Perth took a while longer to get to than I thought it would. By this I mean I had been in the middle of nothing and then suddenly there was buildings and vegetation, were here! Here unfortunately was about 2 hours away from Perth, I was so shocked to see civilization that I immediately presumed it must be the city, also this tends to be the way with a lot of places in Australia. However perth is where most of the Western Australians live, I think the stat. is 99%, so I was only on the outskirts of the city, the real city being another 2 hours away.
When I got there I was a little confused about how to get from there, which was still not the city centre, into the city centre and to my hostel, Perth City YHA. Eventually a nice couple who ran another backpackers gave me a lift because they had a free car and could see I was a little confused by the layout. They dropped me off and I ventured inside my new home, the staff made me welcome and off I went to my room to collapse, on the train I did little sleeping. I chilled out for a bit eating and sleeping and then I met Angela, the beautiful Canadian put in charge of me whilst I was in the west. She got me on to a wine tour with the Pink Bus and I was off seeing more wineries and resting less!
This tour focused more on the alcohol, starting with dessert wines at the first stop, these we drank in awesome little glasses that looked like headless cats! I want one. However I didn’t think it would last my journey so I opted to not waste my money. Then we visited more wineries and tasted cheese (which I was the designated guard of) and chocolate! When lunch came it was a very different affair to last time, instead of lots of kangaroo this time 3 large platters were brought out laden with cheese, bread, beetroot jam, olives, asparagus, salad and dukkah a spice mix that is eaten by dipping bread first into olive oil then into the spices. It was a new experience for me and rather a tasty one, I loved the bread and cheese, which went beautifully with the beetroot and the dukkah was weird but delicious. After our summer lunch we went to a brewery to taste some ales and outside they had a tree which had fallen down, yet refused to let that stop it and was continuing to grow along the ground… a very weird sight as parts of the trunk were buried, a sideways tree! The end of the tour was nigh and I merrily tottered back to my room to have a little nap before dinner.
Then I visited Rottnest, a very pretty little island where I got on a bike and along with an English couple rode around the island which was windy as hell and attempted to find a good swimming spot where it wasn’t really windy. The island is very picturesque and had a lot more people on it than I expected. We started in the little port, and then rode anticlockwise around seeing various lovely beaches and eventually we split up agreeing to meet later. They went straight to a beach they wanted to snorkel on and I having no snorkel rode all the way to the far west of the island against the wind and cursing the whole way! Coming back was heaven, actually having the wind behind me and no longer in my face was utter bliss so the ride back to the port along the north side of the island flew by. We met back at the ferry it having took me so long to reach the western tip and it turned out they didn’t go snorkeling after all.
Perth is a pretty city, I liked the architecture and the way it was split by a huge river, like London’s Thames but bigger. I visited the famous Kings Park however I took perhaps an unorthodox route, I got on a bus and said “Do you go to Kings Park?” the bus driver answering with an affirmative I got on and sat down, we drove away from the city and eventually he dropped me off on a street saying “Its just down there mate!” so I walked ‘down there’ and soon found not a lot. I asked a painter and he grumpily told me it was ‘down there’ as well. It turns out it was ‘down there’ only I had failed to specify which part of Kings Park, after walking for a few hours I found out that I was walking further in but nothing seemed that amazing and I was quite confused, having been told that it was quite amazing. Eventually when I was almost asleep and heading back to my hostel I stumbled upon the botanical gardens, which were very amazing and I had a brilliant view of Perth but I was annoyed and sleepy that I didn’t fully appreciate it at this point.
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