The flight from Brisbane to Perth is a staggering 5 hours and 20 minutes. It is barely conceivable to me that one can fly for this long without leaving the country and for comparison one could get from London to Cairo or Israel in a similar time. I had been looking forward to the flight but a rare depression giving rain all over the interior meant that I had little to see on the flight until we got towards Perth where it was gloriously sunny.
David, my dad's cousin, very kindly agreed to pick me up from the airport and straight away suggested that we go out on his boat to Rottnest island to "set the pots" for the weekend. This sounded interesting so I immediately agreed. Rottnest is a small island 19km off the shore of Perth that contains some excellent beaches and a few holiday cabins that one can rent. "Pots" are basically cages with an opening on the top cunningly designed so that crayfish (rock lobsters) can crawl into but not out of the pot. Setting the pots means obtaining a large amount of severed tuna heads and cramming them into little bait boxes that are inside the cage then cruising around shallow reefs looking for a suitable spot to throw the pot over the side of the boat. A numbered float attached to the pot allows you to recognise and retrieve said pot a few days later, although it is an honesty-base system [couldn't see it working in the UK, then]. It may not sound so, but it is immensely fun. I'm not sure how much luck is eventually involved but there is certainly a moderate amount of skill in placing one's pots so one can get quite involved. By the time we'd returned to Perth (cheekily and illegally boating from one of Perth's posher yacht clubs) it was already evening and I'd had a fantastic first day in Perth.
David and Natalie's house is in Cottesloe and it is fairly easy to see why this is considered the most desirable part of the city. The houses are large, detached and elegant and there is a fantastic beach within walking distance. The train and bus links to the centre are quick and efficient. I was very lucky to be staying here.
Beach Street (what a cool name?) near sunset with the view out to the Indian Ocean.
I spent the first few days exploring Perth, which I have decided is an exceptionally fine city [and this from someone who is not a natural city fan]. For a start Perth is blessed with a Mediterranean climate meaning that the summer days are almost always dry, warm and sunny with cooler evenings and night times. Perth also has the "Freemantle Doctor" - a refreshing sea breeze that pickes up in the afternoons and results in famously excellent sailing conditions. Like most Australian places, it is prone to the odd barbaric hot spell but the humidity is rarely high so it does not feel too oppressive. Aside from the climate, Perth has a lovely setting, perched aside some natural bays near the mouth of the Swan River and has a nearly uninterrupted line of beach along the west coast fronting the Indian Ocean. All this leads (not unsurprisingly) to the place having a lovely relaxed atmosphere. I could definitely live there.
The view over Perth city from the splendid Stanley Park
And looking slightly to the right over the bay on the Swan River through the gum trees on the Anzac memorial drive.
The city centre itself is small and easily explored. There are not exactly thousands of attractions but for the reasons above there don't really need to be. My favourite of the attractions was the Perth Mint where the gold from the inland mines (one of WA's main industries) is melted down and purified. For your entrance ticket you get to see molten gold being poured out in front of you into the ingot mould and then cooled in a water tank into solid form. It is impossible not to be a bit wonderstruck.
The best bit for me, however, was a room where they had a real $400,000 bar of gold in a glass box. The box had a small hole cut in it through which you could stick your arm and try to pick up the bar. This looks easy but since gold is nearly twice as dense as lead, the bar actually weighs something like 15Kg. Well, 7 years of miserable rowing training has at least left me with strong wrists [no cheap gags please] and a decent grip so after the other eight people in our group had tried and failed, it was deeply satisfying to succeed. Alas, for security reasons you are absolutely forbidden from taking photographs so I was not allowed to capture the moment. [For the benefit of any Aussie coppers reading this I shall point out that I would not dream of breaking the law. The following image, which does indeed look a lot like a photograph, is merely a very good representation of what a photograph of the moment might look like and is definitely utterly and totally in no way genuine.]
It looks like it would only weigh about 3 kilos but I assure they don't.
