We spent 5 nights in Perth where we finally had a run of excellent weather and Angela has become the most tanned she has ever been (don't get too excited - that really doesn't mean much!)
We didn't actually have much time to explore Perth city centre as we spent all our time here in the surrounding areas. From what we did see of it though, it is very gleaming and efficient - hard to believe it is the most isolated city in the world.
We got a ferry to Rottnest Island - a small low lying island off the coast at Freemantle. We weren't sure at all what it was going to be like and approaching from sea, it looked a bit barren and windswept. But oh, how wrong we were. Breezy yes, but the beaches! We finally found what we were looking for and remembered that this was the reason we decided to come to Western Australia. The sand was the colour and texture of icing sugar (well almost!) The water was crystal clear, and we mean crystal, brilliant turquoise, and the whole place was deserted. Just to put the icing (or sand?) on the cake, we were there on a Monday morning!
We hired mountain bikes for the day, which is an excellent method of getting around, firstly because there are no cars, just the occasional tour bus (which were actually quite disturbing as we would get used to an empty road and suddenly one would appear over the brow of a hill and make us jump!), and secondly, because the island is just big enough to cycle round in a day, allowing plenty of beach/lunch stops, but still making you feel like you've done some exercise going up and down the gentle hills.
The one downside to the island was the fact that there were swarms of flies everywhere. If you stay still for a moment loads start to land to feed on your sweaty skin, and when cycling you have to go through great buzzing clouds of them and remember to keep your mouth shut - eurrgh! The only place you can get away from them is in the sea. It got quite stressful for me at times.
The name Rottnest comes from rat nest which it was called by the first white discoverer, because of all the Quokkas running around. They are small marsupials that look like a cross between a wallaby and a rat. They are very sweet and pretty tame and it's fun to do a bit of Quokka spotting on the way round. The ozzies have a rather nasty tradition of 'quokka soccer' though.
We actually loved Rottnest so much that we came back again another day (thankfully with slighly less flies) to do some snorkelling and a trip in a glass bottomed boat - the water visibility and the fact that it has some of the world's most southerly coral make it particularly good for this. However, compared to the vast arrange of colours we saw under the water in Fiji, it wasn't as impressive - no sea snakes though!
We also went to Bunbury, a town south of Perth, to see the hundreds of bottle nosed dolphins that feed in the harbour. There is an interaction area in the shallows next to the beach which they visit an average of 200 days a year to swim around the paddling visitors. Of course, they decided that the time we were there was not to be one of those days. That was a bit sad - we saw in the visitors' book at our guest house that one girl had stayed for 3 days in order to see them and finally caught a glimpse of one on the last day! There's really not much to do in Bunbury apart from the dolphins. We killed the rest of the day walking in a mangrove nature reserve, sitting on the beach and going to the cinema. The next morning we tried the interaction area again with no luck, so decided to cut our losses and pay to go on a boat trip instead. We got to watch them twisting and turning in the bow wave, which was pretty special.
We were so impressed with the quality of the trains - it just puts the English system to shame - some of the features include very cheap travel (I suppose if they charged the same amount per mile as English trains, long distance travel would be completely unaffordable), spotlessly clean carriages, clear announcements counting down how much time you have left to catch the train, trains that are the same height as the platforms so you don't have to launch yourself over a cavernous gap in order to get off!), and 50% off travel if you are unemployed.
We haven't seen many aborigines in Australia, but were there when a couple got refused service in a pub in Freemantle. It was quite upsetting to see the racial tensions manifesting themselves in this way.
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