OK, so staying up until 5am using the internet wasn’t the world’s greatest idea, but at least it means I’ve cleared one heck of an email backlog and got to chat to a few of you!

I managed to get another package mailed home today. I hope it makes it. The last one I sent from Oz went AWOL. Australia is the only country I have yet encountered which has a postal service worse than the UK’s. This would be an impressive feat if it wasn’t so disturbing.

My plan to visit the Mint fell flat when I discovered it closed early on a weekend, so that’s something for another day. One advantage is that after I got back to the hostel I found one of those touristy books with vouchers, this one offering a free silver coin or something when you buy your Mint ticket.

I’ve booked a total of five dives over the next few days. On Monday I’ll do two off Rottnest Island which is nearby. Then on Tuesday afternoon I’ll get a bus down to Busselton for three dives on Wednesday. I was expecting to have to do two sets of two dives over two days, but the company there – Dive Shed – told me they can easily allow me two wreck dives around The Swan followed by a 50-minute dive off the Busselton Jetty.

These are two very highly-regarded dives. The former is a nice shallow wreck, deliberately scuppered on my birthday 10 years ago to form a man-made reef. The latter is the largest wooden jetty in the southern hemisphere, again built to encourage the growth of sea life. It’s 2km from land to tippy-most 12m-wide point out in the sea. Pretty impressive. And I’ll get to try out my underwater camera and case for the first time, too!

Hopper, the manager at the Witch’s Hat, was really helpful in sorting this lot out. Always nice to have staff at a hostel who really know the area.