Good Times in Perth

I spent my first few days in Perth in a hostel, enjoying my Easter Bilby and printing out some resumes to distribute around town. The Monday after Easter (which was a public holiday) I went snorkeling in the morning with Andrew and Caroline at Cottlesloe Beach. The water was a bit chilly, but otherwise nice and we admired some wrasses and butterfly fish, as well as a lot of big greyish fish and a few other cool ones. Here’s the poster of the resident fish in the snorkel hole.

I think we saw the red-lipped morwong, crested morwong, McCullough’s scalyfin (definitely the juvenile one if not the big one), stripey, cowfish or boxfish (can’t remember which type), and maybe the silver drummer? The boxfish/cowfish especially made me happy because they’re some of my favourite tropical fish – so cute! It was my first dip in the Indian Ocean, which was pretty cool, and rounded out my trip so far, which covered the Pacific, the Southern, and now the Indian Oceans. We also saw an osprey chilling out on a lamppost, and I got some nice photos.

That afternoon I took a bus to Fremantle, which is the port region of Perth (the main city is up the river a bit from the ocean). It had this street art festival thing going on so I watched a magic show in the middle of the main area, catching a few glimpses of the acrobats beyond (it was pretty crowded and I didn’t feel like trying to make it to the acrobats when I had a really good view of the magic guy). He managed to produce a playing card out of a sausage and make a lit cigarette disappear, which was fun, as well as a few other tricks. There were also some punked-out bagpipers rocking out in a different sidestreet (festooned in combat boots, kilts, and tattoos) and a funny mime who accidentally terrified a little girl when he was pretending to be a Tyrannosaurus rex, and then tried to win her back with repeated behind-the-ear coin tricks (she eventually calmed down but I don’t think she fully got over his craziness). The market was also open so I tried a few more food samples and honey, but no tasty cheese this time. I also distributed resumes and went back the next day for a trial in an Italian restaurant (I did a lot of unpaid trials during my two(ish) weeks in Perth, but never got a job with any of them, and I think they take advantage of backpackers desperate for work and just use people when they need an extra set of hands without actually intending to hire anyone – it’s more than a little bit frustrating). 

That evening I got off the bus early to go back to Cottlesloe for one last quick swim at sunset. Lots of other people had the same idea (at least about watching the sunset, if not swimming, I think they might have been a bit wimpy about the water temperature, although I thought it was quite nice) but it was still very relaxing. I actually like the kid in the foreground who snuck into my sunset shot, since the endless sunset photos get a bit old without a person to anchor them.

Anyway after a few days in the hostel (which was a nice one housed in the historic Swan Barracks building) I decided to try out couchsurfing, since I needed to save money and had heard good things from different travelers I’d met along the way. So I loaded up all my stuff and took the train north to Joondalup to stay with a guy named Michael. Turns out there were a few other travelers staying there as well, so it was like a fun hostel/eternal slumber party vibe with some co-op-living thrown in. I ended up staying there for about 2 weeks, which was a lot of fun, and I met a bunch of other cool travelers moving in and out, including an Estonian girl, a few French guys, a German girl, another German guy, and a French girl. The only person who was there the same amount of time as me was Kelly, an Australian from Adelaide who was waiting for his visa to go to the US to be approved so he could attend the Jazz Festival in New Orleans (he made it in time and is currently living it up along the Mississippi). 

We had a lot of fun in the evenings when most people were home (unless we were doing pointless waitressing trials, grrr), playing cards or watching movies or cooking. Michael was a very cheerful and generous host and performed magic tricks and played the piano to wake us up in the morning and send us to sleep at night (I appreciated his repertoire of movie soundtracks and the way he could pick out tunes upon request). My penny whistle was also appreciated and one night we took to the streets to go to the shopping centre briefly, and I accompanied our sally forth with a few marching tunes (I think there is a video of that somewhere on Michael’s phone). Most nights someone would cook something for everyone, which was also awesome and I tried an Estonian potato dish and a German pasta dish, among other things. I made challah bread a few times, which was appreciated by all, and everyone helped me nearly finish off my remaining jam supply from Kangaroo Island after I made yeast pancakes for dinner. I also impressed everyone with a nectarine cobbler that I cobbled together (sorry, just had to) after realizing that the discount nectarines at the fruit stand were really not up to snuff for eating fresh, but came out all right in a pie. It went even better with whipped cream – yum!

One infamous day Kelly decided to cook and I offered to make coconut ice cream to go with his cherry/lychee pie (the menu was decided based on a few random ingredients Michael had in his cupboard that he said we should use up – I should note that everything Kelly made turned out great, it was only my ice cream that had challenges). I was super excited to try a recipe that I had learned from my wwoofing days at a blueberry farm in Victoria (need to put that post up soon) that involved whipping egg whites with sugar and fruit and then mixing it with whipped cream and freezing it into a fluffy ice cream. Unfortunately Michael didn’t have a mixer and it turns out that blenders don’t quite do the job. We managed to whip the cream by hand but the egg whites were non-cooperative. Even with the helpful suggestions of Philip, a French cook staying there at the time, we gave up after several tries and just combined everything anyway. The coconut butter ice cream came out a bit dense, but it was still edible and went very nicely with the pie – no one complained! 

