Had an awesome long weekend, I rented a car for Sunday and Monday therefore managed to get out of the city for the first time.

The weekend started as usual with Goon and drinking games Friday night in the hostel, ending with a vague memory of me going into town and a terrible hangover Saturday.

Sunday morning I picked up the car, it was a nice Mitsubishi lancer and was $150 (£80) for both days, it was a semi-automatic - which until I picked up this car didn't know existed.  I thought cars where either manual OR automatic, the shop told me it was automatic and it wasn't until I drove about 2 miles up the road in first gear that I realised I had to change the gear myself.  Anyway I got there in the end.

I asked around the hostel if anyone fancied a trip out and ended up with 5 of us on our way to 'Penguin Island'.  The island is about 50 minutes south of Perth and the island itself was only a mile or so off the coast, there was a 5 min ferry across (but some people walk/swim it).  Now I expected Penguin Island to have two things; be an island, and have penguins; unfortunately there was a distinct lack of penguins.  Apparently they are all out fishing turning the day so we didn't see any, instead we walked around the island and went to the beach there.

Monday we and 5 others went sandboarding on dunes about an hour and a half north of Perth. After that 5 of us headed to 'The Pinnacles' which are a further hour up the road.  Sandboarding was fun, but hard work walking back up the dunes.  The Pinnacles are loads of rocks which are in the middle of the desert, no one knows how they got there, we all took some pictures, seen an emu randomly walking around and we star gazed a bit after the sunset.

I'll have to rent a car again soon, travel out a bit further.