Adelaide, South Australia

We flew home to Adelaide from Perth on 7 March, arriving at sunrise. From the airport we went directly to the small warehouse shed where our few belongings have been stored since mid 2007, and where we had arranged to meet a removalist at 9am. By 11am we were back in Lee Tuan's home unit that we left 10 years ago and which has been rented out since then.

After living out of a backpack and hotel rooms since mid 2007, it's a novel and pleasant feeling to be back in our own place and not to have to repack and move on every few days. We are well settled in now although I still have 1.6 years of mail to sort and file! We'll keep this place as our home base to return to when we feel like a break from travelling. Like now. But we already have plans for later this year so the break won't be too long.

At 9.34 am on 22 July in Hangzhou, China, the moon will totally obscure the sun for 5.5 minutes, making this the longest total solar eclipse for over 150 years. Our American cousin Dick is a keen eclipse chaser and we have agreed to meet him at the Shanghai airport and accompany him on a three week trip in China, including of course a couple of days in Hangzhou at eclipse time. Weatherwise, it will be the worst time of the year to be in China but there's little hope of convincing the solar system to delay its confluence until a more comfortable viewing season.

After several months in Asia, Adelaide seems particularly quiet and sedate. But of course that's how many people like it, and the clean air and relatively sparse and orderly traffic are welcome. A chinese student once told me that when she arrived in Adelaide she was initially frightened by the absence of people on the streets, wrongly thinking there must be some sort of emergency situation and the people must have been evacuated. But she was reassured by others not to panic - this is how Adelaide is!

Autumn is a good time to be in Adelaide. The weather is pleasant and there are interesting places to visit in the city and surrounding regions. It often takes visitors' eyes for locals to appreciate what they have in their own backyard.

Pemberton, Western Australia

We flew out of Saigon early on 25 February, arriving in Singapore two hours later. There we spent a day catching up with Lee Tuan’s aunty and cousins. After dinner they took us for a ride on the new Singapore Flyer, Singapore’s bigger version of the London Wheel. The night views from the Flyer were spectacular; from the top, passengers can see not only the Singapore metropolis but as far as Indonesia in one direction and Malaysia in the other. You can’t help but admire the Singaporeans for the beautiful, clean, orderly and racially harmonious society they have built and continuously improved over the past 60 years.

From Singapore we flew on to Perth in Western Australia where we stayed for a couple of days with Lee Tuan’s uncle. We spent a morning at picturesque Freemantle, strolling around the well-preserved historical streets and stopping for fish and chips at a wharf-side café. Many other local and overseas visitors were doing the same.

With no need to hurry back to Adelaide we hired a car on Sunday and headed down the coast. Our intention was to spend a day or two in the Margaret River region visiting wineries before continuing on to the big timber country to the south-east. This is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots with more than 2,500 flora species, more than 100 of which are found nowhere else. Sunday was a hot day and we stopped for lunch on the grassy foreshore of Busselton’s glassy, pond-like Geographe Bay. We hadn’t realized this was a long weekend and the difficulties this would create for finding accommodation. We started making enquiries at the surfing town of Yallingup, and it quickly became apparent that finding a bed for the night wasn’t going to be easy. In town after town we learned that everything was booked out, with many places taking the opportunity of the long weekend to hold a festival of one sort or another. Yallingup was holding a Surf Meet, Margaret River a Wine Festival, Augusta a River Festival, Nannup a Music Festival and Pemberton a Cycling Classic. We decided to keep driving until dark or we found a room, whichever came first. But on the way we stopped for an hour just south of Augusta at Cape Leeuwin, the most south-westerly point on the Australian continent. According to a roadside plaque, it was from here in 1801 that Matthew Flinders commenced mapping the Australian coastline. We walked around the Cape’s impressive lighthouse, along the colorful rocky shore and past the calcified water wheel used long ago to pump water during the construction of the lighthouse.

