PERTH

Flew into Perth the night of Dec 2, didnt want to pay for a hostel cause we landed near midnight so I found an open spot near the baggage claim to try a sleep a bit. The next day I took the bus into downtown and found a great hostel. Its an older building with high ceilings,a swimming pool, a bar, free brekie and diner too (if you buy a beer). Perth is a pretty cool city with a really big parks, and the weather is more moderate because its a bit further south.

Last weekend was great, I met up with a guy from Couchsurfing.org and he took me and a car full of other travelers from France to go to his cabin in some mountains for some fruit picking, swimming in his pond and gerneral hanging out (also tried a pretty good local beer Little Creature Pale Ale in Freemantle (near Perth)). We got to met some of his "neighbors" (the closest live about 3km away) so they could donate fruit and vegies for the sea shepard. The Sea Shepard is a boat that keeps an eye on ships that may be attempting to whale hunt and uses various tacticts to prevent them from continuing.

Heres what wiki's gotta say about it:
"Operations have included scuttling and disabling commercial whaling vessels at harbour, intervening in Canadian seal hunts, ramming other vessels, throwing glass bottles of foul smelling butyric acid on the decks of vessels at sea, boarding of a whaling vessel while at sea, and seizure and destruction of drift nets at sea."

So it was pretty cool to be able to load all this food onto the big black ship with white skulls and a helli on top at the steve irwin docks in freemantle.

Check out thier website:
www.seashepherd.org

Matt (from CS) is letting me stay at his house for a couple of days to save on $$$. Matt works alot in western australia to help with the green movement and the night we dropped the food off he went to some sea shepherd diner gathering. He had a coworker over the other night that was talking about just barrelly missing the opportunity to be in on a meeting with one of the guys in the music group Pearl Jam who wanted to know more about the western australia green movement. It was interesting to hear thier political views althou Im sure much was lost due to the political terminolagy, the unfamiliar names, the thick accents and ie's being attached to random words.

One thing they did suggest is for me to claim Canadian citizenship instead of US. They asked if i had had any troubles while traveling and that they have had some problems in other countries for the same reasons as americans do. I guess not many people have a problem with canadians so I dont feel as bad that every time an australian or fellow traveler has tried to recognize my ethnicity it was Canadian. I attributed it to MI being so close to the boarder but I guess when I actually say "cAAAAnaduhh" they pin me as an Uh-merrrrrcan.