Summertime in Perth!

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It's summer and the bikinis and surfboards and SHARKS are out in Australia!!!

To sample the famous beaches in our part of the world here in Western Australia, we went to Scarborough Beach. It's a scene out of Baywatch, complete with the lifeguards, the (pale) sunblocked bodies baking in the sun, the surfer dudes but minus the very Aussie Shark Patrol (!!!). The beaches of Perth are part of the Indian Ocean and they say learning to surf here with sharks in the water are as common as people learning to drive in the US! During our trip to Scarborough, the Shark Patrol (a helicopter that does its rounds every 30 minutes) had a few shark sightings usually indicated by the helicopter going round and round a certain area and the Rescue speedboat coming towards the area and shooing away people (if there are any). Amazingly, people didn't seem to care as much and it was really just normal for them to know there's a shark out there. And mind you, these sharks could be great whites or hammerheads, about 5m long on the average. Almost once every 2 weeks since summer started, news of an attack will make the headlines -- and I wonder when they say shark attacks are rarer than plane crashes, if they have ever been to Australia during the summer???

Anyway, we had a big breakfast at Plaka on the Beach and just stayed on the beach for maybe 3-4 hours before we decided the sun was just too hot. Aussie summers are really hot -- we have sweltering 40C days here, even worse than the summers back home in the Philippines! We had a gelato on the way home and still managed to catch several hours of daylight -- that's how long summer days are here in Perth!

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