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Published: April 28th 2008
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Perth City
View from the Swan Bells We arrived in Perth after 8 days of travelling (and 3 days stuck in the middle of nowhere) from Melbourne. We managed to find somewhere to rent on the internet for a couple of weeks - a duplex (semi-detached to you and me) in a place called Dianella which is just 10 minutes from Perth City. Set up in the hills you can see the city in the distance. We decided to hire a car as we have heard there are some nice places around Perth to go and visit. On our first day we had a walk around the city, it’s a nice city if not a little like most of the cities in Australia - all set out in a grid system close to the river. The Swan River runs quite a way in to Perth and has some lovely views, we would have hired a bike to ride along it for the day if it wasn’t for the fact that it cost as much to hire the bike as it did to hire the car. A 10 minute walk out of the city is Kings Park which is set up in the hills so you get fantastic views
The Swan Bells Tower
Holds the former bells of St Martin-In-The-Fields from London of the city from here. We decided to go for a walk here on what was a public holiday in Perth, and it was nice to see literally hundreds of families all getting together and having barbeques and playing sports games all around the park, something you don’t see much in England these days. There are barbeques set all around the park and they are free to use as they were in the campsites. There are various places of interest such as museums, botanical and water gardens. The day we were there a group called Air were playing an open air concert, but at $100 a ticket we thought we’d give it a miss.
The lady we were renting the house from told us of some lovely beaches to go and visit while we are here, one of them called Scarborough Beach, so a few of our days were spent here, the beaches are lovely with clear blue waters and some great snorkelling opportunities. For anyone who enjoys snorkelling we definitely recommend coming here, just a 10 minute drive north in between Scarborough and Sorrento are the best places for snorkelling. You can just walk straight in from the
Freemantle
Performing Street Artist beach and within a couple of minutes you are greeted by colourful corals and just as colourful fish, unfortunately we only found this on our last day or many more of our days would have been spent there.
A place called Freemantle was also recommended to us by a few people so we decided to pay it a visit. It’s a nice little town about 30 minutes drive out of Perth, on the day we were there they were holding a street arts festival where lots of street artists come from all around the world and perform to the public. There isn’t much else to do here though except visit the prison where tours are held daily, and eat lots of fish and chips by the marina. But we wouldn’t recommend the beach here.
Perth is very much like the rest of the cities we have visited, very new, modern clean however it did seem to have a lot more happening. For example, Celine Dion was playing their along with ·Rod Stewart and my favourite Neil Sedaka…lol. There were also many sporting events taking place like aussie rules, rugby, cricket and of course loads of horse racing, we visited
Sydney Harbour Bridge
Can you spot any climbers? Ascot which was tremendous value as it was free to enter. One of the must do things in Perth is to visit the Swan Bells Tower which holds the former bells of St Martin-In-The-Fields, London. It’s a very modern building which from the top allows 360 degree views of the whole city. We very much enjoyed our stay in Perth but now we heading for Sydney and our favourite little spot to have champers and sea food platter, the Sydney Opera House.
It is when you fly the 5 hours or so from Perth to Sydney that you can appreciate the amount of travelling we had done, this country is huge. We fly over night and arrive at our hotel in Sydney at around 7am, too early to check in so we decide to take a walk around the city. It was purely by accident that we passed the recording studios of the early morning breakfast show which is filmed quite openly behind large windows, but obviously in a studio. Its quite surreal for us as we have been watching it most mornings as they are a lot like our Fern and Schofield. As we were standing outside sneaking
Cheers!
Drinking Pink Champaign outside the Opera House - one of our favorite places a view of what was happening inside, 2 of the presenters came out and started to mingle, obviously not wanting to miss the opportunity but too scared to approach, a lovely security man came over and said he would introduce us. Melissa Doyle came over and she was just so nice, asking us loads of questions like where we were from, what we were doing etc. We had a good old chinwag as she seemed genuinely interested, she obviously fancied me also lol. The whole team eventually came over to talk - Kochie, Nat and Mark and were happy to pose for photos and sign autographs. It was a very strange start to the Sydney part of our trip. They really are good and well worth watching if your over here, on Channel 7.
Sydney has to be our favourite city by far, the views along the Harbour Bridge and Opera House are stunning. The bridge is the worlds widest long span bridge carrying rail, vehicular and pedestrian travel. It also makes a load of cash for someone as there is always a constant stream of people climbing up the bridge at approx $200 a go for the standard
Sydney Opera House
Our Favorite Place...Paul Potts is performing here, not a bad step up from The Carphone Warehouse climb and nearly $300 for a sunrise climb. We only have 4 days at Sydney and try and cram in as much as we possibly can. We go to Darling Harbour and come across the maritime museum where HMAS Vampire is currently located. The Daring class destroyer is Australia's largest museum vessel. It represents the era of big gun ships now superseded by the modern missile navy. The Darings were the largest destroyers, and the first large all welded ships, built in Australia. They provided aircraft carrier escort and gunfire support to the Fleet. Their strong, lightweight construction, combined with powerful steam turbines, allowed high speeds with maximum armament, which included 3 twin turrets housing 4.5" guns, anti aircraft guns, torpedo launchers and anti submarine mortars. The cramped living spaces onboard graphically illustrate the nature of warship design where machinery, communications and weaponry came before the comfort of the crew.
Next we went onto the submarine HMAS Onslow, named after the Western Australian town, which had clocked up more than 358,000 nautical miles and took part in many international naval exercises, the tour guide said that during the cold war it had managed to enter a Russian naval base
Sydney Harbour
A lot of the locals gather in the bars here for a drink after work and hide beneath one of their ships and send back important information. The cramped conditions inside were unbelievable and hats off to those who chose this as a career.
Mal and Mike, it is now official, I have seen more action than either of you 2 put together with your 40 years service between you or so, at least I got to see how one works…..lol
No trip to Sydney can be had without going to Bondi Beach, probably the most famous beach in the world. Rather than just lay down and get sizzled we take one of the coastal walks and head off towards Bronte Beach which is approx 1km away. Again the scenery is stunning and something we would definitely recommend. Last time we were in Sydney we visited a little well known pie and mash shop called Café De Wheels, people from all over the world visit this little gem which houses loads of photos with celebrities who have eaten there (even been on tv in the UK, on Anthony Bourdains travel cookery programme). The irony of all this is that normally you would have to take a taxi or long walk to reach it,
Darling Harbour
Home to lots of shops, bars and restaurants - and the maritime museum however they have opened another one on George Street in the centre of the city, about 50 yds from our hotel. Karen will not like me for saying this, but we had starved ourselves one day and we each had 2 pies, mash and peas, we would have had 3 but for the embarrassment of having to ask again…lol.
On our last night and true to form we sat outside the Opera house with our champagne and sea food platter lapping up the atmosphere, no better place on earth. Bye bye Sydney, its off to Brisbane next.
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Christine
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I LOVE Neil Sedaka
You cheeky beggars - Neil Sedaka's great! Love the photos as usual, you don't need sun cream now you need Ronseal - does what is says on the tin!! Can't wait to see you both in Vegas on 14th. XX