dont miss out on the sundancer backpacker!

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

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.

super cheap accommodation is a hostel call wild cats or something withs cats in its name. but attention BED BUGS!!!

Beautiful city, nice and clean, quite and lovely people :-)
Make sure you go to Kings park and watch the sunset over the city and Rottnest island is a must,absolutly gorgeous! Its $69 for a return ferry ticket.
A good cheap hostel is Beatty lodge in Vincent street. Its $50 a night for a double or $33 a night for a single, dorms are also available.
Lots of restaurants in the city centre or in an area called Northbridge nearby, everything ranging from Maccy D's to italian, Korean, Japanese Greek

Sunday session @ cottesloe beach hotel is well woth a visit if your into beach, sunset, girls, drink, beer...check it you

L'océan Indien est d'un bleu turquoise foncé tellement beau qu'il nous fait oublier qu'il y vit les plus gros requins au monde!!!

The Perth YHA is right near the train station. It's nice because it's one of the only hostels centrally located, but it's not so nice because the trains make a lot of noise.

Nice to spend a day or two with bycicle on Rottnest island, see King's park and travel to Pinnacles desert. For backpackers it's really nice to sleep in Coolibah lodge -small and cosy.