Must see the Swan Valley wineries and then travel south to Margret River for some of themost famous Australian wineries

The parks! There is so much green in the city, in combination with the water all around, lovely!

I loved it. Lovely, little town close to beautiful beaches...

BUG SPRAY!!! BUG SPRAY BUG SPRAY

Kings Park and Botanical Gardens is a must see!

Over the last few days, I've had the opportunity to take a break from travelling for a while and relax in one of Australia's truly big cities - and I think I've earned it. For nearly a week, there has been no worrying about having to catch a connection, and certainly no having to phone up bus companies to find out which parts of my route are currently underwater. I am annoyed that the combination of floods and prebooking my hotel in Perth has prevented me from stopping off on the coast as I particularly wanted to go to Monkey Mia and swim with Dolphins, but the coach stops there about once a week and on my schedule, I really can't afford to find myself missing a bus and being stuck for days! Having so much free time in Perth has given me a chance to kick back and properly enjoy the city without feeling as though I'm in a rush to move on, so I've been doing all the things that a world traveller would normally avoid like the plague - stuff that I haven't really had a chance to do since leaving England. I've been to the cinema to see movies that I hadn't even heard about, I've been shopping in huge urban shopping centres and eaten in an international food court that was so international that I was able to buy a full English Sunday Roast dinner of Roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, roast potato and gravy from the Japanese Store! Perth seems like a young London - busy, vibrant, full of streets of café's and restaurants, but with less of the hustle and bustle and more of the carefree laid back attitude I associate with Australia. I have also been able to smile politely at people as I pass them on the street without having anyone put me down as some sort of freak, which is always a bonus. After a thirty-six hour coach trip from Broome, forced to sit next to a young mother whose child spent the entire trip either screaming or demanding to know if we were there yet, Perth felt like I had somewhere to call home for the first time in months. I literally threw everything into a corner of my hotel room, checked out the moss growing on the wall outside my window, and went out to explore (1). At first I didn't recognise anything from my first brief visit here back in 1995, but after strolling happily for several hours through malls and pedestrian precincts without a clue where I was going, I literally crossed a street and knew exactly where I was. All the memories came flooding back and suddenly I knew just how to get to everything - the train station, the cinema, the harbour front, the nightlife. Perth harbour isn't anywhere near as grand as Darling Harbour in Sydney, but in my opinion is all the better for it. Here, you can spend a relaxing afternoon away from the city center, drinking coffee outside a waterfront coffee shop or browsing the windows of the boutique and souvenir shops crowded around the jetties. The area is dominated by a small square surrounded by the flags of various nations, and stretching away around the harbour are shops, bars and pubs - one of which has the unfortunate name of "The Lucky Shag", which I was under the impression was how some people like to describe a good Friday night out. I took a two hour river cruise to the port of Fremantle, during which I copied everybody else by taking my shirt off and then got so involved in watching the city go by that I ended up getting severely sunburned. I also took the Ferry to Perth Zoo in the south of the city, which is remarkable in that it is open every single day of the year including Christmas Day - I spent a relaxed afternoon wandering around the confusing array of pathways between the environments, and enjoyed seeing all the funny animals I've ever heard about, like Rhinoceros, Tigers, Cats and Mink. Hang on - that's the lyrics to the Pink Panther show! Bears, Giraffes, Elephants, Zebra and Hyena joined the local Australian wildlife and looked well cared for and happy, although I still haven't managed to see a single Duck-billed Platypus, which is a shame.

