Australia: Perth-lings

We experienced a bit of "culture shock" upon leaving Thailand, and all it's strange magic. Arriving back in to the Western-world, it took some adjusting and switching of gears for the Australian "leg" of our 3-month journey. We flew in to Perth, the capital city in the state of Western Australia, which is in the southwestern corner of this island continent, and found an apartment-style motel on the banks of the winding and massive, Swan River. For 3 days we explored as much of the city as we could, mostly on foot, but also by rail. Our visit converged with "Australia Day" (Jan. 26) a 3-day weekend holiday, which is a huge and festive national event.

Perth is a sprawling, clean, and easy to maneuver city, and like many cities here in OZ (that's "Aussie talk" for Australia), practically everything, except for restaurants, shuts down at 5PM, quite a contrast from SE Asia, where everything really starts to happen after the sun goes down. We did heaps of walk-abouts in the downtown area, and also took a fabulous, long walk to (and through) Kings Park, which is the largest urban park in the world - even bigger than NYC's Central Park! We enjoyed the beautiful botanical garden, and a tree-top walkway that had great views of the Perth skyline, as it's perched high on a hillside overlooking the city.

Public transport is great in Perth, and one day we took the train to a couple of cute, nearby, white sand beaches, for some "beach time"- and then traveled onward to the groovy suburb of Fremantle, which is a hipster, artist enclave just south of Perth proper. In Fremantle we walked around the town and the waterfront area (which is reminiscent of SF's Fisherman's Wharf - only with much cooler shops), and befriended a transplanted Italian street vending bead and jewelery salesman named Max. Later in the day we met a local couple, Peter and Maggie - who bought us beers at the Sail and Anchor brewery (a great afternoon with some fun, new friends)!

Our final day in Perth was Australia Day (a day of national pride), and we kept hearing that there would be tremendous chaos, but in actuality we've never seen such a well-behaved group of 300,000 people gather together to celebrate. Earlier that day people began setting out chairs, blankets, umbrellas, and "eskies" (Aussie-talk for ice chest), in order to secure their viewing spots for the evening's main event, a fantastic firework display over the Swan River. Our motel was perfectly situated for the gala, and all we need do was walk across the (closed to traffic) street, and stroll through a green field to the river's edge. We watched the sky light up over the city, cheered with the exuberant crowd, then made our way homeward at the evening's end - a very festive and colorful time in the city of Perth!