Wanderung 33

Perth HOHO bus

We have found the best way to see many foreign cities is to take a Hop On Hop Off (HOHO) bus that makes a circuit of the city whilst giving a recorded narrative about the sites as you pass them. A HOHO bus also lets you get off and walk for as little or as much as you like at each stop, and I felt that was a good choice for Monika, who was still recuperating from her cold and only had about 70% of her normal energy level. So we took the commuter train into the main Perth railroad station, and asked the friendly ticket-checkers at the exit where the HOHO bus stop was. As that was not part of their training, they had to discuss it a bit, but we were correctly guided out past the Western Australia Cultural Center to Bus Stop 3 of the HOHO circuit. The Cultural Center includes a very interesting fine arts center, and will include a completely new Museum Of Western Australia, which should be fantastic, but that is not scheduled to be completed until the year 2020. Unfortunately, the old museum is closed in the interim, worse luck for us.

Wending our way out to Bus Stop 3, we saw that it was 1/2 an hour to the next scheduled arrival, so we walked around the train station area in a rough loop, trying to find an ATM. The CBD surrounds a couple of streets converted to pedestrian malls in sections, so it was very pleasant to walk along those promenades, but we could find neither hide nor hair of an ATM machine, which was very strange. Our landlord later suggested that the ATMs were inside the foyers of some of the banks rather than being street side as we had anticipated.

Looping back to Bus Stop 3, we picked up the Perth HOHO bus, which turned out be be a red double-decker variety (typical London bus) with a completely open top deck. Given the fine weather we were enjoying in Perth, we migrated immediately to the top deck as it is easier to take pictures over the railing than through a window as we would have to on the lower level. Since HOHO busses run on a fixed circuit, we found ourselves driven out across the Swan River to the site of a new casino for our next stop. The Swan River is a tidal estuary in Perth and thus salty rather than fresh water. Fresh water is in fact in short supply in much of Western Australia, and our landlord said that about 50% of Perth`s water supply now comes from a nearby desalination plant.

Rumbling through town, I enjoyed the eclectic mix of huge, modern skyscrapers with the old but very fancifully constructed buildings from the late 1800s. I personally enjoyed the fancy old buildings much more as to me all modern skyscrapers tend to look alike after a while, whereas with the old buildings you get different styles from the fancy gingerbread decorations of Rococo era buildings to the curved decorations of Art Deco buildings. We both enjoyed the commentary on the HOHO bus as it was delivered with the wry Australian wit that we enjoy and was very engaging.

We decided to disembark at one of the three King`s Park HOHO stops, the Roe Gardens stop. King`s Park is a central-city park like New York`s Central Park, but larger and with well-defined botanical gardens, which is what we wanted to see. Our first stop was the `DNA Tower', called the 'Deoxyribonucleic Acid Tower' by its friends, and it truly was a tower shaped in the form of the DNA double helix. The plaques at the bottom commemorated Watson and Crick, who first deciphered the structure of DNA and led the to subsequent revolution in genetics. The tower is just tall enough to give a view out over the tops of the adjoining eucalyptus trees, so we enjoyed that before walking back downhill to the botanical gardens section.

The botanical gardens did not disappoint us, as there was a HUGE array of carefully-labeled exotic plants, most of which are found nowhere else on Earth. Almost nothing looked familiar, which was kind of mind-numbing in a sense because none of the plants fit in to what you expect based on Europe and the Americas.

We were getting hungry, so we took the Elevated Walkway trail back toward a cafe that we had seen near the entrance of the park, and I can highly recommend it. The Glass Bridge section, however, did have one Australian lady who was afraid of heights in a bit of a lather, but we really enjoyed the panoramic view of the Swan River below us so much that we did not notice the fact we were standing on glass.

While walking, we noticed was that the plants were all being watered or irrigated. Our landlord later said the average rainfall is down to 600 mm from the older average of 800mm, presumably due to global warming. But the irrigation allowed the botanical gardens to keep alive the species that required more water, which was important.

Monika had a huge Australian hamburger for lunch, which was so big she could not finish it, and I had chicken nuggets and chips (American: French Fries). That gave us enough energy to walk back through a parallel section of the gardens that lead to some water ponds, one with a statue commemorating Australian pioneer women in the center. We also passed a large, ancient Boab tree that had been transplanted from about 600 miles North when they were constructing a new road there and would have had to cut it down, which would have been roughly the same sacrilege as cutting down one of California's few remaining old Sequoia trees. Apparently it has survived the move although we did not see any leaves on it the day we were there .

We returned to the Roe Gardens area, just marveling at the odd flowers of some of the bushes. Some were so strange that I was only sure these were really `flowers` because they had bees inside and birds outside trying to get at the nectar. One bird reminded me of a hummingbird in the way it fed on the flowers, but in size and shape it was closer to a wren and it fed by landing next to the flower and pecking at it rather than by hovering with the wings blurred.

Hopping back on the bus, we were driven back into the city center and along the CBD. Our bus ended its loop at Elizabeth Quay, named for Queen Elizabeth II, where you can take ferries out to Rottnest Island or tour boats up the Swan River, both of which sounded interesting if we had had more time to spend in Perth proper. But we were both getting tired, so we stayed on the bus as it started its next loop and got off at at the Cultural Centre to take the train back the Leedville. We stopped off at Coles for both some rolls for our evening snack and for some cash at the nearby ATM, and then just returned to our B&B for the night.