Escaping The Complete Escape in Perth

What little I knew of Perth I mostly learned from my niece Laura Fayne and her great blog (and the inspiration for my effort here). She studied at Murdoch University in Fremantle the first six months of 2010 and loved it.
We ended up spending almost one week post-cruise here, a time needed not just for local touring but also (as funny as it may sound) recovering from the cruise, regrouping, and planning the final month of the sabbatical. The Princess motto is "Escape Completely", but ironically with all the 24-hour regimented social activities and queues, at the end we did want to escape from the most pleasant prison imaginable. Perth was perfect for that.
We spent the week at a very nice hotel right on one of the city's beautiful beaches, Scarborough Beach.

Sunset on the Indian Ocean

It was very restful, but a 45-minute bus ride to the CBD (central business district). We didn't spend a lot of time in the CBD, but what we saw was pretty nondescript, with a great deal of construction going on for no apparent reason. (Are the Olympics coming here next year and nobody knows?). We did the usual stops at the Western Australian Museum, where we caught up with the AC/DC traveling exhibit.
It attracted an atypical museum crowd, and I learned that original vocalist Bon Scott's death in 1980 was due to "acute alcohol poisoning" and officially ruled as "death by misadventure".

The most striking landmark in the CBD is the tower by the Swan River Harbour housing the Swan Bells.

Swan Bell Tower

The harbour appeared to be a favorite haunt of jelly fish.

Overlooking the CBD and Harbour is the Kings Park, with extensive botanic gardens,
 
a war memorial,
 
and CBD views.

Perth CBD

We came to think of Perth as a beach town, like Rio de Janeiro or Santa Cruz. It attracts surfers and sailors from all around the globe.

Scarborough Beach in Perth

In keeping with Australia's reputation as a place with all sorts of bad-ass creatures, there are some warning signs I'm not used to seeing on the Mendocino Coast

(Note the SNAKES!)

One "must-do" is a day trip to Rottnest Island 18 km off the coast. The name means "rat's nest" in Dutch as the early European explorers mistook the indigenous marsupial, called a quokka, for a very large rat.

A Quokka

Plenty of quokkas remain, as do other fauna.

The island has few cars and many pristine beaches

and is a popular destination for vacationing mainlanders.

[Side bar: A big part of the regrouping was laundry. This is a constant travel conundrum. No option is ideal. Hotel laundry is convenient, but can cost more than the room. If there is a guest laundry, it seems as if one or more crucial machines will not be working. More than once I have had to lug an armful of wet clothes from one floor to another looking for a functional machine. It is worse with foreign machines. In New Caledonia I put detergent in the dryer because I could not distinguish it from the washer. Ultra-light travelers say to buy high-tech, expensive fast-drying clothes and hand-wash in the sink daily, but that takes more time than you think and when you need them the most (i.e.: in hot, humid, sweaty climates), they are rarely dry the next day. Disposable togs may be the way to go, but you can't discard your favorite outfits.]

Our last day in Perth we ran into Alan and Rita, table-mates from the cruise (which I felt was a very good omen somehow.).

A&R

They also had to take a few days to recover from the rigors of non-stop pampering. It was good to see them, and we took the bus together down to Fremantle, past Cottlesloe Beach where Heath Ledger's family had a wake (and perhaps scattered some ashes).
We had a few hours to visit Fremantle. Highlights included Fremantle Prison,
 
where the aforementioned Bon Scott of AC/DC spent some time in his youth. They have erected him a bronze statue at the harbour.

A Bronze B. S. on Top of a Marshall Amp

We stopped in a port-side brewery for a cider and a gelato shop highly recommended by Laura Fayne (Yum!!), and then to the Maritime Museum Shipwreck Gallery for more relics salvaged from the Batavia (described in the previous blog from Geraldton).

The Salvaged Hull of the Batavia

Remains of a Batavia Mutineer

We pared our traveling luggage down to under 20 kg (22 lbs) for the next three weeks, then off to the airport for the red-eye flight to Cambodia via Singapore. We come back to Perth in three weeks to resume our visit to Oz.