We left Cervantes (late - bloody Greyhound buses!) on Thursday evening for the final leg of our journey to Perth. We were very much looking forward to getting to a real city. We arrived at about 8pm, checked into our hostel and nipped out for a thai meal. Yum! We even had a bottle of wine. Hell - hang the budget! Go mad.
The hostel's nice, with high ceilings, character and decent facilities. The Lonely Planet says that it "lacks atmosphere", but we've found along the way that that means that the hostel lacks drunken young travellers making noise after 10pm and making lots of mess. Perfect.
Anne will be based in Perth for a while now I think, since I'm flying to the UK on Monday to go to the wedding of some friends, where I'll be one of the two best men. The better of the two? It'll be weird to be leaving Anne for nearly two weeks, having been with her almost constantly for the last two months since leaving Sydney. I'll miss her (sob!) and I'm sure she'll miss me a lot. I believe that.
Saturday morning we rose and hit the town, and found a suit hire shop, where I got them to measure me. I've been trying to get my measurements sent back to the UK for weeks now (for the wedding) but have not found a suitable place since none of the towns we've been in (even, weirdly Darwin) have had such a shop.
After that we did spent the morning doing jobs - shopping for toiletries, going on the internet and arranging stuff. So nice to be in a city again with good facilities (and cheapish internet!) Anne's looking for volunteer work or a farm-stay while I'm away, but is having no joy finding anything at the moment. Ho hum.
Perth's an attractive city, quite small but first impressions are good. We're staying in an area called Northbridge which from what we'd heard was a little dodgy. We've been reading in the paper about the curfew recently introduced there to keep kids off the streets after 10pm. Seems fine to us now - a bustling bar area. There are lots of security guards and police around, so I get it used to be bad. I'd have been worried about Anne staying here alone if it was bad, but it's busy and seems safe so that's ok.
We've explored the city a bit now, and this morning went to the Perth Mint (a money-making venture if ever I saw one). (Do you see what I did there?) We did a tour and saw molten gold being made into a bar - very interesting. We also picked up a "Walking In Perth" book, giving lots of good walks and did one of the city walks. Good stuff. Nice to be back in a place where it's not so exhausting hot!