Thursday 24th April

We both had a good night’s sleep after our exertions of yesterday and woke to another glorious day. We set off at 11.00am to go to Fremantle on the train. When we reached the station, we couldn’t find a ticket office so Tom asked one of the station staff how we went about getting tickets. We’re very glad we asked – as it’s kids school holidays, there’s a special offer in action. 2 adults and up to 5 children can travel anywhere within the Perth public transport area in a 24 hour period for $8.10 (£4.00). No matter that we didn’t have any children travelling with us. So we had return travel to Fremantle, 15 stops down the line, about 35 mins, for the 2 of us for £4.00. We couldn’t even travel into Bedford and back for that – well, we could with our bus passes, but not otherwise. The Australian public transport system in all the cities is great but Perth seems to have the widest cover with 3 free buses covering most of the greater city area and these special holiday offers. Despite the otherwise clean and tidy station, I have to say that I was not impressed with their idea of hygiene. Thus armed with our value tickets we boarded the train and enjoyed the sights on the way to Fremantle. Arriving there, we met a volunteer guide lady stationed at the exit and she gave us the necessary maps and info to explore the city. There’s a free bus there too so that was our first foray, travelling to the Capuccino Strip for the usual provisions, sitting in the brilliant sunshine at a pavement café. We had decided that we would visit the Maritime Museum and on the way to it, we went into the Shipwreck museum. They have some of the original timbers from the Batavia, sunk in the late 1800’s and discovered in the 1980’s. The timbers have been treated and inset into a metal frame as the original ship would have been constructed – it must have been a huge ship. There are lots of retrieved “treasures” with plenty of stories in the museum, as the coast of W Australia is littered with wrecks.

After over an hour in there, we went to the Maritime Museum where, among other exhibits, they have the real Australia II, which won the Americas Cup in 1987. There are good videos on the whaling and pearling industries, as well as a history of the Royal Australian Navy. Did you know that Fremantle had the largest submarine base of the Allied Forces, second only to Pearl Harbour? It’s amazing how much we’ve learnt about all sorts of things since we embarked on this grand adventure.

At the moment, there is a photographic exhibition in the second hall of the museum. Two photographers are exhibited. One whose pics are of industrial scenes and these are huge enlargements of the gold mining areas in Western Australia – impossible to describe adequately, but fantastic to see. I had no idea the mines were so enormous. The other exhibits are war related but not just of soldiers or the hardware of war. These are of the people involved in armed conflicts or as the casualties – it does bring home the horrors war is responsible for.
Coming out into the sunshine blew away the slight depression of the pics we’d just seen so we walked back into the town, only to find, that despite it being advertised as late night opening, most of the shops were closing at normal time! As we didn’t want to eat this early, we decided to return to Perth, which we did, picking up some necessities on the way (beer and wine) before walking back to the motel. We went out again later to eat and so definitely did our 10,000 paces – probably more to make up for the days in between when we haven’t walked enough. Suitably fatigued, we had a reasonably early night to be ready for Friday’s Anzac Day ceremonies.