Wanderung 33

Day trip to Fremantle

On the weekends, the Perth train and bus system offers a `Family Fare` ticket good for 2 adults and up to 3 children all day long. We bought that for our day trip out to Fremantle. From the Leedville station the trip was only 30 minutes or less, but I was flummoxed when we exited the train as to how to find any information about Fremantle. No information or tourist guidance of any kind was available at the train station. While Monika was in the bathroom, however, I saw the oddest sight of a guy carrying a fold-up electric mini-scooter, which he proceeded to unfold and drive off on. The `Stigo bike` scooter was cleverly designed and Australian made, and very compact, but the price of $2,497 AUD was unacceptably steep for us.

As a result of having no guiding information, we simply wandered straight/ into the heart of Fremantle, hoping to see the blue `i` sign indicating an information center. But the morning was cool and we had a wonderful time looking at all the late 1800s era buildings that cluster in the downtown area.

We finally found the Information Centre in the Town Hall in King`s square, and besides the nice map of town, the lady clarified the free CAT Red and Blue bus routes that loop around the core of the city. We wandered off with at least a map to orient us, and had a nice visit to a bustling Fremantle Market, which was just chock-a-block with vendors selling food, crafts, and other boutique items. It was so crowded that it was somewhat hard to move around, but that may have been due to being a Saturday.

Somewhat distracted by all those wonderful but impossible-to-cart-home items, we got turned around when we exited and headed off toward the local hospital rather than the Fremantle Prison which we had been aiming for. Noticing that we had accidentally just junctioned with the Blue CAT bus loop, we hopped on a Blue CAT bus and took it around the southern edge of the city, ending up in the Esplanade Reserve, which had a really great playground for kids, but, more importantly for our situation, an outdoor cafe where we could sit and eat lunch while watching the kids bouncing all over the place.

After lunch we wandered over to the large Ferris Wheel at the other side of the small park, and decided to pay $20 AUD to have a ride in one of the enclosed plexiglass cabins. The ride was a lot of fun, and the plexiglass was clear enough to allow us to take quite decent pictures as we slowly rotated.

We were fortunate right near the top when the wheel stopped to embark some new passengers, and that gave us time to even set up for a panoramic bird`s-eye picture of the view from our perch.

We crossed the railroad tracks that formed a border of the park and bought some gelato ice cream cones for desert (I had tiramisu and Monika had mint with chocolate chips). Then we joined the hiker-biker trail located right beside the RR tracks. Our host in Perth had mentioned that the bicycle trail went all the way down the coast from Fremantle, and the section there was beautifully marked and paved. Coincidentally, I even found an Australian electric bicycle store called `E Bikers` there and confirmed with the saleswoman that 250 watts was the maximum size of motor allowed in Australia. That store designed their own frames, but then had them manufactured in China. But they did rent their ebikes for $60 AUD per day, so that would have been one way for us to ride that coastal bicycle trail.

Just beyond the shop was a small but pretty bathing beach where we watched kids playing onshore and adults playing offshore by racing sailboats around the adjacent bay.

At the far end of the beach we found the "Round House", a very old prison. We stopped in to look at the exhibits, which included a nighttime curfew bell to tell the convicts on parole in town that it was time to return to their cells for the night, and a set of stocks used to punish prisoners even further. That was depressing enough for me, and I was just as glad that we had not toured the Fremantle Prison as I strongly suspect it would have been depressing as well.

But at the top of the round house you could look down the main street. While wandering around we had wondered why there were yellow arcs on some houses and now we knew. Looking down the street you saw yellow rings going around the buildings along the street which perfectly represented the rib cage of a huge whale! It must have been fascinating to design and then laboriously paint all those stripes on the buildings down the street so that a viewer would get that visual effect.

We took a back street cut-through to get to the Western Australia Maritime Museum, which was really big and looked really interesting, but we were just tired enough that the thought of wandering slowly around exhibits for the next couple of hours was too daunting to go in. Curiously, in the driveway in front of the museum we found a weird hodgepodge of things all directed at celebrating the "Western Australia Maritime Day" or something of the sort. I saw vintage cars, military vehicles, life guards, and at least one armed forces recruiting station. I would have liked to slow down and look at stuff, but there was also a makeshift bandstand with a band that was blaring out some Rock and Roll numbers for all they were worth. It was too loud to even think, so we kept on going to find the next bus stop. Man, maybe I should be carrying earplugs for our land excursions as well as for the musical performances on cruise ships at sea!

But in the interests of seeing the other side of Fremantle a bit, this time we boarded a Red loop CAT bus and let it cart us around the northern edge of the city. The highlight of that loop was the Fremantle Arts Center in a beautiful old carved sandstone building that had been a women`s insane asylum back in the old days. A fellow bus rider informed us that they did have exhibition galleries as well as some active artists there, and it sounded very interesting but we were just too tired to do anything more.

Instead, we let our bus carry us back around the loop to the front of the train station, and then disembarked to take the train back to Perth. Once back at our stop, we diverted past Coles to get something for dinner. Monika had a hankering for noodle soup, and we found that the Coles brand of Nissan soup noodles cost only $1 AUD for a package with 5 individually wrapped servings of soup. It looked like the same soup I bought at Aldi at home and the price was dirt cheap, so we picked up a package of chicken and a package of beef and walked home for the night. I fixed the soup by pouring in boiling water and letting it sit for 3 minutes, just like I do at home, and it cooked up just fine. I combined the soup with some rolls coated with a thin layer of Vegemite and a layer of Edam cheese, and it was quite a satisfying meal. Vegemite is an iconic Australian product made from brewer`s yeast, I think, but it is very concentrated, so if you try it make sure to put on just a very thin layer to flavor the piece of bread--don't slather it on!

We chatted with our host and hostess a bit that evening and saw their lorikeets, who we had heard from our rooms. They were orphaned birds that they had hand-raised. Then we went back to our rooms and quietly read and played on our iPads before turning in for the night.