Northbridge (Perth)

Today I opted to stay close to the hotel. No ferries, just feet. 6.96 miles of them (so far – it’s 5:30 and I’m going out to dinner with some folks at 6:30). It’s not quite as hot today as it was yesterday – high 90’s, which is still plenty warm.

By not wearing my cap yesterday, I managed to sunburn the top of my hair. I didn’t realize things were getting quite so thin up there. Unfortunately, Coppertone doesn’t make Butch Wax, so today I took the cap with me, fashion be damned.

When the hotel concierge tells you that it’s, “just a pleasant walk,” that’s like when a Realtor tells you that it’s, “. . . convenient to public transportation,” meaning that the bus stops in your front yard. It was quite a walk to Northbridge, although I left while it was still a bit hazy out so it wasn’t terrible. There are also lots of awnings on the front of buildings here, I marked up my map in advance and set out.

Northbridge is apparently a very Asian part of town now. I say this because after I crossed one street, which still showed on the map to be Northbridge, all the signs were suddenly in characters that I didn’t recognize. It didn’t really matter, because it was all interesting to look at. Going in most of the shops proved pointless pretty quickly, though, as all the labels are in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese or Korean. One very sweet lady offered to help me select an appropriate dried fish, which I declined.

I sat in the shade next to an enormous museum complex for a while and (a) cooled off and (b) people watched. Both were good for both the body and the soul, since by then I was on my 3rd bottle of water since I’d left. I didn’t really want to go into the museums right then (it being lunchtime), but thought I’d go and get prices and figure out which one I wanted to see later.

THEY’RE ALL FREE. Pretty amazing, huh? Lots of students, elderly people and just people on their lunch hours wandering through – not crowded, though. I went into the Natural History Museum and saw aboriginal paintings on bark. They paint with little dots for the most part. It was really interesting. I was tired of walking, though, and decided to save some of the fun for another day.

After that it was starting to get warm so I decided to begin the trek back to the hotel. It would have been a 30 minute walk without stops or detours, but of course, that would have defeated the whole point of exploring. One street – Hay Street – has been partially closed off to become a mall. I saw a sign that said “food court”, pointing to a stairwell and found a whole other city underground – it was much cooler down there, and I ended up with some kind of sausage roll. I’ve also got something veggie that looks kind of like a muffin, but decided not to eat it all at once. I’m supposed to put cream cheese on it and heat it up. I figure it’ll work for breakfast in the morning. After all, a muffin is a muffin, isn’t it?

By the time I was draggin’ back, about 2:30 in the afternoon, it was in the high 90’s again and any hope of getting 2 days out of either the T-shirt or the undies was completely gone. Being right on the ocean, it’s very humid here. There’s no pool at this hotel – it’s got two hot tubs and a sauna, but neither of those are especially appealing in this weather. Maybe when the sun goes down this evening I’ll have a different idea.

Tonight I’m going out to dinner with some guys we’d talked to on the internet, I think through Couchsurfing. Eddie’s got to work late, so he’ll not be joining us, at least not until after dinner.

Oh, one more thing -- finding a pic to go with this (since we've mastered this process now) was difficult. After all, strange cities tend to all look alike so it's hard to find something interesting. This sign, though, I though was somewhat unique. If you look very closely you'll see it's not only an advertisement for tattoos, but this place also offers "branding". Just in case anyone should feel the need for a memento of the trip that would never get lost or need dusting!

Fremantle exploration

Today was the first day that Eddie had to work and I went off exploring on my own. On the recommendation of both our travel agent and some ladies in the hotel, I took the ferry to Fremantle. $39.95 AU, and it includes a “wine tasting” on the return trip – which I’m on as I write this, eagerly awaiting the staff to get the hooch out.

Have I mentioned how much I really, really, really like my new 10 inch laptop? It’s been in my bag all day, and at 3.22 pounds I didn’t mind it at all. Well, no more than I minded the rest of the backpack. It's very hot here, and I've realized that the sunscreen I put on didn't extend to the top of my head -- an error in judgment I'm undoubtedly going to regret in the coming days.

Anyhow, the cruise took off from the “belltower” near our hotel at 9:45 this morning. An hour and 15 minutes each way, with the captain commenting on points of interest along the way. Don’t worry, I didn’t take notes and won’t recount the journey, other than to point out that some things are universal – the closer the house is to the water, the more expensive it is. Someone here has a house on the market for a mere $85 million. Even converting that from Aussie Dollars to US, that’s still a whopping $56.1 million, more or less. This leads to yet another universal conclusion -- that some people have more money than common sense.

