The planned early start went astray as neither of us was in a hurry to get out of bed. We eventually made it into Fremantle in search of Wi-Fi in order to check whether the Land Rover was on schedule, and finding that the library provides free access we setup inside. Unfortunately the vehicle track put the ship off the south coast of Australia, with at least another couple of days to go. Skyping the shipping agent in Sydney confirmed that the ship had been delayed and was now due in on Friday. Somewhat put out (I’m beginning to think we could have paddled the Land Rover to Australia faster), we resigned ourselves to not getting the van until next week and set about making any arrangements we could in order to smooth the retrieval process when the ship finally decides to arrive.
Annoyingly, we were told by the shipping agent that we had to present our carnet at the customs office by the airport, not the one in Fremantle. The airport is about 30 minutes drive away, and taxis will happily take $50+ dollars from you for the pleasure of taking you up there, then the same to come back. With this in mind we bit the bullet and decided that a hire car was a better option, and used a local company with the logo “No birds!” applied to each of their cars - Anne wasn’t sure what they were getting at. It took a second to realise that the white Toyota Corolla presented to us was automatic, but luckily I could remember what to do, so off we went to the airport and arrived back almost 24 hours after we had been there previously.
Customs were really efficient and had the carnet stamped in about five minutes, then they directed us across the road to the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service (AQIS) in order to arrange for the inspection of the vehicle. Again, this all seemed to go smoothly, although they did ask us for the inspection location which was a bit worrying as our shipping agent had asked us to ask AQIS this very same question, so we let them pick a site from their list. We paid our $150 inspection fee and headed off to the company nominated by AQIS for the inspection location, Coote Logistics, in order to check they could take the job.
A quick tour around Fremantle docks and a helpful lorry driver later had us at the Coote office, where a nice ex-pat from Devon told us that they didn’t handle personal shipments, but their office in O’Connor does. She told us to speak to Jan, another ex-pat (is there anyone Australian in Perth?). We dashed over to O’Connor, a district to the east of Fremantle, to catch Jan before 5pm, which is the time everything seems to shut in Australia. Jan was still there and was most interested in our adventures as she emigrated to Australia with her husband some 30 years ago, driving an Austin Princess overland to get there. Yes, they could take the job, but they would need the Delivery Order from the shipping agent before they could arrange collection of the container from the wharf (once it finally arrives) and transport it to their yard to be unpacked and inspected by AQIS. She prepared us for possible delays in proceedings, and apologised as she added various fees to their quote, but we’ve leant the hard way that shipping stuff is never as cheap as first told.
By this time Anne’s hunger pangs required attention (I find it’s best never to ignore them), so pizza from the place on the corner by the cottage was purchased, with one large supreme and some salad seeing us through the crisis. Oh, there are British ex-pats in the pizza place too...
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