Mark Boulton

I’m a little bit late post­ing this. Need­less to say, inter­net access — let alone wifi — is some­what lack­ing in the old­est rain­forest on the planet. As I’m writ­ing this, Emma and I are sat in our camper van just south of Port Douglas in north­ern Queens­land. Tom­morow, we’re driv­ing up to the Dain­tree and Cape Tribu­la­tion which prom­ises to be fant­astic, if the weather holds out (but I guess it’s our own fault for com­ing to Queens­land at the tail end of the rainy sea­son, and did it rain today!). But this post isn’t about Queens­land, but our week in Perth. 

I like Perth. There are lots of reas­ons why; from the pristine CBD and cheap sushi, to the stun­ning scenery and great beaches. There’s an energy in Perth sim­ilar to other Aus­tralian cit­ies, but Perth in par­tic­u­lar seems more so. There’s a lot of build­ing going on, house prices are on the riseit cer­tainly seems like a city on the up. How­ever, there’s one thing I couldn’t get used to in my week in Perth—apart from the tea as Emma poin­ted out last week—was the feel­ing of isolation.

Perth is an isol­ated city. Let me try and put it into some geo­graph­ical con­text. Perth’s closest major city is Singa­pore, not an Aus­tralian city. It’s the same dis­tance from Perth to Sydney as is it from Lon­don to Moscow and you can fit three UK’s in the state of WA (West­ern Aus­tralia). Ima­gine one large city in half of europe. So, Perth is pretty isol­ated geo­graph­ic­ally and you would expect that cul­tur­ally things might be a bit out with the rest of the nation—thankfully this isn’t the case as Perth seemed as met­ro­pol­iton as Sydney or Mel­bourne. But, I just couldn’t get the isol­a­tion thing out of my head, and to be hon­est, it kind of made me feel quite agora­phobic. Is this because everything is so close, and we’re so packed together, in the UK? Not sure. 

Any­way, fol­low­ing on from Emma’s post, things were quite hec­tic with the run up to Emma and Clinton’s wed­ding last Fri­day. The day itself was fant­astic. The happy couple were blessed with beau­ti­ful weather (a cool 30C!), great food, good music and plenty of booze. The cere­mony was quite dif­fer­ent to a UK ceremony—It was very laid back, con­duc­ted in a pub­lic venue over­look­ing Perth under a large gum tree. Fol­low­ing pho­tos in sev­eral loc­a­tions we accom­pan­ied the bridal party to the recep­tion in a fish res­tur­ant called the mus­sel bar in Free­mantle (about three doors down from Little Creatures) for quite pos­sibly the best sit-down meal for a wed­ding we’ve been too. Emma and Clin­ton headed off for their hon­ey­moon in The Kim­ber­ley an Emma (The Wife) and I, were left in the cap­able hands of the bride’s sis­ters (Jenny and Rachel and boy­friends Tim and Rus­sell), to show us the sites for our last two days in Perth.

We were all geared up for a trip to Rottnest Island the day after the wed­ding, but booze, too much sun and lack of sleep got the bet­ter of us (and the fact it was Easter week­end). Instead, in the after­noon, we headed over to Free­mantle and up the north coast along the beaches. 

Our flight to Cairns on Sunday wasn’t until 10:30pm, so we had plenty of time to get another full day in. Jenny had the idea of head­ing up to one of the winer­ies in the Swan Val­ley for lunch (no com­plaints from us!). Jane Brook winery is a fairly small winery, but pro­duces some crack­ing wines. Favour­ites were the Mar­garet River Mer­lot and the Shiraz and, wierdly, a spark­ling red. Coupled with a great spread of local cheeses, bread, homemade cori­ander and chilli pesto and hummous we settled down for a slightly tipsy lunch. 

We’ve enjoyed our time in Perth. We’ll give it a few years, but we’ll be back for sure.