Thank goodness we did not wait until today to go to Rottest Island as it has been blustery gales all day interspersed with torrential downpours! Goodness knows what the crossing would have been like.
Instead having managed to sleep in a little - I think we may be starting to beat the jet lag - we decided to take the train into Perth, We had hoped to take the boat up Swan river and train back but as the weather was a rather suspect we stuck with the train.
Perth is a lovely clean city with a lot of open space. There are not a lot of sights to see but one place we both wanted to visit was the Perth Mint. Although it is no longer the official mint for the country (that’s now in Canberra), it used to be and it still produces official medals (such as for the Sydney Olympics). We took a tour as there is no other way to get into the mint and saw huge nuggets of gold discovered across the country and watched a gold bar being created by smelting down gold in a crucible at over 1,000 degrees before pouring it into a mould which is the image above. (Best viewed on black if you have time).
After a great lunch at a food court in a shopping mall (nice Thai meal), we managed to sort out a SIM card for the Huawei (I had remembered my passport this time) and then headed back to Fremantle on the train. After a coffee and Anzac biscuit at the locally renown cafe Gino’s we headed home for a glass of wine and to work out how to use the top-loading washing machine - we live the wild life whilst traveling!
