Rottnest Island

Rottnest Island is a huge tourist attraction in Perth. It's picturesque, has lots of recreational activities, and a friendly marsupial that is only native to the one island. It's 18 kms from the Australian coastline and only 19 sq kms in size.

Salmon Bay

One of the snorkel stops

Thompson's Bay

The island is a DoC park and so it has some interesting rules. For example, the only motorized vehicles allowed are service vehicles and a small bus system. Almost everyone uses a bike.

Upon arrival, renting a bike was the first thing we did. The bike shop had thousands of bikes, unfortunately they are all the same kind; heavy, creaky and uncomfortable.

 

The 'bike lock' they gave us could have been cut with a butter knife. But whose going to steal these rust buckets from an island all ready covered in them anyways?

The cycling was wonderful however. Both SP and I agreed that it has been too long since we had been on a bike. 28 kms of nicely paved, car free road. Occasionally we had a wonderful 30 km/hr tail wind (and sometimes we had a 30 km/hr head wind.)

Outside of the main settlement services are minimal, pit toilets but no water, food, etc. So we carried a lunch and set off to meet the primary inhabitants of the island.

Despite explorers in the distant past confusing the local wildlife for rats (Rottnest translates to rats nest in dutch) the little critters couldn't possibly do anything to deter visitors.

Quokkas are fluffy, hungry, fat, and cute marsupials who have lost any fear of humans.

Quokka

They graze on the undergrowth of trees. Because they can't climb, most of the the trees they eat look like the one in the background below. Basically they just want your help getting a branch or two down.

Lunchtime!

We're not fat, we're big boned.

Truth be told, you're not supposed to feed them, they are already too acclimatized to people and some folks feed them inappropriate food. There are also 10,000+ of the critters in residence, so they seem to be doing just fine already.

Tomorrow we're vacating Perth and heading to Sydney.

-E

Close to Perth

Perth is a bonus city for us. We had no specific reason to come here, it just happened that we were going to have a layover anyways, so we decided to spend a few days here instead.

Unfortunately we were having so much fun that we never did look into what to do while we were here. So today we mostly wandered around somewhat aimlessly.

Our first stop was at the tiny University of Notre Dame, Australia. At first glance you might think it was a satellite school of Notre Dame in Indiana USA, but they're separate.

Keeping with the trend, we then hopped on the train, and visited the huge University of Western Australia. It's very pretty and looks a little like Stanford. It's often ranked as one of the top 100 universities in the world (but not for comp sci.)

Somewhere along the way we decided it would be a great idea to walk from UWA into Perth itself. On the far side of the campus is Kings Park, and beyond that, Perth CBD. No sweat. For interest sake, Kings Park is the largest inner city park in the world, at 4 sq kms.

Inside the Botanical Garden.

A laughing kookaburra.

Baob tree, 750 yrs old.

We didn't make it. After the park and about 10 kms of walking we called it a day and returned to Fremantle. But we got pretty close.

As close to Perth as we're going to get.

Tomorrow we're off to Rottnest Island (literally translates to Rats Nest Island in Dutch). Should be fun.


-E