So on my last couple of days in Perth I intended to go to Fremantle & Rottnest Island which sad to say didn't happen the way I planned. I did get down to Fremantle in the rain and walked around the town & went on a tour of the Prison which was rather interesting. Given that the place only closed in 1991 it looked like a pretty darn horrid place to spend any time. They did fortunately allow some aborginal folk to paint pictures on their cell walls which were pretty cool. Have a look at my pictures when I get around to uploading them for some of the artwork.
As for my trip to Rottnest - well that never happened. The weather went yuck again & I was advised it was not worth going in bad weather so I went to the WACA and Kings Park instead. This at least was still do able in the rain with the hop on hop off city free bus service. On my little trip around the city I had the weirdest of experiences. On my way to the WACA I saw a Qantas office that I thought I could pop into on my way to Kings Park to confirm my flight so I hopped off, sorted that & then went to grab a coffee from a restaurant around the corner. The girl who was making coffees looked really really familiar. By the time I had paid and gone back to her to wait for my coffee it dawned on me that I had worked with her for a couple of weeks in Limerick in Feb 2006. BLIMEY is all I can say to that. Her name is Marion and she was the assistant manager of the Clarion Limerick and has since come here to travel and decided to stick around so she has been in Oz for 2 years. Sooooo bizarre. This world is ever so small sometimes.
I then headed off to the airport and caught a flight to Melbourne where a friend of a friend picked me up, arranged a stunning apartment on the 35th floor overlooking the city centre and the bay, bought me some food, took me out to dinner 3 times of which twice were in stunning vege restaurants where I had the most delicious glass of organic all good chardonnay & took me around Melbourne including a very interesting tour of the MCG (Melbourne's cricket ground for those of you not in the know). Bless her little cotton socks. That was certainly very kind of her considering she had never even met me. As it turned out we got on just great and had some great conversations on our little local travels. We were going to go up the Eureka building (89 floors - highest residential building in the Southern Hemisphere) but there was a big long queue so we opted out of that one.
On the last day I packed up and headed into the centre of the city to pick up my very awesome little Mitsubishi Colt to take me off on my road trip to the Grampians, Great Ocean Road & coastal route to Sydney.
