"shipwrecked in paradise"

It's always interesting hearing someone else's account of something you know well.

Rotto Bloggo is a keen reader of assessments of the beautiful island: are the things we take for granted boring, banal - banausic, even?

So we loved this young person's account of her two days on Rotto.

jo21 is from North America and her favourite book is The Great Gatsby. She headed to Freo from a hostel...

"I probably should have planned exactly how I was going to get out there though. Me being me, I thought there'd be loads of boats going out to Rottnest from Fremantle each day. Not quite...found I had to wait three hours for a ferry."

The way things are done on Rotto was a surprise.

"The pace of life on the island, as I found when booking up the hostel there, is significantly slower than the rest of the world. Back in Sydney I was left on hold for 26 minutes while I organised accommodation there. The Rottnest Island Authority is pretty much like the on-island Mafia. Everything is overseen by them. You have to pay $5 extra just to hire a friggin' pillowcase at the youth hostel. I felt sure I would wake up on my first morning on the island to find a horse's head next to me."

We mentioned Magnetic Island a couple of posts ago: jo21 mentions it as well.

"I'm telling you, stepping onto that island was like stepping back a few decades. It was pretty reminiscent of Magnetic Island over in Queensland. It's just a really good, wholesome family friendly place with no cars and just one fast food outlet. Big up to Red Rooster for bribing the Mafia into getting a branch onto the island."

However the luggage delivery met with jo21's approval: "I was staying in the only hostel on the island and it just happened to be converted from a load of old Army barracks. The pretty cool system actually involved all your bags being delivered from the boat to the accommodation, which was really cushdy."

(We're sure she meant cushy).

Anyway, then there was bike-riding, a dip in a bay, "enchanting" quokkas...jo21 then observed she was "shipwrecked in paradise".

We hear jo21 about the RIA. There was no spatula in our place a couple of weeks ago, but we were charged for hiring a couple of extra sheets.