Perth and Fremantle
We arrived in the early hours of Wednesday morning in Perth and were grateful that we had scrapped the original plan to sleep at the airport and instead decided to pay for the extra night accommodation at our decent hostel in the Northbridge area of the city.
After a lengthy lay in we set off on the, what is becoming obligatory, walking tour. The tour took us past some fine old buildings, some interesting monuments, and some good looking new buildings. The walk finished up in Kings Park which is a beautiful bit of green with panoramic views of the city and the river/bay along with a moving monument to those killed and impacted by the Bali bombs.
In the evening we made the most of the cooking facilities at the hostel to prepare a home cooked meal and more importantly were able to consume our first bottle of wine (if you exclude the wine we polished off on the Qantas flight the night before) for six weeks or so. It tasted pretty good.
On our second day we headed south along the coast to Fremantle or Freo as the locals apparently call it. This is an old port town which was rejuvenated in the 90s (ish) when it hosted the Americas Cup. It was a great little place. We took the tour of the prison (our second prison excursion of the week) and it was pretty interesting. The tour guide seemed to have a different level of political correctness that he lived by than most people that we come across.
After the prison tour we sampled the local brew of Little Creatures Pale Ale at the micro brewery with a couple of pots of chilli mussels and panoramic sea views. It was marvellous.
For our final day in Perth we started our holy sights of Australia tour as we headed to the WACA to watch the Retravision Warriors (Western Australia) against New South Wales (who have some other ridiculous name). It was the first day of the Weet-Bix Sheffield Shield match. The ground was great and the weather was fantastic as we had warm sunshine but the famous Fremantle Doctor blew to stop the heat from being stifling.
The cricket was pretty good although not exceptional with Stuart Clark and Philip Hughes looking like world beaters when clearly this summer proved that they are not.
We were sad to say goodbye to Perth but our next stop is to collect our campervan and head off on a ten day journey around the south-west of WA.