A short trip to Perth

I've been down in Perth for a few days for some medical stuff. Flew down on Monday, leaving Broome and 35 ºc, to a chilly 16ºc. But the sun is still warm and there are no sandflies here either, so that is excellent.

The op thing went OK, although I did have to spend a bit more time in hospital than I would have liked because I don't respond well to anaesthetic. And gives me a bad headache. But that's OK, its just one of those things. The cannula leaked this time though, and made a bit of a mess and the nurse panic, but it had a faulty cap.

I also had to stay put because, having been sedated and being on my own, there was nobody to collect me or watch me until I was fully recovered. But I was Ok sooner than they expected and they saw the sense of letting me go.

I caught up with Ange the cartoonist, whom I'd met in Freo a couple of months ago. It was good to see her and hear what she'd been up to.

And on her recommendation, I took the free bus to the City farm and poked around down there for a couple of hours. Its one of those surprising places, an oddly out of place rural cameo thriving in the midst of urbanisation. A scrubby misshapen sliver of land  belonging to the railway, once a mill site, then derelict, now a hive of growing, recycling, reuse and slightly mad innovation; it's great. But unlike the city farms in London, there are no animals, although four chooks rule the roost ( literally)

I got chatting to David, a volunteer who used to work in advertising in Asia, and who reckoned he needed to atone for past commercial sins by working on the land, although he ruefully accepted that he would still consequently be reincarnated as a cockroach for many lives to come. 

While we were chatting, along came Jack, a former Special Air Service bloke who had hitched and cycled through many wild places across the world and who now builds odd things, such as the world's most unusual pizza oven. They were both bemused by tales of my travels on Gerty, Jack in particular having driven most of the tracks I've ridden up. 

I love meeting people like them; people who have done interesting things with their lives but by serendipity, end up in the same places at the same time as me, and start talking. It is unlikely that our paths would have crossed otherwise, but they did today, and I am glad.

I was lucky too. The sun shone for most of the day, with a few isolated downpours, but towards the end of the afternoon, the skies really closed in and five minutes after I reached my room, all the water in the world started to fall out of the sky, and is still going now. A real tempest, which I hope will blow itself out by the time its time to fly back to Broome tomorrow.