Killing Time

March 14, 2002-Styling City
(photos:Police & aborigines,
London Court,
Cheeky pelican & me)

We woke up an hour before we were supposed to this morning. The clock/radio had the wrong time & we didn’t notice it when we set it. We managed to occupy ourselves until it was time to check out. We had the day ahead of us & our flight didn’t leave until 11:15 PM.

Although we’d driven through Perth & had seen it from afar, this was our first opportunity to walk the streets & really feel the city. We found it to be surprisingly stylish with attractive modern buildings well blended with the old historic ones. A lot of restoration & preservation was going on & it seemed that the planners were doing it thoughtfully.

We ate brunch at a café on one of many pedestrian malls & watched the city wake up. It was alive with buskers, spruikers, & push cart vendors. There were more aboriginals than I expected to see & they were promenading the streets & socializing. There was a lot of interaction between them & the police, but it didn’t seem adversarial. The first thing I noticed was the abundance of police. The second thing I noticed was that the police wore shorts & had great legs. In the evening, the police presence is augmented by an aboriginal volunteer patrol that, as the police told us, handles “their own people.” The volunteers had no power to detain or arrest & had to call any problems in to a central police switchboard. The officers said that by the time the cop on the street heard about a problem it was resolved or had gotten out of hand.

We followed the walking tour in Fodor’s Guide Book & took advantage of the shops along the way. We did some serious souvenir shopping in stores that had far superior crap than I’d seen elsewhere in Australia. Our trek took us to an alley called London Court. It could have come out of a Harry Potter book. It was designed along the English half-timber style & the narrow lane gave the buildings the appearance of leaning in towards each other. St. John’s Pro-Cathedral, our next stop, had an unusual feature. There was a blue 5-gallon tank of holy water by the door. If you brought your own bottle, you were welcome to fill it from the tank. By the way, does anyone know what a pro-cathedral is? St. George’s Anglican Cathedral, built in the 1850’s, was a surprise. It was the first cathedral I’d seen that had brick interior arches. The ceiling was constructed of jarra wood that soaked in the river for two years until it was pliable enough to bend into beams. The cathedral was originally designed to be built of stone, but it was not possible to quarry the stones due to a convict shortage. They ended up making the bricks on site & using them instead.

When we found our walking tour was taking us past the new fire station, we realized there was nothing more worth seeing in Perth. We still had about nine hours to spend in the 90-degree heat until our flight. We headed south to Mandarah. It’s a small hamlet huddled around Peel Bay. Fortunately for us, it has some of the best homemade ice cream. We strolled along the water & were entertained by dolphin playing in the shallows. We found the pelicans as pushy as the seagulls & enjoyed their antics as they joined together to beg for handouts. Dogs & humans joined the menagerie in the water to make an entertaining sight.

I guess they don’t have the problem there that we have on the Gold Coast. We just read that there’s a shark feeding frenzy going on two blocks from our apartment. Beaches have been closed as hundreds of sharks gathered around an enormous school of fish. They divide up into groups of fifty or so & herd the fish into smaller more manageable groups so they can feed more easily. Word has it that whales have joined the fray. If I have enough energy when we return, I’ll walk down to the beach to see what it’s about. Tuesday begins the big week for the surf lifesavers competition. I wonder if they’ll cancel it or add a shark-roping event.

We went back to Northbridge in Perth for dinner at Harriet’s Restaurant. It was highly recommended, but we weren’t too optimistic. You know the drill about expectations. Were we surprised! The food was so good that we kept asking our server about it. We found out one interesting combination that made a great foccacio dip was sour cream & sweet chili. The man at the table next to us was alone & we struck up a conversation. He was from British Columbia in Canada & was a geological engineer. He was in Perth to meet with clients who were building a gold mine in Laos. Who would have thought that Laos had gold? Somehow, “Maybe I can interest you in a gold mine in Laos,” doesn’t have a ring of authenticity.

March 15, 2002

I love hearing from you all. Someone who gets these email, made an interesting observation after reading about our harrowing day of problems culminating with the night drive through kangaroo territory. Come to think of it, that would be the entire continent. She referred to it as a “pathetic litany.”

I am finishing the email from our apartment. The flight went off without a hitch except for the ungodly hour. We did get to see sunrise over the outback. It looked like the sky was bathed in a rainbow. Starting from the horizon, the black rugged land was silhouetted against shades of orange, yellow, blue, & purple.

Toby