You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

Last time I came to Perth, I stayed in a charming little Swedish hotel called "Miss Maud's", which was full of winding corridors, creaky lifts and even had it's own Swedish Coffee Shop and Restaurant. This time, my hotel is a new addition to the city and has been having a few teething troubles. Nevertheless, they seem to exhibit the standard Australian relaxed and friendly attitude towards the situation, and the reception staff have been happy to put anything right the moment it goes wrong. When I pointed out to them casually on the way out the other day that they were showing the wrong movie on the in-house movie channel, they instantly refunded the cost and changed it over immediately. While I was out, I imagine they must've had several complaints from couples all over the hotel who had been happily snuggled up in bed watching a romantic comedy and suddenly found themselves watching the second half of Die Hard 2. The next day they were showing the movies in the wrong order and because the VCR swaps them over on a timer according to the lengths of the films, everything was getting cut off ten minutes from the end. Again, they just refunded everybody. Perfectly good customer service, of course - but if they don't get things right at some point I can see them being bankrupt in no time! The TV stations themselves don't seem to entirely know what they're doing either. According to ABC, every night at 8.00 is supposed to be "Classic British comedy" - tonight, I turned on for an episode of Black Adder and found myself watching a program called Murder Squad, in which Essex Police were looking for a man who was going around casually setting fire to people who passed him in the street. Not quite the same thing. On my second day in the city, I joined the local "tourist tram" service which takes visitors on a two and a half hour tour of the city - a service which appeared to me to be sponsored by the local nightlife as it was mainly the casinos, nightclubs and bars which we trundled past, even to the point where we were offered the chance to get off and walk through the biggest casino in town. Perth is a sprawling city of suburbs and an extensive train system links all the outlying areas to the city center, where the central station is large and modern and reminded me of Liverpool Street in London. The trains are sleek and modern, and a pleasure to travel on compared to the dirty graffiti covered ones back home. They aren't overcrowded, and there are four suburban lines serving all the outer districts. Each line has slow and express services in case you don't want to stop at every station - on each line, there are trains that stop at every station, trains that stop at the first half of the stations and skip the second half, and trains that skip the first half and stop at the second half. This struck me as a very efficient system which seems to get everybody to where they want to go in a reasonable amount of time. The large, shiny information machines located on the platform of every suburban station, however, rather let the system down for me and should probably be renamed "lack of information machines" - no matter which button I pressed, the screen lit up with the helpful statement "No Information Available", so I'm afraid I can't regale you with vast amounts of knowledge about the outer districts of Perth. Instead, in an attempt to at least see some of suburban Perth while I was here, I simply closed my eyes and took a random stab at the map and ended up heading out to the town of Cottesloe which turned out to be a fairly small suburb, the station backing onto a sleepy side street. I spent a couple of hours browsing happily in the shop windows, and had lunch in a café near to the shopping precinct. It was nice to find the small urban side to this vast city, and quite unusual to find it more like the towns back home than the traditional outback village. The nightlife in Perth is every bit as vibrant as you would expect from a big city, and there are no shortage of things to occupy you after the sun has set.
I had been told that most of the decent nightclubs were based in the James Street area, but it quickly become obvious that the whole of the Northbridge area around James came alive at night - but the nightlife here seems to be somewhat different to the nightlife back home. In most parts of the world, nightlife means a handful of darkened clubs playing loud dance music while lines of scantily clad girls and blokes in jeans form outside waiting to be frisked by bouncers who don't appear to have much chance of holding down any job which doesn't involve lifting people from the ground and throwing them several metres. Perth, and in fact Australia in general, seems to have a much more enlightened and relaxed way of enjoying themselves. The entire area around Northbridge is littered with cafes, restaurants, pubs, bars, clubs and coffee shops - the average night out can involve having a meal and coffee, sitting outside a bar chatting with friends, and then wandering up and down the crowded streets for hours checking out several clubs. Clubs are far more diverse than at home, offering anything from Jazz to Dance to music from the 70s - a night out in Perth seems to be much more about hanging out with friends outside a bar and occasionally wandering into a club for a dance than the six hours of sweating on a single dance floor we're used to back home. The fact that everybody is so friendly is also a bonus - especially as being a traveller in a foreign land is usually a pretty good way of meeting people. No sooner had I walked through the door of my first club than I was being chatted up by two stunning Australian girls called, rather exotically, Skye and Monique. They were on a short holiday from a small town a couple of hundred miles away, and had just wandered into the club and started introducing themselves to everyone - although as soon as they found out I was from England they seemed to forget about everyone else and just wanted to buy me drinks and find out if I needed showing around Perth. This also happens in America, and I've never really been able to get my head around it - it seems that just having a British accent makes a person very popular in certain parts of the world, and the fact that we seem to have spent most of the last few hundred years invading and starting wars with everyone in the name of the British Empire seems to have gone mostly un-noticed! Monique and Skye introduced me to just about everyone else in the club and by the time I was too tired to stand up any more, at about five in the morning, I felt as though I'd known everyone for years.

