We're going to the zoo! And a city tour!

We had a wonderful lie-in (that’s sleeping late) and didn’t wake up until 6:30 (8:30 in Sydney) and then headed down to the restaurant for breakfast, where they did not have porridge. I like porridge for my travelling breakfast but made do with cereal and some scrambled eggs and mushrooms. Dave is still eating breakfasts which is unusual for this far into our travelling. Yesterday we’d found our way down to Elizabeth Quay (Quay is pronounced kee, if you were wondering) and saw the mass transit ferry there that said South Perth – Zoo – Something Else (who can remember these things?). Dave mapped it while we were at breakfast and we headed off from the hotel at about 8:45. 

We got to the ferry dock and the nice woman in the ticket office came out and helped us with the ticket machine in time for us to run onto the mostly empty 9:00 ferry. We got on, sat down, and headed across what I thought was the harbor but turned out to be the Swan River. It was about a 10-minute walk to the zoo, so we had plenty of time to go in. It turned out to be a great zoo, with exactly the Australian exhibits that I was hoping for. We saw roos and quokkas and koalas and tazzy devils and a cassowary and tree kangaroos and echidnas and dingos. They don’t have wombats and the numbat exhibit was closed, as it so often is. Possibly the very best thing, though, was a raven, also known as complaining bird. Make sure you turn the sound up so you can hear it grumbling.

A Banksia from King's Garden

I’ve been looking for a koala souvenir for the Bubster and I found a perfect one in the zoo shop. Then we made the trek back to the hotel. As we’d been in the zoo the crowd had gotten bigger and bigger, and we saw large groups of students wearing eclipse polo shirts – we don’t know if the zoo was running camps or what. When we came in the ticket  line was maybe 10 people; when we left it was very long indeed. Similarly we’d run onto a nearly empty ferry; when we got to the north Perth terminal where we’d boarded there was a very long line. On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a small shop next door called Miss Maid and got two party pies, small beef stuffed pastries, which were the perfect snack size. We went back up to our rooms and got completely ready to go, including taking our suitcases down to the lobby to use their stapler to put our P&O bag tags on. Then we had a half hour or so to relax before getting back on the bus.

We somehow managed to get all the luggage on the bus and headed out for a city tour, one of my least favorite activities. Our first stop was a “supermart”, which is what we would call a convenience store, to grab snacks for lunch. I grabbed an egg mayo sandwich for us to share, and also some chicken flavored potato chips. The bus we have here has a door halfway back which makes the whole loading/unloading much easier. Next stop was the King’s Garden, the largest urban park in the world. We ate our sandwich, which was on squishy white bread and felt very authentic, and our chicken crisps which tasted kind of onion/herby, like stuffing. We quite liked them. We had about an hour to wander through the park, so we walked through the botanic garden section and along the walkway and through the water and banksia gardens. The weather was absolutely perfect and we really enjoyed ourselves. We could even forget that we were on a city tour!

Then it was back on the bus to drive around Perth and Freemantle with a brief stop to get off at Cottesloe beach (Indian Ocean, can you believe it?) and a drive by of the Freemantle Prison. Then they dropped us off at the cruise terminal and we all said goodbye to our driver Darrell (unlike Sasha, Darrell liked to drive over the curbs a lot). We were especially happy to say goodbye to the bus portion of the tour – on the ship we can behave pretty much as if we were by ourselves, although we do have group mealtimes we can attend if we want, where they will pay for our wine with dinner.