Our WA Trip - Part Three - Perth

OK, time to pick up the threads of our WA adventure. First off, I re-read last night's post and now realize how tired I must have been - I didn't include the links to any of the pics I've taken on this trip! They're in four different albums:

Adelaide
Western Australia - Part One
Western Australia - Part Two
Western Australia - Part Three

The pics that go with this section of the story are in "Western Australia - Part One". I last left the tale on the train platform in Perth, where Jen and I met Pat and Rob, who were kind enough to give us a place to stay while we were in town. I really can't stress enough how wonderful it was to have someone waiting for us at that station! Looking back, I think I was more tired coming off the Indian Pacific train than I was getting off the plane from Canada. Yikes. On the other hand, maybe this train experience will make my flight home seem short. Who knows?

Pat and Rob were eager to show us around Perth, so they offered to take us on a bit of a scenic route on the way back to their place for lunch. It was ridiculously hot, so we were glad to view the city from the comforts of an air-conditioned, tinted-window car, as opposed to hoofing it around on foot. They drove us up to Kings Park, a huge and beautiful greenspace that overlooks downtown Perth. We walked to one lookout where I took a few good pictures of the city, but we couldn't stay out in the sun for more than a few minutes because of the heat. Then we took a short walk down one of the nature trails and over this cool elevated walkway. Basically it was a bridge that spanned a dip in the landscape, but the effect was that you suddenly found yourself walking through the treetops as the land fell away beneath our feet. It was pretty neat. But even that short walk left all of us drained because of the heat, and soon we headed back to the car.

Pat and Rob tried to point out other interesting sights as we drove towards their house, but unfortunately neither Jen nor I were really able to absorb any of it - we were simply too tired! I know I was fighting just to stay upright in the back seat of the car, let alone stay awake. I think Jen might have had to poke me when we got to Pat and Rob's house. Once we got home, Pat made us lunch while Jen and I threw a load of laundry in (we'd only brought minimal clothes with us so any chance to do laundry, we took it!). After the lunch and the laundry were done, Jen and I both crashed on our beds (Pat and Rob have two spare rooms, so we didn't even have to share!) and took a nap. I guess Jen must've woken up before me - she basically came and woke me up for dinner! Methinks I was a wee bit tired. :-) However, after the days on the train, being able to stretch out on a real bed was such a luxury, I enjoyed every minute of it!

Pat and Rob have a very cute, fluffy white dog named Kobe. After dinner, since we hadn't done any real exercise all day, Jen and I took Kobe for a walk around the neighborhood to stretch our legs. It was still too hot to go far, but we did a little exploring and tried to get Kobe to run with us across the nearby cricket oval. Not so much. He was happy to walk along with us, but didn't seem to understand that he could run around off his leash on the oval! Or maybe he was just too hot. When we took him off his leash, he kept turning for home. So home we went. And back to bed! And that's how we spent our first day in Western Australia!

I can't tell you how good it felt to sleep in a real bed. One of my goals for this whole Australia trip was to become more thankful/appreciative of what I have. Let me tell you - that train ride sure made me appreciate a real bed! (You know - the horizontalness, the softness, the pillow, the ability to actually stretch out...) I didn't really want to get up, and neither did Jen, but we only had a few days to explore Perth, and a ton of things on our list, so we had to get going.

We caught the train downtown to do some wandering around. I've been on transit systems in a number of different cities, and Jen of course has had the luxury of traveling in many different countries, and we both agreed - the trains in Perth are AWESOME. They're bright, clean, new, fast, and with an easy-to-understand ticketing system. I'm pretty sure the train line we were on was the newest in the network, but that hardly mattered. It was a wonderful system to ride on. On top of that, Perth has a network of free "CAT" (Central Area Transit) buses that circulate through the downtown core. FREE! What a concept! The CAT bus stops tracked the buses electronically, so you could press a button and it would tell you how long until the next bus. Very cool. So yeah, to put it mildly, we liked the Perth public transit system a lot. We didn't get lost on it once! (More than I can say for, oh, Sydney... or Melbourne...)

Downtown Perth was bustling full of people, which was a nice change after the emptiness of Canberra and Adelaide. Our first stop was the information centre, so we could get maps to find our way northward to Monkey Mia in a few days' time. Then we were off to find the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Jen and I agreed that so far, this had been our favourite art gallery. It was just the right size! We toured the whole building in just a couple of hours and didn't emerge feeling completely overwhelmed by everything that we'd seen. We really liked the works by James Angus, who had a special exhibition going on. He does all these crazy surreal sculptures, where he takes ordinary items and represents them in new and intriguing ways. For example, he had a sculpture called "Basketball Dropped From 30,000 Feet". And that's exactly what it was - a stone sculpture of a basketball as it would look when it hit the ground after such a fall. There was also a bicycle which, upon first inspection, looked completely ordinary. However when you looked at it more closely, you realized that everything (and I mean everything) on the bike had been repeated three times... it was almost as if you were looking at 3 identical bikes, overlapping each other as if it was one image only slightly out of focus. Hard to explain but very cool. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos in the art gallery, so you'll just have to take my word for it. It was neat.

