Perth (7 nights)

It is strange being back in a big city after so many months in pretty isolated places and only the occasional town (even Darwin isn’t really that big).  The price of food and fuel has dropped dramatically and there is more selection in everything.  We are in a camping ground 10km south of Fremantle, adjacent to the Woodman Point Regional Park which is a woodland area full of walking/cycling tracks, playgrounds and a jetty off the beach.  It used to be a munitions storage area after the war with the old ‘sand bag’ bunds still there, albeit the bags have disintegrated leaving cemented contents.  There are a few kids staying here so the boys have been having some fun.  A troop of them found some broken up pallets out the back where the caretaker keeps his mulch etc and made a bike balancing course.  I kept waiting for him to come along and tell them off but he hasn’t so far….unlike the City Of Melville Council who, as reported on the front page of the local rag, dismantled a similar set up made by local kids on a corner reserve.  A neighbour dobbed them in, the council CEO stating that “On assessment, the unauthorised structures were deemed to present public safety concerns”.

We have been busy visiting various attractions and smooching around Fremantle.  The Maritime Museum included a tour through the decommissioned HMS Ovens submarine, very confined spaces and tiny beds.  The shipwreck exhibitions are housed in the old Maritime Museum and these are really interesting, so many wrecks on the western coast due to proceeding too far east before turning north to Jakarta.  Part of the Batavia is there with some of the treasure found, what a gruesome story that is!

Inside HMS Ovens submarine

The Perth zoo was worth a visit, love those meerkats!  Unfortunately we didn’t get to see some of the elusive Australian wildlife that we didn’t see in the wild, like quolls and numbats, they remained elusive at the zoo!  But we did see others such as the frilled neck lizard that are hard to find in the wild.

Meerkat on the lookout- cute!!

We checked out Kings Park on Sunday morning, it was a sunny day and it seemed all the young families in Perth were at the Synergy Playground, a massive play area that the boys assessed as being for “little kids”.   The Botanic Gardens are also in Kings Park so checked them out too.  Then off to the Perth Mint, they don’t make coins for circulation any longer but make coins for collectors.  There was a gold bar pouring demonstration, they have been melting and pouring the same bar for 20 years, about 5 times a day and it still weighs the same!.  They had some replica gold nuggets found in Australia in the past, the last being found in the 1980 and weighed around 30kg.

Botanic gardens display of Everlasting daisies

the boys holding the massive gold nuggets, wishing they were real!

Yesterday the boys went to an aquarium at Hillarys boat harbour and I biked to Fremantle then got the train into the central city (ended up in the basement of a car park building looking at parking monitoring equipment after asking a parking warden about the system they use!).

Today is our last day so we went into Fremantle for a last smooch, love the old buildings and narrow streets, cafes galore and quirky shops!  Start the last leg of the trip tomorrow, first stop Brusselton.

love this old ad for Swan Lager on the side of the old pub shown below

great bookshop in Freo