Perth February 19

Thursday, February 19

Off to the airport this morning for the 4 ½ hour flight to Perth, the capitol of Western Australia and about as far from Rochester, NY on land as you can be.  Perth is 20 miles upstream on the Swan River from Fremantle, on the Indian Ocean coast and the site of the America’s Cup race in the 1980s.  Another three-hour time change!

In the afternoon we toured Kings Park and the enormous and quite wonderful botanical gardens.  Here’s a view of Perth from the gardens:

We had a great docent take us on a walk through the gardens for well over an hour, where she showed us many varieties of trees and plants which we do not have at home.   Here’s one, the grass tree:

There are also birds we don’t have.  I got this photo of one I haven’t yet had identified.  Anyone know what it is?

Perth has a wonderful feel about it and extraordinarily friendly and upbeat people.  Despite being a city of over 2 million people, it is still, in many ways, a frontier town, isolated and with its own style.  The downtown is lovely with four free bus routes around the city, the busses running every 10 or 15 minutes!  It is impeccably clean with no litter anywhere.  The weather is gorgeous, sunny all the time (they average 8 hours of sunshine/day 365 days/year), and temperatures are in the 80’s with a great breeze.  They did have a heat wave last week, just before we arrived, with temperatures of 100!

We checked into our hotel and at 5:00 began a lecture on the history of Western Australia, which was fascinating.  The state is, by far, the largest state in Australia and accounts for about 1/3 of the land mass of Australia.  There’s been a gold rush, and currently export of minerals, especially iron ore, make up the large bulk of the economy.  There’s been a boom and bust economy which fluctuates far too frequently for comfort, and the Perth area has the highest proportion of millionaires of any city in the country.  

Of course it was now well after 8 PM Sydney time, and I’m afraid much information didn’t stick in my memory.  We had dinner after the lecture and off to bed!