Asian & Antipodean Adventures - VII

 

Having used up our time in Melbourne we hopped on a flight to Perth WA, it's a longer flight than I thought, I snapped the picture of the seat-back screen I was watching (above), about half way across the Great Australian Bight, overall the flight  took around three and a half hours. I hadn't realised before we went there but Perth is one of the most isolated capital cities in the world, it's nearest large city is Adelaide over 1300 miles away, only Honolulu is more physically isolated but isn't as remote if you look at the sheer distance-to-population ratio.

We took a few trips from Perth, one of them was out to a place called "Caversham" (I guess named after the place near where we live in Berkshire) There we visited a wildlife park, my wife is very keen on Koala Bears, having held on at a park in Queensland back in 1998, so we had to see some Koalas. Fortunately the park had loads of them and uber-cute they were too! I snapped quite a few pictures while we were there but I think the one below captures the lazy-life of this popular marsupial, it's food is do energy poor that it has to sleep around 20 hours per day (a bit like Human teenagers then?)

We saw quite a few other Australian critters while at the park, the picture below shows a Kangaroo mum, you can just about see the joey (and its long legs!) in her pouch..

One of the rarer and more elusive of the mammals that we saw was a Red Tree Kangaroo, I hadn't even known such a thing existed but there it was, climbing up and down the trees. The light seemed to catch the fur at the edges and illuminate the hairs so that it looks like the animal was photoshopped onto the scene, but I can assure you it's real! (see below)

There were a ton of other interesting animals to be seen so I've assembled this little collage (below) to summarize them, it was a great day out at the park and at the end we hailed an Uber to take us back to our hotel for a quick shower before heading out to our adopted beer bar for a cold one and a bite to eat.

While in Perth we also took the ferry up the Swan River to Freemantle, originally a separate community it's now been absorbed into greater Perth but it still has a very "Victorian" colonial character, home to the major container port for the area it's also an education hub with a couple of universities located there. I also managed to find a little craft beer spot to sample a couple of brews while waiting for the return ferry.

In Freemantle there's a really good Maritime Museum, we spent a good hour wandering around that looking at the exhibits, everything from immigration to fishing to whaling as well as some cultural artifacts from the original inhabitants through to the Americas Cup winner as well as more recent waves of arrivals from Europe, Asia and Africa, it was an interesting place that covered a lot of ground. I snapped one of the buildings on the high street in Freemantle, I don't think I ever saw a more Victorian/Australian looking building (below).

There was quite a good craft beer scene in Perth as well as some stunning wines from the Margaret River area which is a couple of hundred miles to the south of the city, more about that in the next part.