2011 Oz Blog # 6 Attadale (Perth)

# 9 Roberts Road Attadale WA

Back Yard

Covered Deck

Living Room

Kitchen

Perth Walking Mall 3 Blocks Sqaure

Bronze Statue

Church in the center of Perth

Stainless Steel Sun Dial

Perth Center

Bell Tower

Leaving on a Cruise to Freemantle 16 Km

Perth Skyline on the Swan River

Cottelsloe Beach (Perths Bondie Beach)

On the Cruise

Another Beach

What a Job to have

Perth Aquarium

At the center of Freemantle

Restored Building

SS Batavia sunk 300+ Years ago

Some of the Cargo, over 300 lives lost

Surfboard Lessons

Freemantle Harbor

Aussie did 3 times around the world non stop

Blog #6 Western Australia 2011-04-27

Our last stay is in Attadale, a residential area between Fremantle on the coast and Perth, 18 km up the Swan River. In the state of Western Australia there are 2.3 million people with 1.7 million of them in this Fremantle/Perth area. It is very diverse and shows many influences of immigrants. An example we enjoyed was the Cappuccino Row with two blocks of coffee houses with outdoor tables of course. We are told this is the Italian influence.

A car-free mall in Perth, gave us a good look at stores, restaurants and souvenir shops. As you will see from the pictures there is quite a spectacular bell tower in Perth on the Swan River. We sat in the park and enjoy the bells. There has been lots to do and see. Some of the highlights were a river cruise from Perth to Fremantle, a fascinating Maritime Museum with actual sail boats that won the Americas cup etc, but especially a partly restored wreck of a Dutch vessel that sank 350 years ago.

Again there are perfect beaches, surfers, boaters and all the things we have learned to expect here. A scenic drive up the coast brought us to a great aquarium. It had a plexiglass tunnel about 10 feet high, with a slowly moving floor. We could just stand there with turtles, sharks, rays, endless brilliant coloured fish swimming above us and beside us. There were even little seahorses.

Again we are very lucky to have a wonderful home to stay in. The back garden is very private as mature trees surround it. Perfect for, guess what, birds of course. A huge tree in a near-by yard had a bright red mystery fruit and finally it must have been ripe as there was a non-stop parade of Rainbow Lorakeets, a medium sized parrot type with more colours than the bird in the Telus ad. It was quite a treat.

On April 12 we flew from Perth to Sydney where we stayed overnight, catching our flight home in the a.m. We left at 10.30AM, and fourteen hours later we ready to nap....but it was 7:30 AM and we were arriving in Vancouver, my Sydney-set watch said midnight, we had got the day back we had lost on the yrip over. After a three hour wait we got the plane to Kamloops. We were very glad to be home 30 hours since we had got out of bed 30 hours earlier!! Took us 3 day's to gey over the jet-lag.

We carry many happy memories from this trip and no regrets so that is a good way to wind things up. Are we glad we did it? Absolutely. Would we do it again? Probably not, unless one of you has found the Fountain of Youth?

Thank you for following us!

South Yunderup Blog #5

South Yunderup Exchange Home Living Area Dinning & Kitchen Patio over looking Jetty & Canal Our Jetty w/ Alum Boat View from Jetty Miles of Canals Wild Black Swan Bird of Paradise Plant Our Road Runner "Beep Beep" Our Yacht

Loverly

"Hungry" Waiting for the Lunch Cruise to begin

Condo's Starting @ AU$495,000.

Beautiful Area

AU$11 Million

Beautiful Water & Beaches

Australia 2010-2011 Blog #5 South Yunderup On arrival at the Perth Airport, from Geraldton, we were met by Tim (from the Augusta stay) he kindly took us to pick up the car so generously lent to us by Sue and Mike as they were away and not using it. It was a shock to learn that this exchange didn't include a car, even though a car was included on the Home Exchange Site! Thankfully Sue and Mike (from our last stay in Perth) came to our rescue. We drove to our next exchange “Pelican House” in South Yunderup which is a suburb of Mandurah, about 15 minutes away. This area is part of the Murray River Estuary and has been developed into a residual area by creating miles of canals, with the homes backing onto them. Each has it's own little jetty and there are some sizable boats tied up to some of them. There is walking space along some of the canals near us, with mature trees for shade. We enjoyed walking along watching ducks, a black swan and assorted LBB's (little brown birds). They are too quick to identify. Bird of Paradise plants grow profusely here. We stopped to take a picture of a plant of them that was about 7 feet tall when the owner offered to cut one for us. It lasted about 10 days. When it was in a vase with a leaf we felt it looked just like the Road Runner...don't you think so? It was a lovely spot with a large patio area looking out on the canal. Once again we are comfortable and happy to have new things to explore. An unexpected bonus is a pool table.....at least it turned our to be a bonus as we poked balls around and had fun. Herb has played (in his misspent youth I guess) but I (Lil) had never had a go at it. Occasionally I even got a ball in a pocket! Who said 'never too old to learn'? It is still quite hot, in fact it has been over 35C for something like 53 days. A/C to the rescue, as well as a good breeze as again we are not far from the ocean. Actually most of Western Australian people live not far from the ocean. No mountains to the east of us, just desert, and it is the desert wind that is the cause of the high temperature. The City of Mandurah is on the Murray River Estuary, were the river enters the Indian Ocean, and is very popular with the well to do from Perth, which is less than an hour away, lots of vacation homes, boaters and tourists. We took a Boat Tour of the harbor, the estuary, and some of the canals, with homes valued in the millions of dollars. It was a lovely treat to see porpoises between the sail boats docked at the marina but best of all, several accompanied us beside the boat. Such graceful creatures! Altogether it was a great day, there was a roof over the top deck where we were so no problems with too much sun. At noon we stopped at one of the water-front cafes, as arranged, and excellent fish and chips were brought aboard for us. Just for a smile, here are some names from the tree book and the bird book (honestly!) the black butt tree and the snottygobble tree birds: the Babbler, the Hardhead and Willy Wagtail.