You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

The 26th was Australia Day, which is a national holiday and appears to be an excuse for just about everybody to stay in bed or spend the day at home with the family. It's the one day of the year when those parts of Australia which don't already have tumbleweed blowing down the road get to find out what it's like to live in a Ghost town. I'm sure somebody up there has got it in for me - wait until I arrive in the biggest city I've been in since Sydney and then arrange for everybody to stay at home! I went out, wandered the deserted streets wondering where the entire population of Perth had vanished to overnight, and finally had the Australia Day phenomenon explained to me by the girl behind the counter at Hungry Jack's, who clearly hadn't seen another customer all day and was just happy to have somebody to talk to. And it also gives me a good excuse to tell you the story of Hungry Jack's. Tourists coming to Australia on a fast food diet can sometimes be found scratching their heads and wondering why McDonalds have such a large presence in the country but Burger King can't be located anywhere, and the story behind this is actually one of those rare cases where a small company has managed to get one over on corporate America. It would seem that when Burger King finally noticed that McDonalds was all over Australia and decided they ought to compete, they sold the Australian franchise operation to a man called Jack Cowin. Having done this, they were slightly surprised to discover that they didn't own the universe as they had previously thought and that the name "Burger King" was already trademarked in Australia by a small food shop on the Gold Coast. After presumably cursing for a while and trying everything they could think of to get the name back, Burger King provided Cowin with several alternative names to which it owned the trademark and he jumped at the rather lucky chance to use the name Hungry Jack's as it meant he could have his name on all the restaurants - Hungry Jack's had previously been the name of a pancake mix sold by Burger King's parent company in the States. Hence the first branch of Hungry Jack's opened right here in Perth back in 1971 and Burger King has been called Hungry Jack's across the whole continent ever since because of one small businessman in Queensland. Now, that's what I call sticking it to the man! But wait - it gets better. In 1996, the Australian trademark on the name "Burger King" ran out and Burger King immediately attempted to take the franchise away from Jack Cowin, trademark the name themselves and move into Australia. Over the next few years, they opened more than sixty Burger King locations around the country, until Jack Cowin looked at the small print on his franchise and decided to sue them for breach of contract. And he won. Burger King was told to pay seventy-five million dollars in compensation, appealed the decision to the High Court but the case was thrown out. Australian courts seem to have the same attitude as Australian people, and don't like to be bossed about - so they were probably never going to be told what to do by a big American company. Burger King sold 51% of its Australian operation to the company operating the Burger King franchise in New Zealand, who took advantage of their new majority shareholding and promptly decided to change all of their Burger King restaurants across New Zealand to Hungry Jack's in an attempt to boost sales. So don't look too hard for a Burger King in Australia or New Zealand. It has proved remarkably difficult to set up the next leg of my journey across to Adelaide in South Australia. It seems that they're currently holding some sort of National Cycling Championship over there, and this is obviously considered such an important event that Greyhound have been booked solid going in and out of Adelaide all week. I've had to book one of the last two seats on the only available coach all week, so it looks as though I decided to take my break in Perth at just the right time - I really can't think of anything I'd enjoy less than being surrounded in Adelaide by thousands of guys comparing bikes. Mind you, being stuck on a coach with fifty people talking about bike accessories might also be enough to drive me insane!