We sat in a courtyard just outside the art gallery to enjoy lunch, then wandered right next door to the Western Australian Museum. This was also very well done. I know I've said it before, but we've yet to come across a museum in this country that we haven't enjoyed. There were great displays on minerals, meteorites, fossils, and local Aboriginal history. Not surprisingly, I loved the dinosaur models that were in one of the main galleries - they were so lifelike! Jen and I emerged from the museum in the late afternoon, feeling like our brains were about to explode from all the information we'd tried to cram inside.

It wasn't quite time to head back out to Pat and Rob's, so we wandered back around the downtown shopping district a little bit more. We were especially enchanted by the arcades in Perth. I don't think I've quite explained arcades yet. I'm not talking about shops with a bunch of video games inside. In all the Australian cities I've explored, the downtown shopping area is riddled with these narrow streets between main buildings, that run all the way from one big city block to the next. At home in Canada, such places would be simple alleyways and not very exciting. Here, they're full of shops and cafes and people. In Perth there's a particularly cool one called the London Arcade. After stepping through an ornate archway, looking down the length of the arcade to the other side, you'd swear you'd somehow been transported to England. My guess is that store locations in these arcades is at a premium, 'cause I sure couldn't afford most of the goods shown in the windows!

We finally headed back to Pat and Rob's house for another yummy dinner. They're both vegetarian and everything Pat fed us was simply delicious. After dinner, Jen and I helped Rob do a little bit of planning - he and Pat are hoping to come to Canada in a couple of years and travel across the country by train. So we gave them what advice we could, and volunteered our parents' houses (hee hee!) as places to stay along the way, should they so desire.

January 10th was to be our last day exploring Perth before we took off to drive northwards. The first thing we did that morning was to head back to downtown via the train, so we could pick up our rental car for the next stage of our adventure. We rented a bright orange Kia Rio (we named her "Mia" almost immediately) - and she was a standard car! I've never driven a standard before. But it was less expensive to rent a standard car, and Jen convinced me that now was the time to learn! We agreed that she would do all of the big-city driving, and that I would get to practice once we were well away from other vehicles.

We drove north about 15kms out of the city to visit the Aquarium of Western Australia (AQWA). This aquarium is smaller than the one in Sydney but more expensive! On the other hand, this aquarium is dedicated exclusively to the waters off of Western Australia, and had good displays on the various underwater environments that can be found along the state's length. We learned that AQWA has the largest collection of live corals to be found anywhere in the world. Almost all of their tanks depicting scenes from various coral reefs had live corals instead of just models, as is the usual practice. Their Shipwreck Cove exhibit was also really cool. This is their largest tank, and you travel through a long Plexiglas tunnel, watching the sharks, rays and fish swimming by on both sides and overhead. The tunnel is a loop so you end up coming out where you went in, and there's a long rock down the middle of the tank so you can't see the people on the other side of the loop as you go along. Also, there's a slow-moving conveyor belt in the floor, so all you have to do is stand still and the belt takes you all the way around! What a clever way to eliminate pushing, shoving, and "hogging" of good vantage points. We went around twice. :-)

Jen was more than a little disturbed by the "Danger Zone" exhibit, with displays on all the different fun animals in Australian waters that can hurt/kill you. I enjoyed watching the seals and rays in the outdoor exhibits. But, not surprisingly, there were about eighty billion kids and families at the aquarium, and there got to a point where we really needed to leave.

AQWA is situated at Hilary's Boat Harbour, and there are all sorts of fun shops along the quay. We browsed in those for a while, and then wandered across the Harbour to the Naturaliste Marine Discovery Centre. This is a research institution, but it also has informative displays on local marine life, fisheries, and environmental issues. Admission was only $4 and we found the information in the displays much more useful than what was at AQWA! (To be fair, AQWA is aimed at families and kids, and the Discovery Centre was definitely aimed at adults.) We learned about the Western Australian pearling and rock lobster industries, tried on a deep-water diving helmet, and explored a fun touch pool. Pretty neat!

Our last stop was a dive shop at the very end of the Harbour. We originally went in looking for one of those laminated underwater guides to local fish, as we were planning on going snorkeling. But the real find there were "rashie" shirts. These are Lycra shirts worn by surfers and snorkelers to protect them from sunburn. The ones we were looking at had an SPF of over 50! The dive shop had some really cute ones on sale (they fit Jen, of course, but not me) - but we were running out of time and needed to head back to Pat and Rob's for dinner, so we resolved to stop by on our way north in the morning.

After dinner, Jen took me out in the car and taught me how to drive a standard. This was an adventure in itself. I now understand why Jen and Vicky sit so darned close to the steering wheels in their cars... it's in order to be able to reach the clutch! I found it strange sitting so close to the wheel, but I got used to it. And I think I only gave Jen a minor case of whiplash as I tried to figure out how to get the car to "go" into first gear. She said that I picked it up a whole lot faster than she expected, but let me tell you, it was a little scary trying to figure out how to shift gears and brake without stalling the car! I was glad that I wouldn't have to drive in the city, at least on this trip. But hey - if I can get comfortable with a standard car, then I can buy a standard when I get home and save myself some serious dough. I think that the locals in Pat and Rob's suburban neighbourhood must've thought we were crazy... I circled the blocks many, many times.

So on the morning of the 11th, we packed up, said goodbye to Pat and Rob, and headed northwards on the next stage of our adventure. Which I will tell you about another time. It's taken me two hours to type up this part of the adventure and I need a break. Stay tuned!