That weekend David had managed to secure one of the beach cabins on Rottnest island so we could stay over. Saturday was also the day of the annual Rottnest Swim which we would be watching the start and finish of. This is a typically Australian piece of insanity which involves swimming the 19.2Km from Perth to Rottnest island in the Indian Ocean. It is open to singles and teams of 2 and 4 who do a sort of 5 minute per leg on-off relay. To give you an idea of the immensity of this, the record time is well over 4 hrs. They swimmers set off at first light so we were up nice and early to see them off. Upon waking I had the strange feeling that I'd gone back home for it was grey, wet and windy. Very English. The organisers delayed the start of the race to miss the worst of it and eventually okayed the race though it was a close run thing.
It could almost be Blackpool!
It was pretty inspiring seeing these guys running down the beach and disappearing straight out to sea [Rottnest wasn't even close to being visible through the drizzle] and as someone who's not normally reticent about taking on a challenge, I was distinctly envious. I'm not sure I could handle 19km in the sea in one go but I reckon the 2 man team version might be my sort of thing [I'm a far better swimmer than I am runner]. I may be back.
Our own team of David, myself and the 10 year old twins [two of my five second cousins], took the easy option of a warm breakfast and coffee inside and headed over to Rottnest with the assistance of our fifth team member, namely a 60hp Yamaha outboard engine. The seas were pretty rough and there was a strong wind blowing, which made for an exciting crossing. It would not have been an easy swim and the finish rate was only about 40% of the competitors with many dropouts occurring from seasickness and swallowing too much seawater. On a more tragi-comic note, one of the boats supporting a swimmer actually sank in the conditions.
Once over on Rotto [as they call it], it seemed that every single boat in the southern hemisphere had arrived and there appeared to be a significant portion of Australia's GDP afloat in the bay. We were able to find a small bit of space to park on the beach and admire the first finishers before heading out again to the important business of acquiring our dinner. This proved remarkably easy as all one has to do is locate one's pots and haul them in. After a worryingly empty first pot, fears were allayed as a total of 7 crays were hauled in. Dinner was looking good.
Approximately 1% of all the boats parked over on Rotto. Note how despite the miserable daybreak, Perth has already returned to near cloudlessness.
David and Zander with another 2 king-sized crays.
And the correct final destination for crays. No apologies to any vegans.
The following day was spent catching a few more crays, doing some sand surfing on the dunes that back onto the beaches and playing a bit of cricket with the twins. Very relaxing it was too. We ended the day with a round of mini golf where I was nearly embarrassed by my cousins. It came down to me having to hole a nasty little 8 foot putt on the 18th to draw the match. I announced before the putt that I was totally confident (which was total bollocks) and that I'm usually good under pressure (which probably is fair) and surprised all by securing the face-saving tie. Being constantly beaten by the Aussies in all sports is bad enough but when they are 40% of your age it would be unimaginably depressing.
Even I could manage the downhill bit, but sadly there aren't any chairlifts installed here yet.
I spent a further week in Perth where I re-joined some of my best east coast mates and had a great time though not really achieving much. One thing that is worthy of a mention is that a better standard of beer is generally available on the southern and western coasts of Australia than the east coast. For those of you that think Fosters and VB are bad, you should try Queensland's XXXX. On second thoughts, you shouldn't.
For my final week in Oz I decided that I should head into some of the back-country areas of Western Australia as the state has a lot of diversity that would be otherwise easy to miss. It is far from being mainly desert as is often thought. Unfortunately, the original plan of doing this as a small group fell through and I ended up driving around on my own. However, this did mean that I could do what the hell I wanted, and it can be strangely therapeutic to be completely on your own for a few days.
I shall start with a few statistics. The state of Western Australia is absolutely vast. Nearly as big as India. In this state are a mere 1.8 million people. Of this total, 1.4 million reside in Perth. This leaves a mere 400,000 people [roughly the population of Bristol] to live in a land area 10 times the size of the UK [population 60,000,000]. Yet it is not empty at all. It is just that the [many] towns are more widespread and much, much smaller than what a European is used to.