Just on dark we found a vacant motel room in the quaint, small timber town of Pemberton. To set the scene and steel ourselves for tomorrow’s hike, we polished off a bottle of 2004 Tall Timber Shiraz from one of the local wineries. We spent the following day walking along a few of Pemberton’s beautiful forest walks that wind through stands of awesome Karri and Tingle Trees. Karri (an Australian Eucalypt) is the third-highest growing tree species in the world. At an age of 300 years they reach heights of around 300 feet and a weight of about 150 tonnes each. Tingle trees don’t grow quite as high but their girths are even more impressive, with trunks up to 65 feet in circumference. Photographs don’t do these trees justice – you need to walk amongst them to fully appreciate their massive grandeur.

These days the Pemberton region is increasingly well-known as a producer of not only timber but also fine wine. We visited a few wineries to sample their fare; the one that made the biggest impression was the Wine and Truffle Company. This establishment has embarked on a unique combination of agricultural endeavours. In addition to the vines, the owners have planted several tens of hectares of hazelnut trees, and have inoculated the roots of the latter with truffle spores. The result is a growing annual harvest of black truffles, a highly sought after aromatic fungus. The company expects to harvest about 800kg this coming winter. At a price to the grower of about $3,000 per kg, this year’s crop will be worth around $2.4 million.

The woman at the cellar door who served wine to us was a passionate truffle aficionado. Listening to her, it was obvious that her life has been transformed quite unexpectedly by the black truffle. Not so long ago she was a dog handler employed at the Perth Airport to sniff the luggage of arriving passengers for contraband (the dog did the sniffing, not her). Then she answered an ad for a dog handler position at the Wine & Truffle Company just north of Pemberton, and she won the job. Traditionally in Europe, pigs have been used to sniff out forest truffles that grow near the surface. But these days, dogs are considered a more environmentally friendly truffle sniffer. The outcome for the woman we met is that her job now consists of serving wine at the cellar door and ensuring the truffle sniffer dogs stay healthy and ready for action. Then, at winter harvest time she walks her canine charges daily through the hazelnut groves, unearthing the lumps of black gold that are mainly exported to Europe and elsewhere. She has also become an eager truffle consumer herself. She told us that about 20-30 grams of truffle need to be grated over a dish of pasta or the like for a great “truffle experience”. In her holidays she travels to Europe and seeks out great gastronomic moments involving truffles. This all sounded fine and the truffle obviously must provide something pretty special to justify shelling out $60-90 for what is essentially a mere garnish over the dish. It was very pleasant to hear how someone’s working life could be transformed so positively and unexpectedly, and how much she was now enjoying her job and was obviously so passionate about it.

From Pemberton we headed further south-east to the idyllic little seaside village of Walpole where we stayed for a night before pressing on to the equally idyllic small town of Denmark, also on the coast. There would be few retirement spots in the world more pleasant than Denmark and this fact has obviously not been lost on West Australians, many of whom have retired to Denmark to fish, swim and walk along the great beaches here. We hired a cottage for a night, overlooking the river, and when we checked in the owner urged us not to miss Green Pool at William’s Bay, that she claimed was the best beach in Australia. We checked it out the following day and could not disagree with her claim. The long, horse-shoe shaped beach had pure white sand and smooth, attractive rocky outcrops in and around the water that deepened rapidly from the shore. The sparkling water itself was the cleanest and clearest we have ever seen, and was a swimmer’s, snorkeler’s and rock fisher’s paradise. This would be a great place to spend a month, or perhaps years.

But our time here, at least this time, was limited and we headed on to Albany, the site of the earliest European settlement in Western Australia, and now a neat, manicured coastal city of about 35,000 people. From Albany we returned directly to Perth along the inland Albany Highway. The complete circuit had taken us about 1,500km through some of the most picturesque and unspoiled countryside and coastline you could hope to see anywhere. Sometime down the track we hope to spend a few years caravanning leisurely around Australia. Western Australia’s south-west region will be near the top of our list of places to visit first.