Over the last few days, I've had the opportunity to take a break from travelling for a while and relax in one of Australia's truly big cities - and I think I've earned it. For nearly a week, there has been no worrying about having to catch a connection, and certainly no having to phone up bus companies to find out which parts of my route are currently underwater. I am annoyed that the combination of floods and prebooking my hotel in Perth has prevented me from stopping off on the coast as I particularly wanted to go to Monkey Mia and swim with Dolphins, or to the Pinnacles, but the coach stops at these places about once a week and on my schedule, I really can't afford to find myself missing a bus and being stuck for a day.

Having so much free time in Perth has given me a chance to kick back and properly enjoy the city without feeling as though I'm in a rush to move on, so I've been doing all the things that a world traveller would normally avoid like the plague - stuff that I haven't really had a chance to do since leaving England. I've been to the cinema to see movies that I hadn't even heard about, I've been shopping in huge urban shopping centres and eaten in an international food court that was so international that I was able to buy a full English Sunday Roast dinner of Roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, roast potato and gravy from the Japanese Store! Perth seems like a young London - busy, vibrant, full of streets of café's and restaurants, but with less of the hustle and bustle and more of the carefree laid back attitude I associate with Australia. I have also been able to smile politely at people as I pass them on the street without having anyone put me down as some sort of freak, which is always a bonus.

After a thirty-six hour coach trip from Broome, forced to sit next to a young mother whose child spent the entire trip either screaming or demanding to know if we were there yet, Perth felt like I had somewhere to call home for the first time in months. I literally threw everything into a corner of my hotel room, checked out the moss growing on the wall outside my window, and went out to explore (1). At first I didn't recognise anything from my first brief visit here back in 1995, but after strolling happily for several hours through malls and pedestrian precincts without a clue where I was going, I literally crossed a street and knew exactly where I was. All the memories came flooding back and suddenly I knew just how to get to everything - the train station, the cinema, the harbour front, the nightlife.

Perth harbour isn't anywhere near as grand as Darling Harbour in Sydney, but in my opinion is all the better for it. Here, you can spend a relaxing afternoon away from the city center, drinking coffee outside a waterfront coffee shop or browsing the windows of the boutique and souvenir shops crowded around the jetties. The area is dominated by a small square surrounded by the flags of various nations, and stretching away around the harbour are shops, bars and pubs - one of which has the unfortunate name of "The Lucky Shag", which I was under the impression was how some people like to describe a good Friday night out.

I took a two hour river cruise to the port of Fremantle, during which I copied everybody else by taking my shirt off and then got so involved in watching the city go by that I ended up getting severely sunburned. I also took the Ferry to Perth Zoo in the south of the city, which is remarkable in that it is open every single day of the year including Christmas Day - I spent a relaxed afternoon wandering around the confusing array of pathways between the environments, and enjoyed seeing all the funny animals I've ever heard about, like Rhinoceros, Tigers, Cats and Mink. Hang on - that's the lyrics to the Pink Panther show! Bears, Giraffes, Elephants, Zebra and Hyena joined the local Australian wildlife and looked well cared for and happy, although I still haven't managed to see a single Duck-billed Platypus, which is a shame.

Last time I came to Perth, I stayed in a charming little Swedish hotel called "Miss Maud's", which was full of winding corridors, creaky lifts and even had it's own Swedish Coffee Shop and Restaurant. This time, my hotel is a new addition to the city and has been having a few teething troubles. Nevertheless, they seem to exhibit the standard Australian relaxed and friendly attitude towards the situation, and the reception staff have been happy to put anything right the moment it goes wrong. When I pointed out to them casually on the way out the other day that they were showing the wrong movie on the in-house movie channel, they instantly refunded the cost and changed it over immediately. While I was out, I imagine they must've had several complaints from couples all over the hotel who had been happily snuggled up in bed watching a romantic comedy and suddenly found themselves watching the second half of Die Hard 2. The next day they were showing the movies in the wrong order and because the VCR swaps them over on a timer according to the lengths of the films, everything was getting cut off ten minutes from the end. Again, they just refunded everybody. Perfectly good customer service, of course - but if they don't get things right at some point I can see them being bankrupt in no time! The TV stations themselves don't seem to entirely know what they're doing either. According to ABC, every night at 8.00 is supposed to be "Classic British comedy" - tonight, I turned on for an episode of Black Adder and found myself watching a program called Murder Squad, in which Essex Police were looking for a man who was going around casually setting fire to people who passed him in the street. Not quite the same thing.