My route took me first of all directly west to Kalgoorlie. This looks on the map like a small foray away from the coast but is in fact a 7 hour drive. Kalgoorlie is situated in the sparse woodland that is poised to give way to the semi-desert that stretches all the way to South Australia. It owes its existence to the discovery of large deposits of gold at the latter end of the 19th century and is still one of the world's more productive goldfields.
Until recently, (and to some extent still today) Kalgoorlie was a very rough outback town containing loads of bars, brothels and brawls. However, the wealth that has accrued from the gold (and nickel) mining has meant that a certain yuppification has taken place although one can still find plenty of establishments employing scantily clad barmaids [known as "skimpies"]. The visitor attractions of the town are entirely based around the mining and one gets the opportunity to go down a disused mine and see the miserable conditions they used to work in, as well as try one's hand at panning. After 10 minutes of hard work I was rewarded with success. I'm rich!!! Well, it was nice to think so for a while, but a piece of gold the size of a large-ish grain of sand is, alas, not the key to eternal financial security.
The mining heritage is everywhere in this town.
I then went to see how the mining is performed nowadays. I was well aware that this is sadly not as exciting as the various old-fashioned methods but was expecting lots of cool gadgets, technology and surveying tricks used to pinpoint the best deposits. The reality is spectacularly untechnological and unromantic. What they do is blow up a large amount of rock from the ground and then take away the debris to be crushed down into dust where the gold can be removed. Rather like the US Army with bombs and guns, the key to success with this method is to ensure that you simply do more of it than anyone else and thus make up for inaccuracy and inefficiency. The technique is carried out using dumper trucks that can each carry some 300 tonnes and are approximately the size of a multi-storey car park. Each tyre alone is about 5 metres high and worth tens of thousands of dollars. Years of 24 hour production have now resulted in the creation of a giant hole some 400m deep and over a mile across. This represents a lot of rock to have been dug out and the crater is aptly referred to as the Super Pit.
These 3 photos stitched together do not begin to convey the real size of this thing. Those trucks are at least 5 times the size of a lorry. [for those with good eyesight, the tiny white dot at 8 o'clock to the second truck left of the rightmost Panavue logo is a transit van]
I was back in my customary speed-travel mode so immediately headed south for the southern coast where the town of Esperance would be my destination. The countryside starts off as the usual woodland with wonderful primary colours prominent in the red soil, green gum trees and blue sky. Even inland at Kalgoorlie it was much less hot that I'd anticipated and as I headed south it became cooler and the scenery more temperate as well.
Classic Australian Outback colours
Esperance appears as a major town on al the maps I had and so I was somewhat surprised to pass the sign on the way into town declaring "Esperance, Population 11,000". I guess that probably still makes it the largest town for 400Km. I couldn't find anything to do in Esperance save the humiliation of watching England again contrive to throw away an impregnable position against Australia in the cricket World Cup, so headed east. Just along the coast is the fabulous Cape LeGrand National Park, where I was able to dust off the old hiking boots and ascend the distressingly-named Franchman's Peak. However, the peak turns out to be aptly named as it is smaller than it looks and easily conquered.
The view from the top over the islands that make up the Archipelago of the Recherche.
There are a whole load of fantastic little beaches and islands along the coast down here and it would have been nice to spend a little longer but time dictated a move back westwards along the coast to Albany - the oldest settlement in WA, founded in 1825 and thus predating Perth by 2 years. Sadly, the road goes along slightly inland so one misses out on some undoubtedly excellent scenery, although one can eat up the miles easily and when petrol is at under 40p a litre, there is little to slow you down.
The stunning beach known as Hellfire Bay (thought to be named after the phenomenon of St Elmo's fire experienced by an early explorer.)
A short way along the coast from Albany is the small town of Denmark near to which I would be staying a few days in my cousin's country farm. The weather down here is a lot cooler and I even found myself lighting a fire in the evening! Ironically though, the region is still plagued by bushfires like the rest of Australia. This is a serious national hazard and it is thought that the eucalyptus tree has actually evolved to encourage fire with its high oil content in the leaves and habit for continuously shedding thin strips of dry bark [perfect kindling material]. The tree benefits from this straegy as it can resist fire better than most and the aftermath of a fire provides lots of nutrients and unimpeded access to light.