You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

My coach towards South Australia was due to pick me up from the station at a little after seven this morning, so, being a man, I left everything until the very last moment and had to get up at the crack of dawn to pack my suitcases. Of course, the only place open for breakfast at this time of the morning was McDonalds, and so at six o'clock I was wheeling my luggage into a deserted restaurant and making the mistake of trying to make smalltalk with the spotty-faced teenager behind the counter:
"I've seen three McDonalds on the way over here," I said casually, "It seems you have something of a monopoly."
She blinked at me twice, perhaps trying to work out what I had just ordered - because conversation is clearly a foreign concept to these people: "What's Monpolopy?" she finally wanted to know.
Now, I know what you're going to say. At this point, I probably should have just shut up and ordered breakfast - but instead, I decided to refer her to the world famous board game that's been around since the beginning of time and is probably even known to tribes in darkest Africa who have never seen another human being. My server stared at me blankly for what seemed and age, before informing me that she'd never heard of a game called Monploppy. The coach station wasn't open, which often seems to be the case when people are waiting for coaches. Instead, I waited outside in the morning mist in the company of Teddy Tramp and Percy Pervert who were asleep on an adjoining bench. The coach was fashionably late, and even when it did arrive I had to wait around some more while the driver unlocked the station and went in to have his breakfast in the warm - all I had available was a single vending machine which was covered in dust and appeared to contain products which haven't generally been on sale since the 70s. When I finally got to board the coach with the handful of other early morning travellers who obviously knew the system better than me and had arrived at exactly the moment the driver opened the doors, it felt as though I had been waiting in the cold for a month. I've never been so glad of heating in my life, although coach captains in Australia do seem to have an annoying habit of playing with the air conditioning throughout the journey so that one moment you are toasty warm and the next you've got icicles hanging from the end of your nose. Near to the small town of Corrigin we passed by a working dogs cemetery where more than seventy sheepdogs and tracking dogs are buried. Over the entrance there was a huge statue of a working dog which made the place look kind of weird, and far from thinking how sweet it was that farmers cared so much for their sheepdogs, it kind of reminded me of Stephen King's Pet Cemetery. The fact that you drive for miles before suddenly coming across this oddity in the middle of nowhere just makes it feel even more eerie. I was certainly glad we weren't passing through in the middle of the night. On the way to our major stop at Hyden, we called at a place called Hippo's Yawn. This is a series of rock formations and cliff-faces which, if you really strain your imagination to the limits and squint a lot, could possibly pass for a Tortoise lying on its back, a Donkey and a Hippo in a perpetual state of yawning. Members of our party stood around nodding thoughtfully, pointing in awe and telling each other how amazing it was, even though it was quite obvious that none of them had been able to see a thing until they were actually told what they were looking for - in the same way that once somebody has told you that Bohemian Rhapsody contains the lyrics "Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard", you can never hear anything else again. I got the impression that I wasn't the only one who couldn't see the Tortoise or the Donkey at all, but nobody wanted to look stupid in front of their friends. There's a chance that we would've had a better view had we been able to get closer but apparently there is a constant problem with people painting graffiti on the rocks, and sandblasting makes the rock faces look even less like what they're supposed to be, so the whole area is fenced off and you have to squint from a distance. I'm pretty sure that a fence isn't going to stop the sort of graffiti artists who are willing to hang upside down from motorway bridges, thirty feet above death by concrete, just to paint a rude word for oncoming motorists - but nobody seems to have thought of this. Graffiti of a different sort was to be seen at Bates Cave. It was quite a struggle clambering across the rocks to get in, but inside we found a whole wall of Aboriginal cave paintings and handprints and huddled around like small children as our guide explained their origins and told us the story of Mulka the Terrible. This is a legend told to Aboriginal children, probably along the lines of the western bogeyman and obviously intended to stop them wandering outside at night. It involves a devil creature called Mulka, born to a woman who was in love with a member of a forbidden warrior tribe. Mulka was born cross-eyed, was cast out by his tribe and took his revenge by becoming a monster who hunted and ate the local children. Bates Cave, also known as Mulka cave, is supposed to be where he lived and legend has it that the handprints on the wall are his. It's very easy to find yourself thinking "What a horrible thing to tell small children", but this would be quite hypocritical considering that nearly all Western nursery rhymes involve children falling out of trees, having their heads cut off with choppers, or dropping down dead from the plague! By the side of the road in Hyden can be found a bizarre collection of metal art - it seems that the locals have collected up any old scraps or discarded junk and welded it all together into metal cows, horses, cars, people, anything else you can think of. Unfortunately, we whizzed past on the way into town rather than stopping for a good look - but this resulted in several people spinning around in their seats and pointing out of the back window, nobody knowing quite what to make of it. The main attraction in Hyden, however, is Wave Rock - a fifteen metre section of the larger Hyden Rock, shaped like a giant wave. It is one of the most amazing natural phenomenon I've seen in my life, and standing underneath it and looking up really does create the feeling of being a surfer just as a wave is about to crash down upon you. The first instinct is to assume that it must've been carved out by the sea at some point millions of years ago when the ocean came this far inland - but this simply isn't true, although the guides don't rush to tell you this in case the true story should detract from the mystery of the place. The shape of Wave Rock is simply the result of millions of years of erosion and the shape was probably carved out of the granite from below as the surrounding softer ground wore away to reveal it. The entire face of the rock is streaked with multicoloured strips of algae and darker granite stripes which give it a certain otherworldly feel. It was even possible to scramble up the side of Wave Rock and walk along the flat top, looking down upon it from above. This is something which is rare in Australia as many natural sites are covered in danger signs, fenced off or considered sacred to the local Aborigines - in which case you keep your distance out of respect. After touring the Rock we were driven to the Wave Rock tourist centre, a big glass restaurant and souvenir shop where a meal and Australian Billy tea and Damper bread had been laid on for us. Billy tea is Aboriginal tea boiled in a traditional Aboriginal cooking pot called a Billy Can over a campfire - as immortalised in the unofficial National Anthem of Australia, Waltzing Mathilda. Damper Bread was the original Aboriginal bread made using items found in the bush such as seeds and roots. There was also a wildlife centre and museum at the Wave Rock site, but visiting would have cut down on my time at the rock so I gave it a miss.

You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

NorthBridge is great for backpackers, I stayed at the old prison building. Great place and they have lots of deals on the go all year.