Perth - WA-yyyy better than the rest

It was with a heavy heart that I left the lads in Sydney and headed for the airport and Perth to visit my uncle Sean O' Connor for a few days. I was to meet up with the lads again in Melbourne before we hit Fiji. Having moved out to Australia in 1971 I had never actually met him so the problem of how to recognise him in the airport dawned on me as the plane touched down. Now Sean, being a Kerryman, doesn't have many redeeming features but one of them happens to be the fact that he is the mirror image of his father which proved to be most helpful as I walked out with my bag!

Sean and Marilyne live in a part of Perth called Scarborough which is on the Northern side of town. For the first time in 4 months I had a double bed with my own bathroom. It made a bit of a change from the rather tight surrounds of the camper van and the eh......local wildlife in the Perhentian islands! The one bit of wildlife in the house was a lorikeet named Patches. I think this guy was a bit spoiled as he went absolutely mental every time you turned your back to him. He also liked landing on your shoulder before displaying a kamikaze like streak by bolting for the window every now and again (not sure about bullets but the windows are definitely lorikeet proof).

The next morning I awoke to a breakfast of sausages, rashers, beans, tomato and mushrooms. It was then that I thought I should probably split from the lads more often and I must also check the family tree for relations anywhere else along the trip! That day we travelled down the coast to a city next to Perth called Fremantle. This was the place where most of the boats landed back in the day and was indeed the scene of the now legendary O' Connor landing in the early seventies. Fremantle is famous for a few things, the main ones being the aforementioned harbour, the Dockers Aussie Rules team and the old Freemantle prison. The prison is old school to say the least. It was finished in 1859 and there wasn't a whole pile of DIY done on the place. There was no running water ever in the place and let's just say the air conditioning left a little to be desired. Not the kind of the place you'd want to be hanging around!

That night I'd a wonderful roast chicken dinner which I'm pretty sure trumped what the lads were eating over in Melbourne. The following day we went into the city and took a stroll around Kings Park which is probably the best park I've seen on my travels. It's basically 1000 acres set on a hill just outside the city centre with a fabulous view of the city skyline and the Swan river.

After lunch we hit the Perth mint to check out what all this fuss about the gold rush was about. At one stage I had a gold bar worth half a million dollars in my hand at one stage. I would have held onto it but I reckoned it would have weighed my bag down too much! They do a demonstration where they melt down a gold bar (at 1300 degrees) and recast it in front of you. Amazingly they've been using the same gold bar since 1993 and it's still perfect after 30000 demos. Myself and Sean did find a couple of shiny rocks lying around the place on the way out though......

That evening we had a visit from Marilyne's granddaughter, Charlotte. A word of caution - don't ever give a tim-tam (the aussie equivalent of a penguin bar) to a 5 year old. The phrase rocket fuel springs to mind. I left for the airport the following morning extremely well fed and very happy to have visited the Western shores of Oz. I'd like to thank Marilyne and Sean for their wonderful hospitality and recommend that the rest of the O' Connor clan should definitely drop by for a visit...........if only for the museums!