Back in Perth, WA
Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Fri 13 Feb 2015 06:27
The hotel we stayed in at first was a bit strange. The rooms were fine, but it was more the position. Miss Maud's has been here for years and probably was better situated when it first opened. However, it is now surrounded by the homeless and down and outs of Perth who are constantly hanging around the main street. When you walk back at night they are all hanging round, drinking, chatting etc, not exactly causing a problem but visible enough to make you notice them and be aware of them. Part of the problem is the way they are treated by the city. The salvos (Salvation Army), feed them and provide drinks etc, but they do this in the main street and in the parks so that is where they congregate. The town could be improved just by moving the soup kitchens out of the main areas. Where we are now, we are to the east of Perth and it is more residential, with nice restaurants nearby.
Perth is itself an odd town. It is the most isolated capital city in the world. There is nowhere anywhere near and it feels more like a provincial country town than a city. To give you an idea of the size of the state of Western Australia, imagine this. If you were to start in the Fylde Coast and draw a ring around the land somewhere near Preston, you would probably encompass about 2 million people. This is the same amount of people that live in and around the Perth metropolitan area. In the rest of the state there are only another 500,000. This other people are spread over a huge area, so if you were to start at the ring around Preston and clear most of the rest of Europe and scatter those 500,000 people around, then you have an idea of the scale of the place - huge and largely full of vast empty spaces. Our flight back to Adelaide will take as long as a flight from England to southern Italy!
On Friday we decided to try our hand at the local pastime of gambling with a night at the races. The most popular racing here is harness racing where the horses are driven by drivers in small chariots and are allowed to go no faster than a trot. We did ok in the first two races, with a second in each so managed to re-coup $55 against our (limited) losses for the night, which almost paid for a pizza and wine on the way home, and then lost in all the subsequent races! It is not quite the same as normal racing, as the speed is limited there are no thundering hooves, but still fun. There was also quite a spectacular sunset over the course.
Full flow racing!
A rather spectacular coloured sunset which amazingly wasn't the start of a storm!
The big event here this weekend has been 'The Giants' as part of the Perth Arts Festival. The company that produces the shows are French and have travelled the world putting on various shows. They have huge puppets, a little girl, a diver and a boat, I know, it's an odd mix, and they use them to tell a story. They try and fit their puppets into a local story wherever they go. Here the obvious story is Aboriginal based and it makes for quite strange, somewhat disjointed story about a girl giant searching for a diver who went missing when he was searching for survivors following the wreck of a boat carrying soldiers in Gallipoli - I forgot to mention that as well as an Aboriginal folk story, the show is also meant to be celebrating 100 years of Anzacs. Anyway, so the story goes, the diver, a normal man at first goes looking for survivors on the sea bed in Gallipoli, but finding none decided to bury their bodies in the sand. He unhooked his air, and wandered around the sea bed for years finding sunken boats and burying bodies, until he got so big and strong he was a giant - very believable! The Aboriginal bit related to the girl living with a tribe for a while before she found a boat half buried in the sand and tried to find the diver - very mixed up and weird, but a) the puppet company are French, and b) this is entertainment Western Australia style! These huge puppets have been parading round the city twice a day for the last two days and thousands of people have turned out, over 500,000 on Saturday which bearing in mind the population of the state is like 1/5 of the population of the UK turning up to Lytham Club Day!
The little girl giant
The boat
The little girl although seemingly up huge when we saw her on Friday was absolutely dwarfed by the diver - his head was nearly 5ft tall! In total he was about 4 stories high.
We spent Valentine's Day having a lovely lunch in Fremantle at a seafood restaurant rather than join the crowds for dinner last night, and spent the evening watching a rather mixed up Mamma Mia on television, I think when they cut the film for the adverts they put some of the bits back in the wrong order, so the whole film was a little confusing and out of sync!
We are now on our way back to Adelaide to do some exploring there. Unfortunately due to the fact that we didn't read the small print on our visas, we are actually going to outstay our three month welcome - oops! When we went to the immigration office the options weren't great, we could get a dodgy bridging visa for $350 each which does not look good for further applications, or move our return flights, which we really don't want to do. The best option was to leave the country and reset the visas for another three months, so next weekend we are flying to Bali for 3 days! It was only marginally more expensive than a visa extension and a whole lot less problematic in the long run - really we are having a terrible time!
Sent from my iPad