Geraldton Blog #4

Our Transwa Coach/6 hour/1 Stop Ride to Geraldton


Long flat road, but senic drive


Our home for 2 weeks

Geralton has some beautiful beach's

Trillions and Trillions of small Clam Shells

100 Kms of shells up to 10 meters deep

Shell Sculpture

Emu along the side of the road to the Dolphins

Dolphins up close

Feeding the Dolphins

Pink Lake

Blue Parrot

Blog #4 – Geraldton

Our 6 hour trip on the bus from Perth went faster than we thought and was quite comfortable. We were met by Phil and Maureen who took us to their home for our next exchange. It is quite comfortable, but quite noisy as a main street passes the house. It's hot, as we expected, 32 – 37, fortunately there is an almost constant stiff breeze (wind?) so it blows through the house....thankfully because the A/C did not work very well!

Geraldton is about 30,000 people, and on the coast. Again lovely beaches and all the facilities you need. This is a deep water port shipping iron ore, fertilizer and whatever else they mine in the interior. Rumor says it's on it's way to being a boom town as there are a number of new mine's in the development stages.. The harbor is quite shallow, so it has a dredged channel for the ships to come through. We can see them from the house as we are only a block and a half from the ocean, and the tugs seem to be with them for a couple of miles.

As in other parts of Australia, we have been warned by locals not to drive at dusk or after dark as there is a real danger of hitting a kangaroo.

We drove about 400 km north to the Shark Bay (yes there are sharks, no we didn't see any) to a place called Monkey Mia where the wild dolphins come into shore for a fish treat. Interaction with them is no longer allowed, which was a disappointment but it still was wonderful to be within a few feet of them and actually look them in the eye. There were about 12 of the beautiful creatures who swam back out from the bay as soon as a couple of fish were handed out.

We booked a motel off the internet. It was unbelievable. A little rickety cottage where nothing worked but at least the bed was comfortable. All this for “only” $110. per night.
On the way there, we did visit a beach which was made entirely of small shells shaped like a clam shell but only about the size of your little finger nail. It was unbelievable. There is 110 km of shell beach and they are more than 10 meters deep. There are buildings in the town of Denham, made of building blocks of shells, as the shells away from the salt water have had the salt leached out, and can be mixed with cement to hold them together.

On the way back toward Geraldton we saw a Pink Lake. The sign says it is caused by beta carotene, like carrots, but this was definitely pink. Hopefully the pictures will show the color of the water. There are a couple of processing plants on the lake shore, recovering the chemicals.

The next night we stayed in Kalberri a resort area about 125kms north oif Geraldton, and found a great room, for $75 Regularly $262.
One of the attractions of the town was to see the Seahorse Breeding Stable. Cute, eh? Well they were closed up, so we went to where there were tropical birds in a “free flying jungle setting” It was a lovely jungle setting of tropical plants but their idea of free flying meant within cages. I was some miffed (lil) as I feel birds shouldn't be in cages. Ah well, you can 't expect all to be perfect.

The rest of the trip back to Geraldton was fine, in fact we saw several emus along the side of the road. The land is very flat with miles of straight road through red earth with shrubs no more than 4 feet high. The long flat and straight roads make travel fast, if not too interesting.

We have enjoyed Geraldton, it is the most northerly of the exchanges so it was a good chance to see that area.

We took a Skywest flight back to Perth, a 70 min flight so we could see this area from the air, suprisingly a lot of grain farms, not much mixed farming as the area is a drought area, the current one has lasted 6 years.

Next we will be off to South Vanderup, for those of you who may be following us on a map, it is actually very close to Mandurah, with the home being located on a man made canal off the Murray River.