Sometimes Michael brought back some pies or sausage rolls from the (meat) pie shop where he worked, which was also fun to try. I don’t know if it was the best environment for me to focus on finding a job, but it was definitely the most fun place l’d stayed so far in my travels, and reminded me of living in a dorm, but with a lot more accents spoken and a lot less space (with up to 8 people staying in a studio apartment, it was snug but we managed to make it work with a lot of air-mattresses and Michael’s couch). It was also fun to meet some younger Australians (Michael and Kelly were really awesome) since I’d been spending so much time with older wwoofing hosts (although they were also really awesome), aside from Andrew and Caroline.

This is a bit of a summary post, and I don’t have many photos from those weeks, unfortunately, but there were a few specific adventurous days that I’ll post separately. Here are a few pics from an afternoon when I went walking to the nearby Joondalup Lake with Kersti, the Estonian girl, Giuliano, a German guy with Italian heritage, and an American from New Jersey whose name escapes me (he was only there two nights).

 

It was a really hot day but I saw a few birds, nonetheless, including these cool stork things and some ducks.

These little grebe guys were cute, I think the second one was a half-grown chick.

I also caught this shot of one of the giant ravens that hang out everywhere – look at those jowels!

During the days I trolled Gumtree (the Australian version of craigslist) for jobs and wandered various suburbs of Perth distributing resumes, mostly to bars and restaurants since I wanted to get a hospitality job quickly (I really really didn’t want to have to go back to fundraising call-centre jobs). I saw an ad about English tutoring, so I helped this Italian guy, Matteo, with his English every few days, usually at various beaches (the weather was still really nice at this point). I had always known English was a confusing language, but it’s never so confusing than when you have to explain all the different pronunciations of “thought,” “though,” “tough,” “through,” and “thorough,” as well as all the many uses of the word “get” (think about it…it’s really ridiculous how ubiquitous is this fairly meaningless word). Anyway he was a nice guy and one day I even got to ride on his scooter because we were meeting his girlfriend at this beach a few kilometres from the train station. It was one of the most stereotypical experiences I can mention to date – riding on the back of an Italian’s scooter! But normally it would be on the streets of Rome, not to the nearest swimming beach on the Indian Ocean (by the way I did manage to go swimming a few times during those weeks, but snorkeling didn’t work out again since the next time I went to Cottlesloe beach there were all these invisible, but still very noticeable, jellyfish!).

The two Saturdays I was there I spent at the Kanyana Wildlife Centre, which is outside of the city, being trained to be a volunteer. It was really cool to start out, since we learned about the resident bilby breeding program – we got to see baby bilbies and I’m just sad I didn’t have my camera they were so cute!! Most of their patients are birds, because mammals are too hard to care for (since a lot of times they have to be fed every few hours throughout the night) so they get outsourced to other people, but the sick parrots and kookaburras were still cool to see, and we practiced changing the hotboxes (literally small enclosures with a heating system to keep birds and reptiles warm) and installing the right sized perches depending on the nature of the patient. We also saw some bobtails, which are a type of skink with a blue-tongue (I think they’re different from the blue-tongued skinks on the east coast, but I’m not sure) although a lot of them are suffering from a disease that they have trouble curing, so that was  bit sad. 

The worst thing was that the second day of training I was really late because I was getting a ride from this girl who also lived in Perth and we literally got trapped in the city because the main highway east was under construction and there’s a river running through town that makes it hard to just skip to another highway when the main one’s closed. By the time we navigated out of there we had missed the introduction to the resident animals, which included quendas (another hopping marsupial), bettongs (ditto), and echidnas. This wouldn’t have been a huge deal except that I never made it back to the wildlife centre again because I took a job outside Perth (I was really striking out in the city and was getting desperate to be paid again) so I didn’t get to see those animals. I also never got any photos from the centre. Oh well, I have a t-shirt and I got to learn a little bit about how they operate, so it was still a cool experience even though it was too brief.

I’ll skip two side-stories for now about a trip to a national park with Andrew and Caroline and a trip to Rottnest Island with Lucie, the French girl, and end this post with my last days in Joondalup before heading south to work as a bartender at the Nannup Hotel (more on that to come, but I do think I made the right choice in taking that job, since it’s worked out well and been an entirely different experience).

Kelly got his visa approved and his flight booked for the day before I was due to travel south, so Michael took us to the local pizza shop for a celebratory nearly-last meal together. Here’s the two of them about to devour a Ferrero rocchero cake thing that we split after the pizza (everything was super tasty). It’s a slightly creepy photo, I’ll admit, but still a good one.

I was doing a bit of packing, and had decided I needed to part with at least one of my Adventure Travel Expo t-shirts I’d been lugging around since Sydney (they were good pajama/work shirts, but I needed to lighten my load and I didn’t think I needed three of them). Kelly and Michael both agreed to take one, since they were actually more of a guy’s size anyway, so we had to take a few silly matching photos – check it out!

 

I also got some voice recordings of their Australian accents before we said goodbye to Kelly and went to bed (his flight was at some ungodly early hour of the morning). The next day I made apple/pear pie with the remaining pastry in the fridge and we whipped up some cream with Michael’s brand-new mixer that he had just bought – it was delish! It wasn’t officially a goodbye since I’ll be coming back to Perth for a night or two before I leave for good, but it was still nice. When I come back I plan to make the ice cream properly and also to bake one more loaf of challah (there’s some in the freezer because the last time I made it I halved all the ingredients except the water, so then I had to double all the rest of them to keep the challah from becoming a mushy disaster – oh dear).

Oops, I forgot about the Fremantle Prison, which I visited on my last day in Perth – I’ll have to do a mini-post about that!