Saturday 3 August 2024 – The agency, Audley, which is managing our itinerary (under the beady eye of the household travel co-ordinator, i.e. Jane) has done a distinctly average job of creating, and, critically, presenting us with, our schedule. Quite early on in the planning process we were given a very good general idea of where we would be and when, and what we would be doing when we got there; but important details (timings, meeting arrangements, etc) were missing, in many cases until a couple of days before our departure, and a few things had to be corrected after regression errors crept in as we moved from version to version of our schedule.  However, it looks like the whole – and very substantial – itinerary has come together nicely. As well as to Jane, thanks are due in no small part to Judy at Spear Travels, who cracked the whip very effectively for us.

STOP PRESS: Two days into our vacation, our trip is at last visible to us on the (admittedly cool-looking) Audley Travel Companion app, which will be a convenient way of accessing our itinerary details, which would otherwise be a bit of an encumbrance to  carry round with us everywhere.

The longest of journeys starts, as the saying doesn’t quite go, with a single taxi ride. Our taxi turned up early and got us very comfortably to the airport, whence everything moved very swiftly and unproblematically through the journey to Perth, our arrival point in Australia, reached via Singapore.

I say unproblematical; actually our departure from London was delayed, but only around 30 minutes. Any more than that and our transit through Singapore might have been rather inelegantly brisk, but the timings worked out fine.  We spent a long time on the various taxiways between terminal and takeoff, and I got an opportunity to capture a timelapse of the rather elegant ballet that goes on when there are several aeroplanes converging on the relevant runway.

I was interested to see a Concorde parked on the outfield; I didn’t realise that there were any left in the wild.

The arrival process of getting through customs and immigration and picking up our bags at Perth was impressively smooth and swift. We had to fill out an arrival card on the flight from Singapore, in which we promised that we weren’t convicts (no longer, it seems, an entry requirement to the country), didn’t have tuberculosis and weren’t bringing with us anything untoward, meaning, basically, foodstuffs. Because I knew that the Powers That Be in Australia are quite pernickety about such things, I had decided that we shouldn’t bring any home comforts that might cause a ruckus at the border; so we actually arrived in The Foreign without any of Twinings Finest Earl Grey just in case. Or, more accurately, not in either of our cases.

We were greeted at Perth’s airport by a very cheery chap called Stephen, who whisked us swiftly to our hotel, the QT, whilst simultaneously giving us a useful commentary about Western Australia and Perth, and making a useful recommendation of an outing we should undertake (Fremantle) and when (Sunday, i.e. tomorrow) because The Market Will Be On, and that’s a Good Thing.

The hotel is quite posh and is extremely conveniently located in downtown Perth,

but is architecturally unremarkable beyond being 18 stories tall with a Sky Terrace at the top (the highest bar in Perth, we understand), which sounds like something we should definitely acquaint ourselves with before we move on.

Another key datum that Stephen vouchsafed was that the shops were only open until 5pm, and, it being by this stage about 4.30pm, as you can understand we had an important shopping mission to undertake, which was to find a supermarket, and fast. Google Maps promised that there was a Woolworth’s (no relation, for those of a certain age) a couple of minutes away, and so off we scurried – not in quite the right direction, as it happens.  The Woollies was in a mall, and our efforts to find the entrance led us down a rather disreputable-seeming alleyway, which was, however, decorated rather beautifully.

Suffice it to say, we eventually found the shop and returned to the hotel bearing our spoils, whereupon we discovered something that raised the hotel in my estimation. They provided a kettle in the room. And largish cups for the tea. And milk in the minibar fridge.

Having used the shopping expedition to help us orient ourselves, and still being fairly full of Singapore Airlines (really rather nice) food, we needed to spend a few minutes before finding further sustenance. So we went for a walk. Obviously.

We didn’t cover much ground because it was heading towards sunset and, being winter, it was likely to get a bit chilly after the sun had disappeared.  But we were able to get a sample of the colonial buildings one can still find in Perth, squeezed in between all the modern high rise stuff.

We headed down to the water – the Swan River – also passing more modern buildings such as the Bell Tower

which has definite shades of Sydney Opera House in its side view.

Nearby is Elizabeth Quay

which has a very distinctive footbridge giving access from the west.

As you can see, the sun was going down by this stage, and it was indeed getting a bit chilly, so we headed back to the hotel, past another part of Perth’s architectural vernacular,

modern buildings in a faux-old style.  I think a lot of the colonial-era buildings have been demolished over the years, and in many cases replaced by steel-and-glass constructions; but there was more than a sprinkling of this more welcome style as well.

The QT Hotel offers an Italian restaurant called Santini, and we repaired there for an early evening bite to eat.  It was Saturday night and there was a wedding going on, so it was a tad on the raucous side, but provided a decent enough meal, after which we retired to our room to try to stay awake for a while to try to stave off the worst of the jet lag.  Crossing time zones can be unsettling enough, and crossing them from west to east is the more challenging direction, and we wanted to try to avoid the usual wide-awake-at-4am consequence of losing seven hours of the day.

I have to report that we failed, although not spectacularly.  It was around 8.30 at night when we both decided that we were losing the struggle to stay awake, and so we turned in. We had no formal schedule to have to work to, just an inchoate plan to get to Fremantle somehow. Stay tuned to see how that all worked out, eh?