We have now left Perth and we are heading south to the Southern Coast and starting the long trek eastward across this vast country to Melbourne.
Perth is such a beautiful city and I can understand why so many Kiwis have moved over there. Its biggest problem is its isolation. It takes longer to fly from Perth to Sydney than it takes to fly from Wellington to Sydney and more money too. We could have flown from Perth to Bangkok for 5 nights for $480 return. Not bad eh! A large majority of Perth people have never been to the East Coast of Australia. Perth has a population of 1.4 million people and there are only about 2 million people in the whole of Western Australia. Western Australia is the largest state of Australia and covers one third of the country. The whole of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Spain, France and Germany would fit into Western Australia. Now you know why we were travelling over 600kms. between towns and not seeing a house or a shop. It is so vast.
Perth has about the same population as Auckland but that would be the only similarity. The mineral wealth of Western Australia is very obvious in Perth with the infrastructure and the amazing number of huge homes and European cars. Perth has an amazing network of motorways and freeways that flow freely and bypass the city if needed. The rail system seems to run like clockwork and the city also boasts a great bus service with three different inner city routes being covered by free buses. I can vouch for it being a great way to get around the city and have a free tour. We had a day in Perth with Bev & Bruce, our friends from Kapiti. The weather turned wet so we just hopped on a free bus and toured around. I don’t think we did much observing though as there was too much talking going on. The CBD is very compact but it doesn’t seem to have the crowds that we associate with Sydney or Melbourne. It’s a very genteel sort of place. It has beautiful public gardens and parks, especially Kings Park, which overlooks Perth City and the lovely Swan River.
Perth was where we caught up with friends Veronica & Leo, who we met on the road last year. We spent a very enjoyable overnight stay at their lovely home overlooking the city and river and then they invited us to spend Father’s Day with them and their family in King’s Park. We all took our morning tea and there were hundreds of families doing the same thing. It was a magic day and we worked off our meal by walking around the gardens and looking at all the wild flowers.
There are plenty of day trips that can be done from Perth and we certainly did our share of them. One of the most interesting was our trip to New Norcia about 130 kms, north of Perth. New Norcia is Australian’s only monastic town. The whole town is owned by the Benedictine Monks who settled in the town in 1847. They came from Spain and all the buildings show a very strong Spanish influence. There are tours of the Monastery, chapel, bakery, flourmill, library, school, church, convent and hotel. There are 46 people who live in New Norcia as well as the monks, and they all work for the monks. The school and convent were used at one time as an Aboriginal mission but are only a tourist attraction now. The monks make their own wine and bread and of course we had to sample that! It was a most interesting day and the buildings were in such good order.
We spent a lovely day in Fremantle. It is over 15 years since we last visited and the place has really grown a lot in that time. The number of cafes has trebled and the waterfront has been totally revitalised. Huge ships were tied up at the wharves and a Dutch firm of dredgers were busy dredging the harbour floor from a depth of 30 metres to 45 metres so that larger ships can use the port. We came back into Perth by ferry, which is a great way to view the mansions that line the waterfront drives.
When we planned the trip this year I had meant to spend a night in a little town called Toodyay. We decided to bypass it on the way into Perth but make a day trip there later. I am so glad we took this option, as we wouldn’t have had enough time to do this town justice. This little town is about an hours drive north of Perth and is one of West Australia’s oldest towns. My friend Jude, from Christchurch, gave us the name of an old friend who works at the old gaol, which was constructed using convict labour in the 1860s. It’s a magnificent old building and Jim Page, Jude’s friend, was such an interesting guy. He is 76 years old and he just loved talking about the area. He has only lived there for over 50 years and still considers himself an outsider! He hadn’t had many visitors the day we were there and was very reluctant to let us go! We really loved talking to this old guy who was such a hive of information about the area. Toodyay is also among one of the wild flower areas and we loved seeing all the different flowers as we drove through the countryside.
We were also going to have a stay in Mandurah on the south coast from Perth but as it was only an hour’s drive from Perth we decided to go down there for a day. This new city has a population of over 60,000 and has made a feature of the Peel River, which flows through the town. They have built apartments, cafes and homes along canals but have still kept walkways and bridges so that the locals can walk along the riverbanks. On the road down to Mandurah we drove through huge industrial towns of Kwinana and Rockingham. There were aluminium plants, granaries, gas plants, mineral sand storage, ship building and others we had no idea of what they did. There were wharves with ships loading and others waiting out at sea to get into port. It is mind blowing the resources available in this country and they are still building more!
We had to spend a day in the Swan River region of Perth as we never managed to visit it last time.. This is a wine growing area about 45 minutes from the centre of Perth. There are wine cellars, breweries, chocolate factories, cheese factories, cafes,
B & Bs, country retreats; hotels etc. We caught up with Bev & Bruce there again as they were having a break from their golf games and also Trish & Llew who we spent an evening with way back in May in Noosa. We shared a few beers at a brewery and it was good to catch up with them again.
We had a few friends to catch up with in Perth, some from NZ and some from Oz, most of whom we hadn’t seen for years so there was a lot of chatting to get through!
After Perth we moved onto Busselton which is the gateway to Margaret River which is the largest wine producing area in WA. Busselton is quite a small town but there are so many places to go to from there, it was a good place to base ourselves. The weather wasn’t the best for the first 2 days but we had Sunday in Bunbury and nothing was open, not even the information centre! Not very impressive for a city of 33,000. Busselton is at the end of Cape Naturaliste, a national park, and we drove up to the lighthouse and walked around the park where we saw whales playing just off the coast. We haven’t seen so many whales this year. Today we went to Margaret River which is similar to Swan Valley but on a much larger scale. We saw some lovely wineries set in beautiful grounds but I think NZ can more than hold its own in that department. There are lots of caves on this coast and we visited Lake Cave today.
We had to go down 362 steps, which of course we had to come back up again! But once below ground the scenery was just beautiful. The lake inside the cave acts like a mirror with reflections of the white crystalline formations. Stalactites and stalagmites and a fantastic lighting effect made this a really magical place. It was worth having to climb back up all those steps, well almost worth it! We were both breathing rather heavily when we reached the top. We then drove down to Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse which is in Augusta at the very bottom of Western Australia’s west coast. There the Indian Ocean meets the Great Southern Ocean. This will be the last time we will se the Indian Ocean as tomorrow we leave for Walpole and we will be following the Southern Ocean to Melbourne.