Perth is the most isolated capital city in the world. It was claimed by the British just a couple of weeks prior to a French expedition’s attempt to land and lay claim to it. One tour guide today pointed out that’d be about like Canada’s got with Quebec.

The offered a little tour guide for purchase on the ferry. I opted out, but glancing through it shows that the Australians treated their indigenous folks about the same way we did in North America.

Some other things are universal, as I learned by reading the local paper. Childhood obesity (as well as adult obesity) and unhealthy vending machines and school lunches are a significant problem in Australia right now.

Australians are sports fanatics. It’s amazing how many of them are planning to play hookie from work today to watch the Superbowl (which came on about 6:00 a.m. local time if I’ve calculated correctly.)

Paper cups here are truly paper cups. What’s neat about them is that those destined for hot liquids have a textured outer layer around them so you don’t get burned holding them. It’s a lot better than the paper coffee cozies you get at Starbucks.

Enough of the triva, though. I opted out of the informative off / on trolly, which was probably a mistake. On the map, it looked very small. In reality, it is very small, had I not been reading the map upside down much of the time. Something about being in the southern hemisphere, I suspect – we know it couldn’t possibly be that I’m an idiot when it comes to reading a map.

Fremantle is about like Key West. As I wandered around, I noticed that a lot of the houses even have the same feel – small and set very closely together. I suspect that’s got something to do with the fact that they’re on an island. The difference is that here most construction is done out of concrete blocks or brick rather than wooden construction. In the CBD (Central Business District), there’s lots of little ootzy shops, a mix of T-shirts, junk, high end galleries and (primarily) women’s clothing. Red Dot stores are the equivalent of Freds or Dollar General. I didn’t go into many of the others – didn’t need any of that stuff, so didn’t buy any of it.

So I walked. A lot. 7.6 miles according to my little digital pedometer. Did I mention that according to the website it was 100 degrees F out there? Just because they express it in degrees centigrade doesn’t make it feel any better. It’s still hot, and the only real place they made any money off of me was on bottled water.

One thing that amazes me is the number of people that walk around barefoot. They (teenagers and 20-somethings primarily) walk along on the asphalt like there’s nothing to it. For those of you from Oklahoma – can you imagine heading across a mall parking lot barefoot in July?? Didn’t seem to be a big thing to them, though.

I had lunch at a place picked because (a) I was hot and tired, (b) they had shade over their outdoor dining and (c) there didn’t appear to be much of a wait. Nothing spectacular – noting the comparison to Key West or Myrtle Beach, if you’re in the tourist district your food, for the most part, is going to be nothing spectacular.

While sitting at lunch with a glass of wine (which I think cleared my head from the heat), I recognized how the map worked, happened to find a street sigh so I could get oriented, and decided to try once again to go to the prison tour. This time I was successful and after paying my $17.50 I go to see the jail.

Traveling during the off season is that there’s no crowds for the most part. Our tour had 4, including me – a couple from Holland and a British kid from London who is backpacking for an extended period of time.

Prisons, especially old ones, tend to look very similar. This was so similar to Alcatraz in San Francisco that had I been dropped into either one of them and not known where I was, I probably couldn’t have told the difference. Tiny cells (4 ft. by 7 ft), cots, etc. The main difference is that this prison, having been built in 1850, didn’t have running water or toilets. Until it closed in 1991, they slopped out buckets every morning. Ugh.

The one unique thing we did get to see that was different was the gallows, where those sentenced to death were hanged, pictured above. We were allowed in the actual location, could touch and pull the lever if we wanted. No traditional noose like we see in Westerns – just a metal grommet with the end of the rope slipped through it. The condemned (43 men and 1 woman) were set above a trap door and the executioner pulled the lever. In order to insure that the rope didn’t stretch, which could result either in strangulation or decapitation, the executioner came in a day early and did practice runs with bags of sand the same weight as the condemned. As with most everything else, I assume that practice makes perfect.

The tour went a bit faster than it would have with 40 people in it, and our guide knew that I was on a tight time schedule – usually it takes an hour and 15 minutes, he got us done in an hour with all the exhibits in there – it was time to head back to the ferry dock. As I was leaving I asked directions (since I only had 30 minutes to make the ferry) and he handed me a map and said, “This is much better than the old ones like you’ve got – some of them are printed backwards”. Suddenly I felt much better about being directionally challenged.