After a fire the trees have lost all their small branches so the regrowth springs straight out of the trunk and main boughs leaving a strange sight.
Near Denmark and Albany is the Stirling Range. This is reckoned to be one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world and rises up incongruously from the surrounding farmed plains. It contains several trails/scrambles up to various peaks (c. 1,000m) offering an excellent challenge and some fine views. Having not done any proper exercise in weeks I was immediately loving it again and found myself walking all day, claiming 4 peaks in all, though one or two were in the cloud at the top and my hipflask came in far more useful than my camera [much to the bemusement of a German family group]!
The Stirling Ranges
And again, viewed from the top of one of the smaller peaks.
Some of the routes up to the top were pretty tough but the rock provides excellent grip for scrambling and they are beautifully peaceful. I did not meet a single soul on the 2 hour round ascent/descent on either of my last 2 hikes.
The following day I did some more hiking in the Porongorup Range - another slightly smaller collection of hills that rise out of the plains, but for totally independent geological reasons. This area has some of those amazingly smooth and round granite formations and also a large collection of the giant eucalyptus trees (more on that later).
A typical walking trail through the porongorups surrounded by the giant karri trees.
However, whilst on one fairly inaccessible stretch of path there was a sudden enormous crashing noise in the undergrowth next to me. I'd been warned to be wary of snakes and instictively stopped dead but this was no snake. A western grey kangaroo, the same height as me and far broader, bounded across the path not 10m from where I was standing. Another tick in the Australia Experience!
There are a number of modest but worthwhile tourist attractions based upon these tall trees. One of these is the famous Tree Top Walk. This is a walkway suspended some 40m above the ground that lets you walk amongst the canopy and appreciate the size of the trees. It is unarguable an impressive piece of engineering but it's all a bit underwhelming in the end. A short distance back east towards Perth is the Gloucester Tree. This is a particularly tall tree into which a series of spikes have been driven to provide a rather precarious spiral staircase. At the very top is a surprisingly sturdy lookout hut built into the tree. This tree was used in the early days to scan the local environment for bushfires but now the braver citizens can climb it for a small fee.
The bottom of the Gloucester Tree.
And the view from the top. The authorities had even conveniently arranged for there to be a bushfire in action that day so you felt that it was worthwhile when you got to the top.
The final leg on the giant rectangle that my route was mapping took me through the Margaret River region. This area is famous for a series of limestone caves [interesting but not unlike thousands of other limestone caves] but rapidly making a much better name for itself as a region producing some outstanding wines. Alas, being car-bound, I was unable to try more than a handful but they were jolly nice.
The west coast of Australia has the priceless asset of ensuring a gorgeous sunset over the ocean every night. However, I discovered to my cost that the sea is a lot cooler down here some 300km south of Perth
And thus, I returned to Perth having covered 3,162Km in 6 days and yet seen just a fraction of what WA has to offer. Certainly there are some fantastic places further north that will become the third place nominated in this website that I vow to return to [the others being the Canadian Rockies and New Zealand]. Alas, I did not have the time to go on this trip and I believe it's unpleasantly hot at this time of the year anyway. It is not often that on the weather map you see a graphic of a storm accompanied with a high of 42 degrees!
My last night in Oz was my birthday and this double excuse to party was celebrated in an apt way by having a large night out with two friends from the east coast who are in Perth for the medium term. My final memories of the night are of myself and my partner in hyperactivity, Nicole, yet again being the last two left on the dancefloor. And I hadn't even had that many Red Bulls that night...
Australia ended up being far and away the longest chapter of my travels and it is easy to see why. Although the scenery is not quite in the Premier League of places I have visited [Canada, parts of the US, Bolivia and NZ South Island all would be] the national attitude is mainly first-rate and surely there is nowhere else on the planet where it is so easy for the backpacker to party. The climate is also infinitely preferable to the UK, there is a wonderful attitude to sport/the outdoors and it is easy to eat very well for very little. It was 11 years between my first and second visits to Oz. It will be less between no's 2 and 3.
Final view of Australia en route to Singapore.
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