We spent today in Busselton, Western Australia. We saw a lighthouse (which just reminded us of home, where if we go down the street there’s a lighthouse, and if we go up the coast road to the Mums’ there’s another lighthouse), and a giant limestone cave. It was fine, but I noticed something interesting: lots of houses had fencing that looked like the corrugated sides of shipping containers. We saw the same on the train ride from the port to Adelaide. It seems possible that it actually is recycled shipping containers. In Abu Dhabi and Dubai, there were whole blocks of shops and small restaurants made of recycled shipping containers, so it’s clear that they have a limited life as shipping containers, and then get new life as building material.

In Busselton, we also saw a weird number of fences made of thatch – you know, the stuff that people make roofs out of. Bundles of either thick grasses or thin twigs (in Australia, it’s thin twigs), tied together. I was surprised at how sturdy the fences were.

I’m realizing that while the system of government in Australia is more similar to the one in the UK, and a lot of the language originated in the UK, the landscape is much more like home. Normally, as we go on various tours, we get the history of the town. In Western Australia, there’s no history before the 1830s. To the British, that’s last week, but in America, that’s on par with a lot of our own history.

To be honest, the best thing about Busselton was the fact that there was a grocery store three blocks from the pier. You know how you should never go shopping when you’re hungry? Well that goes double if you’re hungry and have an hour-long ride on a tiny boat with ninety other people. We carried three shopping bags of groceries back to the ship and looked forward to having fruit that’s not bananas, apples, or pears; vegan cold cuts and cheeses; vegan yogurt (or “yoghurt,” which somehow encourages them to pronounce it “YAW gurt” which is just weird); hummus and good bread; and licorice allsorts. That should get us to Mauritius, which, after tomorrow’s stop in Freemantle, is our next stop after an entire week at sea.