On my second day in Perth, I joined the local "tourist tram" service which takes visitors on a two and a half hour tour of the city - a service which appeared to me to be sponsored by the local nightlife as it was mainly the casinos, nightclubs and bars which we trundled past, even to the point where we were offered the chance to get off and walk through the biggest casino in town.

Perth is a sprawling city of suburbs and an extensive train system links all the outlying areas to the city center, where the central station is large and modern and reminded me of Liverpool Street in London. The trains are sleek and modern, and a pleasure to travel on compared to the dirty graffiti covered ones back home. They aren't overcrowded, and there are four suburban lines serving all the outer districts. Each line has slow and express services in case you don't want to stop at every station - there are trains that stop at every station, trains that stop at the first half of the stations and skip the second half, and trains that skip the first half and stop at the second half. This struck me as a very efficient system which seems to get everybody to where they want to go in a reasonable amount of time. The large, shiny information machines located on the platform of every suburban station, however, rather let the system down for me and should probably be renamed "lack of information machines" - no matter which button I pressed, the screen lit up with the helpful statement "No Information Available", so I'm afraid I can't regale you with vast amounts of knowledge about the outer districts of Perth. Instead, in an attempt to at least see some of suburban Perth while I was here, I simply closed my eyes and took a random stab at the map and ended up heading out to the town of Cottesloe which turned out to be a fairly small suburb, the station backing onto a sleepy side street. I spent a couple of hours browsing happily in the shop windows, and had lunch in a café near to the shopping precinct. It was nice to find the small urban side to this vast city, and quite unusual to find it more like the towns back home than the traditional outback village. Except for Cottesloe's white sandy beach - there aren't too many of them in villages back home, unfortunately!

The nightlife in Perth is every bit as vibrant as you would expect from a big city, and there are no shortage of things to occupy you after the sun has set. I had been told that most of the decent nightclubs were based in the James Street area, but it quickly became obvious that the whole of the Northbridge area around James came alive at night - but the nightlife here seems to be somewhat different to the nightlife back home. In most parts of the world, nightlife means a handful of darkened clubs playing loud dance music while lines of scantily clad girls and blokes in jeans form outside waiting to be frisked by bouncers who don't appear to have much chance of holding down any job which doesn't involve lifting people from the ground and throwing them several metres. Perth, and in fact Australia in general, seems to have a much more enlightened and relaxed way of enjoying themselves. The entire area around Northbridge is littered with cafes, restaurants, pubs, bars, clubs and coffee shops - the average night out can involve having a meal and coffee, sitting outside a bar chatting with friends, and then wandering up and down the crowded streets for hours checking out several clubs. Clubs are far more diverse than at home, offering anything from Jazz to Dance to music from the 70s - a night out in Perth seems to be much more about hanging out with friends outside a bar and occasionally wandering into a club for a dance than the six hours of sweating on a single dance floor we're used to in the UK. The fact that everybody is so friendly is also a bonus - especially as being a traveller in a foreign land is usually a pretty good way of meeting people. No sooner had I walked through the door of my first club than I was being chatted up by two stunning Australian girls called, rather exotically, Skye and Monique. They were on a short holiday from a small town a couple of hundred miles away, and had just wandered into the club and started introducing themselves to everyone - although as soon as they found out I was from England they seemed to forget about everyone else and just wanted to buy me drinks and find out if I needed showing around Perth.

