Smell that smell

Is it us, or does Western Australia smell bad? We can't tell. And it's been following us for three weeks.

It was raining the day we arrived in Geraldton, our first stop in 'temperate' Western Australia, and we had our car serviced a couple of days later. It was a big service.

And as we drove away the next morning, we smelled it. It smelled like a butane gas cartridge to me, or natural gas. Chris said it wasn't quite it, that it was more like durian. Whatever it was, it smelled bad, and it was only noticeable in the car. We looked. I pulled out all the snorkelling stuff, that wasn't it. There was no rotting food in the back of the car. We looked through all the boxes, under all the seats. We spent a good four hours unpacking and repacking the car.

We started noticing some odd things about it. First, we only smelled the smell when the car was moving. Maybe it's when the engine is warm--first thing in the morning, we can't smell it until the car starts. Then it's immediately there, sometimes very slightly, sometimes a lot. And strangely, it smells much worse when you rolled down the windows. It had to be something outside, maybe? But it's following us everywhere.

We thought some more. Is it the degreasing solvent they used on the engine? We washed the car, and used the low pressure hose to wash the engine again. The Smell went away a bit, but it was humid and rainy the next four or five days, so maybe the rain kept it at bay. Yep, that was the case. The Smell came back the very next week.

We still can't figure it out. But today, walking around the rainforest exhibit at Perth Zoo, we smelled it again. And now we're suspicious. It's not the car; this time the car was a good 600 meters or more away. It's this state.

We think it's a native smell. But it still irks us that we can't figure out what it is at all.

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