Straight down the hill, through town and across the railroad tracks, where the ferry was just pulling up to the dock. On that happy note, the wine tasting is now underway and I certainly don’t want to miss out.

Cheers.

Our final stop of the day was at the beach in Busselton, where we got to dip our tired, swollen tootsies in the Indian Ocean – which was significantly colder than expected. It felt about like it did at Provincetown, MA, meaning you could stand it but it got your attention and you didn’t want to stay long. After another day of sitting upright, though, it felt pretty good.

The claim to fame at this location was the world’s largest wooden jetty, extending over 2 km into the ocean. If you wolfed down your supper and hurried, you could make it to the end, check out the underwater observatory and make it back in the hour allotted. We chose to eat slower, stroll along the beach and soak our feet instead. We’ve seen fish before!

The hardest thing after we got back on the bus was staying awake. The time change was starting to catch up again, and since the kangaroos didn’t seem to be showing themselves (a fact which was profoundly disappointing in my opinion – although Eddie did catch a glimpse of 2 of them in the scrub alongside the road, the closest I came were 2 instances of suspicious and unidentifiable roadkill and a couple of tire treads, none of which counted in my opinion!) By the time we got back to the hotel about 9:45, we both had the church nods pretty badly.

Cape Leewun Lighthouse

This was one of the things that blew our minds today – we were at the southernmost point of Australia – a mere 3,398 miles from the South Pole!! This point was discovered by the Dutch originally, and the name means “Lioness”. You get a real sense of isolation, even today, and I can’t imagine how solitary it would have been when constructed in the 1890’s.

One of the other cool things is that this is the point where the Southern (Pacific) Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet. The waves and currents are pretty strong, and there are all kinds of signs warning about rogue waves that will suddenly come up and wash you out to sea. There’s also a memorial about a military ship that was overturned by such a wave in 1945.

The scenery was spectacular. It’s a long ways from North Carolina and we never thought that we’d be in such a spot.

Mammoth Cave

It’s the height of summer here, and the climate is VERY warm, so you can imagine that after sitting at the unairconditioned and outdoor raptor center we were not at all unhappy at the prospect of a nice cool cave.

The problem with caves, even gloriously huge ones with enormous stalactites and stalagmites (the former from the ceiling down, the latter from the floor up – about the only thing I remember from college Geology) is that they don’t photograph well. So we don’t have any pics that would post well here.

On the other hand, just outside of the cave are these wonderful 400+ year old trees with all kinds of character. They are the tallest trees in Australia and the pictures don’t do them justice – they really are as amazing as the Giant Sequoia’s in California.

Eagle Nest Raptor Center

OK, this rates pretty high on the “cool” scale, and not just because I happen to like the birds. The guide (pictured, with Echo), was intelligent and entertaining as she took us through to meet the various species.

The favorite story was about the first bird we met – a very large black eagle who was born at the center. She’s 20 years old now, and has been released into the wild – no less than 5 times. Last time, the director bundled her up, drove 5 hours away and released her. He then turned around and returned to find her sitting on the gate waiting for him to let her back into the cage. She now has a permanent job as an educator.

Lunch was at the Raptor Center (picnic sandwiches, buffet style), after which we had a flight demonstration. In addition to Echo, she had 4 native hawks who would snatch bits of food from the air. She explained that they catch insects on the fly as their main diet, crush them with their feet and then pass them to their mouths for in-flight dining.

Oh, and I got to hold Echo – only 5 were allowed, and I shamelessly pushed my way in line. Always wanted to be able to do that. He’s much lighter than you’d expect.

Margaret River - First Stop - Xanadu Winery

The first stop of the day was at Xanadu Winery. The grapes are within a month of harvest here, which means (like at our house) the birds are very interested in them. Unlike our vineyard, where we don’t care if the birds eat the grapes or not, these people want to keep theirs for their own use and have draped them in these white nets. I can’t imagine how many miles of this stuff they use, when you figure each row is about 6 ft. tall and the netting goes to the ground. I also couldn’t figure out why some were covered and others were not.

The best part of the winery was there was no obligation to go and tour how the wine is made. Face it, once you’ve seen one set of big steel tanks folding and crushing grapes, they all pretty much look alike. These people seem to recognize that, as well as the fact that their bread and butter comes from selling wine, not explaining how it gets in the bottles. Thus, in our allotted half-hour, we proceeded directly to the tasting. All 7 were nice. We bought a bottle to enjoy later. That’s about all we need to say about that!