This also happens in America, and I've never really been able to get my head around it - it seems that just having a British accent makes a person very popular in certain parts of the world, and the fact that we seem to have spent most of the last few hundred years invading and starting wars with everyone in the name of the British Empire seems to have gone mostly un-noticed! Monique and Skye introduced me to just about everyone else in the club and by the time I was too tired to stand up any more, at about five in the morning, I felt as though I'd known everyone for years.

The 26th was Australia Day, which is a national holiday and appears to be an excuse for just about everybody to stay in bed or spend the day at home with the family. It's the one day of the year when those parts of Australia which don't already have tumbleweed blowing down the road get to find out what it's like to live in a Ghost town. I'm sure somebody up there has got it in for me - wait until I arrive in the biggest city I've been in since Sydney and then arrange for everybody to stay at home! I went out, wandered the deserted streets wondering where the entire population of Perth had vanished to overnight, and finally had the Australia Day phenomenon explained to me by the girl behind the counter at Hungry Jack's, who clearly hadn't seen another customer all day and was just happy to have somebody to talk to. And it also gives me a good excuse to tell you the story of Hungry Jack.

Tourists coming to Australia on a fast food diet can sometimes be found scratching their heads and wondering why McDonalds have such a large presence in the country but Burger King can't be located anywhere, and the story behind this is actually one of those rare cases where a small company has managed to get one over on corporate America. It would seem that when Burger King finally noticed that McDonalds was all over Australia and decided they ought to compete, they sold the Australian franchise operation to a man called Jack Cowin. Having done this, they were slightly surprised to discover that they didn't own the universe as they had previously thought and that the name "Burger King" was already trademarked in Australia by a small food shop on the Gold Coast. After presumably cursing for a while and trying everything they could think of to get the name back, Burger King provided Cowin with several alternative names to which it owned the trademark and he jumped at the rather lucky chance to use the name Hungry Jack's as it meant he could have his name on all the restaurants - Hungry Jack's had previously been the name of a pancake mix sold by Burger King's parent company in the States. Hence the first branch of Hungry Jack's opened right here in Perth back in 1971 and Burger King has been called Hungry Jack's across the whole continent ever since because of one small businessman in Queensland. Now, that's what I call sticking it to the man! But wait - it gets better. In 1996, the Australian trademark on the name "Burger King" ran out and Burger King immediately attempted to take the franchise away from Jack Cowin, trademark the name themselves and move into Australia. Over the next few years, they opened more than sixty Burger King locations around the country, until Jack Cowin looked at the small print on his franchise and decided to sue them for breach of contract. And he won. Burger King was told to pay seventy-five million dollars in compensation, appealed the decision to the High Court but the case was thrown out. Australian courts seem to have the same attitude as Australian people, and don't like to be bossed about - so they were probably never going to be told what to do by a big American company. Burger King sold 51% of its Australian operation to the company operating the Burger King franchise in New Zealand, who took advantage of their new majority shareholding and promptly decided to change all of their Burger King restaurants across New Zealand to Hungry Jack's in an attempt to boost sales. So don't look too hard for a Burger King in Australia or New Zealand.

It has proved remarkably difficult to set up the next leg of my journey across to Adelaide in South Australia. It seems that they're currently holding some sort of National Cycling Championship over there, and this is obviously considered such an important event that Greyhound have been booked solid going in and out of Adelaide all week. I've had to book one of the last two seats on the only available coach all week, so it looks as though I decided to take my break in Perth at just the right time - I really can't think of anything I'd enjoy less than being surrounded in Adelaide by thousands of guys comparing bikes. Mind you, being stuck on a coach with fifty people talking about bike accessories might also be enough to drive me insane.

(1) This was, however, a different experience to my arrival in Perth when I visited in 1995. On that occasion I flew in from Sydney, where our plane was delayed by several hours because they were unable to shut the doors - something which I remember thinking could've been a problem if they had suddenly sprung open again unexpectedly at 35,000 feet. Luckily, there had been previous problems with flights which had resulted in me being given a courtesy upgrade to business class, so I spent the flight languishing in a double-width seat and being waited on hand and foot. Upon arrival in Perth, however, the gods of fate were waiting for me once again and had arranged for all my luggage to have been left in Sydney.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.