In Fremantle Prison!

We had a sleepless night when we awoke around 3am to a funny noise in our room and discovered that a mouse had found its way into our food bag; a mouse, not even an interesting scavenging little Australuan marsupial - we felt cheated from some more exciting wildlife encounter! On the plus side, at least we're at the end of our trip now, so we won't miss the stock cubes and soup sachets it nibbled... We stayed around Dryandra woodland this morning and did a walk where we saw kangaroos, Australian robins and another 2 echidna. We have now seen almost all of the Australian animals we wanted or hoped to see in the wild - one exception being wild budgerigars (we' ve seen plenty of budgie smugglers but no budgies!). We also saw this sign "The Dream" (2nd photo), written by an early Australian conservationist and still so very true today - wise words... We then drove back to Fremantle and returned our hire car. In the 18 days we had the car we have driven 3,372km (most of it within the speed limit!) exploring Western Australia. Sadly, tonight is our last night in Asutralia and we are spending it staying in the Fremantle Prison Youth Hostel (no sniggering - we understand very well that only one of us is anything like "youthful"). It used to be a womens' prison (from the late 1800s until 1991) and the rooms are all converted cells; the interior of the hostel still looks very prison-like and there are stories up on many of the walls of the prison days, attempted escapes, etc. It is a pretty cool place to stay. In fact, we are kind of hoping that they will not let us out to go for our flight home tomorrow night...Read more