And it all begins in Perth. We'd heard
soo many good things about it that we'd been thinking about arriving here for a while.
Perth is the most remote city in the world due to it's location on the West coast of Australia. Most of the Australian population live on the East coast so Perth is a long was off. I think around 3,000 kilometres.
The promised land arrived with the worst landing we'd had so far. It was pouring with rain and and it felt like the plane lurched sideways after the constant up and down motion just before touchdown. But we're here non the less and the temperature is a shocker. It's half that of Singapore, around 16 degrees. And it's lashing it down, sideways.
Whoa, this feels like stepping back in time. Not far, around the late 80's somewhere. The small airport seems......I don't know, not as advanced as others we've passed through. The 'shuttle' service from the airport to our accommodation is a minibus. Public transport isn't quite what it should be. The driver says it's the worst rain for ages and they've been in drought for blah-
de-blah long and so forth. Grim.
Our hostel is nice though, other than the lack of heating - apparently common in Australia(even though they have winter every year!). At the time of booking I knew we'd be hitting the tail end of winter but after coming through Asia the weather is a bit of a shock.
Our hostel was located in the 'bustling
Northbridge area of the city. It's where all the bars, restaurants and clubs are located so we thought we'd go check out life on the streets that evening. Dead. Everything was closed bar a couple of places. The streets were empty and I started to wonder if we were in the wrong area. We weren't. A car pulled up and a drunk Australian got out and approached us. He was friendly enough and started talking bollocks to us almost straight away, "Hi, I'm Brad. My friends call me my father's son." He repeated this phrase at least 4 times. Interesting. We dived in a restaurant to get away, and nice it was too. Whoa, the prices here are mental!
One thing Brad did tell us of note though was about the death of
Northbridge since an underground road bypass was built. Not as much through-traffic meaning not as much business.
Ok. So let's head over the railway, which splits the city, to the main heart of Perth itself. Also closed. Except for MacDonald's of course. The streets were deserted other than a few rogues and vagabonds, we got asked for change immediately from some zoned out tramp. If I'm not giving to a heavily scarred 10 year old boy in
Hong Kong I ain't giving to a drunk tramp to fund his booze and drug habit. Besides, I need to buy booze for myself!
Laura needed the loo so I waited outside the dirty looking MacDonald's. An arguing group of late teens wandered up the streets. This carried on to the boyfriend of the couple arguing saying to his girlfriend "Where are you going you stupid bitch? I hope you get raped!". Nice. She entered MacDonald's and after a strangely racist comment aimed at her from him, he followed her in. I then got asked for a cigarette of another scuzzy street urchin.
Hmmm.
Back to the hostel then. On the way we thought we'd check out the Internet place round the corner. A dirty hovel full of
pre-pubescent lunatics playing online games. The place was scruffy as anything, cockroaches up the stairs and food crumbs scattered on the tables. This was not the Australian dream.
Maybe we'd been pampered with hi-speed free Internet and up-to-date technology with excellent infrastructure. Maybe this was just a bad day. We'll see how it fairs in the daylight.
We headed out on the dirty train to Perth's port town,
Freemantle. This is supposed to be a bohemian artsy type place with live street music and a flashy cafe culture. Utter bollocks. It was dead. I know this is winter but come on! We wondered round feeling fairly miserable. The free buses around
Freementle and Perth are a great idea but there's so little to see it's hardly worth it. Maybe it's transformed in summer. I don't care. It's the worst place we've been. There's no atmosphere and the streets feel unsafe in comparison to anywhere in Asia.
A huge sign on a shop frontage read '
Freo(
Freemantle) is dying, it needs a leader'. Looks like it's already dead. A nice beach though but clearly not the weather for it.
There seems to be a real people shortage here, but maybe this is coming from the hectic places of Asia. Some may prefer it but after a couple of days in Oz we were in total shock. This is far from the dream we were sold on and a long way behind the excellent places we'd visited so far. I didn't think it would take a while to get used to Australia. But it did.
Australia brought a few firsts on the trip for us. The first time we've seen loads of rubbish and ripped seats on public transport and the first time we've stopped in all evening. Normally we'd wander the streets at night among bustling atmospheres with sights to see and to just take it all in. Here? No. We couldn't face it.
Next day we checked out the Museum of Western Australia to find out about the culture and history of the place. It was alright and there was quite a bit of information about how badly the
Aboriginal people were treated here and how many were slaughtered. There was also an interesting video about Perth in modern times. An aboriginal bloke talking about the racism he still gets everyday and many locals discussing the 'move out of the city program' which was a plan to get people to live on the outskirts rather than the centre itself. This means that after 5pm the place is dead. Odd.
Looking around you soon see how culturally diverse this place isn't. There are Chinese here but that's about it. We finally saw Aborigines though, they were just scrounging for a dollar to buy more booze. Apparently the aboriginal people you see around towns are the outcasts from their tribes, whether this is true or not we never find out.
For a place that likes to think of itself as clean, modern and forward thinking this place is still in the dark ages. Way behind Asia and not even a quarter of the fun.
Kings Park was a slight glimmer of what it could be. A great park slightly on the edge of the city. It offered great views back to the good looking skyline and river on which the handful of skyscrapers hugged. As well as war memorials there was also a more modern memorial to the Australians who died in the Bali bombings a few years back. 16 Perth citizens perished in the attack, 8402 people lost their lives in total.
Northbridge livened up a little after few days. The results of drunken brawls were evident, the first violence we've seen. But, how people choose to live here and call it paradise I have no idea. Maybe they lived under a rock all their lives. I don't think I'd come back in the summer to see if
there'd been any change, it doesn't deserve the chance. The first big disappointment. We originally thought 4 nights here was not enough, we were wrong. Next stop Ayers Rock, or as it's now call
Uluru.
365 days, 16 countries and a full circumference of the globe. So how much would a trip like this cost? The tickets, 20 flights, cost almost exactly £2000. We bought a couple more, at about £120 each, along the way. A long van rental in Australia? Just over 50 days in the off season cost us about £1500 between us. Considering that was our accommodation as well it wasn't too bad. But if anyone if staying longer than a couple of months then buying a vehicle is the way to go.
One person has asked me what my worst country is and to be honest that's an even harder question. I plumped for Bolivia because the people were miserable, there was a lot of civil unrest once we left, but there's some truly beautiful scenery there. The unwanted attention in China and the annoying con-men in Bangkok were only minor bugs in an otherwise exceptional trip. We spent a year almost constantly travelling and encountered only one dodgy situation and even that was not a full week into the trip.
