Perth and Fremantle

Seven days gone in the blink of an eye. The hurly burly of Perth is some 800k away from Coral Bay which is where where we are now. The pace of life could not be in more contrast. Finn is enjoying turning six today and we are letting him decide what is the agenda for today and for the moment it is Mario Kart and some Harry Potter game on the Nintendo at the moment. Whilst he does battle with that I shall try and recall some of the events of Perth and Fremantle that we experienced.

Perth is a big place, 1.7m people with about the same amount of cars which are constantly choking its highways. All the houses look new and there some extraordinarily rich people that live in houses the size of shopping centres. Fortresses built out of mining and engineering wealth. Kerry Stokes' pad looks like a corner shop compared to some of the mansions that border the shores of The Swan from Perth to Fremantle. Houses in Fremantle are smaller and the traffic is less but very large container ships are parked on the high street. Fremantle also has a statue of Bon Scott, a functioning brewery and a prison that now functions as a museum. It also has a rather good market that operates Friday and Saturday and in it there is an Indian man with an Indian take way shop that sells the best deep fried Indian delicacies in the world. Each one of these deep fried things have unpronounceable names (I did recognise samosa though) but my recommendation would be the the stuffed sweet chilli, heaven on a stick.

Finny in front of the magic shop

Not sure whether it was a reflection on Perth or not but we spent three nights there but two days in Fremantle. Perth is a nice enough place, very clean, good air, nice park and beautiful river but Freo has vibrancy, salty air, deep fried food and a brewery. It also has an oldish lady that walks the streets picking up everyones rubbish, I was going to take a photo of her but I just watched her in stunned admiration, maybe she had an obsessive compulsive disorder or maybe she just liked her city to be clean, whatever her motive she deserves an award.

We enjoyed a trip down the Swan from Battery Point to Fremantle on a cruise boat. It just gave us the impression that there are an awfully lot of very rich people that live in Perth in big palaces next to marinas that have very big expensive white boats in them. There must be poor people somewhere but we could not see them. Perth sprawls forever and on the way out north the freeway reduces to to a un-signposted roundabout, but that is another story.

The long walk to Freo prison

Here are some pictures from Perth and Fremantle.

Using the amenities in the yard

The legend

Checking out the digs in 3 division

A giraffe and a camel at the docks.

Little Creatures.

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And the markets