West Coast sojourn

I've just returned from a work junket trip to Perth to attend a conference.  It's hard to believe that you travel for five hours (or six if you fly via Sydney for some unfathomable reason) and are still in Australia, albeit right at the end of it.  The flight over was okay.  Just the usual stuff; flight attendants constantly interrupting my reading of my London Walks book by speaking unintelligibly into a distorted PA system between opening cans of diet coke.  Did you know that the Thames is one of the cleanest urban waterways?  It's true; because it's tidal. 

My taxi driver from the airport gave me an entire rundown of everything I needed to know, including things I have never cared to know, about Western Australia.  Topics covered on the 20 or so minute drive to the city included miners, the mining boom, shark attacks, tourist attractions, town planning, housing, etc etc.  As a result, I began a lot of sentences that week with, "My taxi driver said...."

Perth is nice. And clean.  But I suspect the reason they sweep the streets several times a day has less to do with community spirit and more to do with the fact that Her Majesty the Queen is making her way out west very shortly to open the exceedingly boring and generally pointless CHOGM conference, where Commonwealth leaders take tea with each other and discuss light and fluffy topics rather than things that actually matter.

I'm sure the HM has an ADF person with her at all times during her Australian visits who points out things of interest to nobody her that will distract her looking down a certain street, for example, that could do with a bit of a spruce up.


I walked around Perth city on my second night there with a work colleague and commented that it seemed like a 'fake city', because there weren't any homeless people or irritating out-of-control youth prowling the city streets.  Perhaps they were shipped to a shittier part of town prior to the arrival of world leaders in the next few weeks.

Apart from the days spent at my work conference, which amounted to the most thrilling days of my life, I visited Kings Park - an area overlooking the city, and went out on a speedboat in Fremantle Harbour, where I got doused with sea water over and over again, but it was terrific fun.  A trip to Fremantle Prison - which closed in 1991 - highlighted the need to continue my current pattern of not breaking the law in my everyday activities.