We arrived in Perth on an “Ear New Zealand” flight from Auckland in a venerable Boeing 767 at 22:00 - an hour or so later than planned; to us it was 02:00 Auckland time. A fine, warm, moonlit night. The signage at Perth Airport reminded us both of home and Heathrow Airport but it couldn’t have been more different. We were the only flight to arrive that late and customs and immigration formalities were minimal. There was no damage to the boxed bikes or searching questions beyond being asked where we were staying that night; we answered with the address of popular Backpacker hostel but we were expecting to hide somewhere close to the runway in our tent instead. ⊕
This excellent book sent us cycle touring to WA, and the Valley of the Giants between Denmark and Walpole looked like a good reason to start the Australian leg in Perth, his photos and route plans are great. I had insisted on emptying the huge Nepalese nylon kit bags a bit as soon as we got them from the Oversize Baggage conveyor to avoid having to turn all of our panniers out in front of the customs people, I at least wanted to offer up the flower press that Janet was carrying once I’d realised how hot they were on visitors bringing exotic specimens into Australia. They judged the poor little pressed plants as being non-viable and they let me keep my precious stock of spices and noodles too - we’d pretty much just cycled into the airport in Auckland and loaded everything into the two kit bags.

We were the last people to leave the arrivals terminal that night. While Janet talked to a tearful Swiss girl who had almost been strip-searched after not declaring her stock of sweeties, I hastily threaded each pedal back onto each bike, too hastily in fact because after a few turns of the left one for Janet I realised that I’d cross-threaded it, and couldn’t back it out with the little hub cone spanner I was using. Since it wouldn’t budge, the best solution looked like not pedalling far - we were both absolutely dropping from tiredness as it was. We pitched the tent about five minutes’ away from the approach road to the International Terminal in a dip screened by a row of bushes. Janet found the sodium street lights and the swish of passing cars reassuring, we both slept really well. We didn’t have a map of the area, but coincidentally we were only a kilometre away from the suburbs of Guildford and Woodbridge - all these years later we live just off the Woodbridge Road in Guildford. There’s no commonality between the places beyond the names, though, as were were about to discover.