The Pinnacles

Part of the "tourist" visit planned for me was a visit to the famous Pinnacles, which was a few hours' drive away from Perth. According to the map, it was only about 3-4 hours' drive, and as we were making good time, my friend's husband decided to take the scenic route.

Sadly, we couldn't find the left turn that was supposed to bring us straight to the Pinnacles, and ended up making a loop. We ended up driving for up to 7 hours and we ended at the Pinnacles 5 minutes after sun down. Another lesson learned - the estimated distance on maps and road signs cannot be trusted...We scrambled around taking photos trying to make the most of the quickly diminishing light.

Amidst the scrambling around, my friend's hubby dropped his plunger for his camera. After the sun finally went down and we were making our way out, we saw an unusual rock formation that was just beautiful, and we improvised by using the headlights of the car to take photos.

After that, it was a search for some place to take dinner before making a mad drive back to our hotel in Perth. We found a student club of sorts nearby which sold horrible, but piping hot food. It was a long drive back to Perth where I fell asleep along the way.

Sorrento

My friend's hubby did some reading in order to plan for my visit, and was the perfect host not only in providing me with a beautiful place to stay, fantastic food and view, but also the luxury of having a "tour guide" plan my visits for me.

He decided that Sorrento would be a nice, relaxing beach place to bring me, but was sorely disappointed to find it busy and "infested" with tourists and holiday makers.

There were some pretty sights though, and the yachts and tourists were a welcomed change from my cubicle. There was a "direction pole" of sorts telling us the exact number of km from Sorrento to Paris and London. As if that made them more accessible...

Fremantle Buys

Like I said, I did some shopping at Fremantle. On my shopping list was to get knick knacks for my modernish Bohemian abode to make it feel more authentic, cosy and "lived in".

The moment I saw Freddie, I knew he was the perfect Bohemian knick knack addition. Don't you think? Doesn't he just look like a Freddie?!
















I also saw something that I knew my niece would love. Problem is, my niece takes after me a lot - we both like the same colors and the same toys and gizmos fascinate us. So my niece's gift ended being my new toy... Isn't it amazing? What is it? It's a clay toy that allows you to mould it into whatever mood you want:


Smile


Smile (again)


Pout


Uhm...

Fremantle Market

Upon colleague's recommendation, I insisted on a trip to Fremantle. Well, I initially wanted to make it to both Rottnest AND Fremantle. However, my friend did a search on Rottnest and was convinced it was a tourist trap. She and her hubby both had no plans to be trapped, so we made our way to Fremantle for a half day trip.

We passed by Fremantle prison on our way to the Fremantle market, which was just as well as there was quite a bit of shopping to be done before we made our way down to Cappucino strip for lunch and some coffee.

Purple Jacks

Apart from Hungry Jack, we saw a lot of purple "jacks" in Perth. Beautiful trees covered with purple flowers decorated the streets of Perth and were a sight for sore eyes. As we drove along, I kept looking out for these trees gracing the bleak Perth landscape.

Nobody knew what they were called, so I googled them when I reached home and found them in Wikipedia. Apparently, their biological name is "Jacaranda". And what keywords did I use to find them? "Purple Trees, Australia". As easy as that, and took me the whole of 10s to find.

Bondi Beach

These photos were taken at Bondi beach at high risk. Please view with appreciation and share (if you are) with care. *evil grin*

My Australian Trip Movie

So I have been in Bangkok the past 3 days for another company meeting. Out of the 3 days, I felt I needed to be present at only 1 - where I was presenting on communications plan and platforms. After that, it was more of a working meeting for the countries where a few of us regional folks did not really need to be there. However, the agenda wasn't drafted by us, and we planned our feedback, and promised to work harder at influencing the agenda for the next meeting so as to cut traveling costs and maximise the use of our time.

Upon my return, while trying to unwind, I thought it would be a great idea to create a home movie for my trip using my mac (since creating a movie was almost automated) and got started to work on it. However, for some reason or other, it refused to let me use 2 songs for my movie. The movie played well on my mac running on the 2 songs I chose for my movie, but when I exported the file to a Quicktime movie, it only played one song and ran the rest of the movie in silence.

However, since I'm pressed for time and have a hell of a work tasklist to follow up, in addition to the unpacking I need to finish after my move in, in addition to contacting my aircon installer as my aircons keep tripping, in addition to my renovator who mixed up my hot and cold water pipes, in addition to the my neighbour's upstairs toilet leaking down and ruining my paint job, in addition to the fact that classes have started for one of the modules of the Masters' course I'm taking - I think I will settle for this imperfection for the meantime and just post it up.

If any of you have the know how to save me some time so that I can fix the movie to run the 2 songs I have selected for it to run during the whole movie, please write me and save me some time.

(8 hours later...): Well, the video was taking a long time to load, so I checked. I nearly fainted - my file was over 400 MB. No wonder. Looks like you guys will have to wait until I have time to create the Flash file for this. Sorry! Will just do photo blogging first. However, blogger's photo upload seems to be having some problems recently...