Fremantle for loners

The weekends are the worst part of the week for travel writers. Come Friday the locals you’ve barely seen all week suddenly appear en masse as one big, happy gaggle of family and friendship groups, making the lone journo feel like the poor soul who didn’t get invited to the party – a bit like when your neighbours throw a raucous shindig the night you’ve planned to be early to bed.

Today I really felt the isolation – and I blame Fremantle. On my previous trip to WA I fell in love with Freo, as the Aussies call it. Visiting with my mum and boyfriend I spent many a happy hour sipping coffees on South Terrace, guzzling fish and chips at Cicerellos and knocking back the drinks at Little Creatures – sun-soaked memories that have kept Freo at the very top of my favourite places list for the past five years.

So this morning I arrived by train from Perth in high spirits. I had planned to revisit my favoured haunts and rediscover the laidback port city I’d remembered so fondly. But then I remembered that it was Sunday. The whole of Perth appeared to be in Freo; families with multiple buggies choked the pavements of South Terrace, raucous friendship groups were squeezed into every last space outside Little Creatures and hand-holding couples seemed to be everywhere – most of them meandering along at shuffle pace immediately in front of me.

I could, of course, have jostled with the best of them and grabbed a space in each of the places I’d planned to go, but is there anything worse than being gradually surrounded by groups while repeatedly telling people that yes, they can take that chair? I genuinely don’t mind eating alone but when everybody else is part of a gang it’s hard not to feel lonely.

So my day in Fremantle wasn’t quite what I’d planned. Instead I visited the Maritime Museum to play with the interactive exhibits and still not quite grasp why the Aussies are still going on about winning the Americas Cup and wandered around the markets trying to comprehend how so much hippy tat is still being gleefully sold. I watched herons picking at discarded fish and chips down by the wharf and realized why every Aussie has a hat after walking far too far in the blaring sun. In short, I made some new memories – and they were just as sun-soaked.

The humpback highway

Rottnest Island is (cliché alert) like paradise on earth. There may be more attractive islands in more remote places but Rotto, as the Aussies call it, is so easily accessible, so affordable to reach and so simple to get around that it could rival even the most stunning of tropical idylls.

I was picked up at about 8am this morning by Rottnest Express to head down to Barrack St Jetty for the ferry ride down the Swan River and across to the island which was, although convenient, frustratingly slow. The boat was stuffed to bursting with weekend day trippers eager to get out of the city so loading everyone took an inconceivably long time – plus we had to make two further stops in Fremantle before heading out to sea – and the journey from hotel to island ended up being almost three hours.

It was, of course, well worth the journey. The water on Rotto is an arresting shade of turquoise, the sand is like silica and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky – my camera battery took a beating. I explored some of the bays near the main “port” Thomson Bay and walked up to Bathurst Lighthouse, then joined Rottnest Express’s Adventure Tour for a trip around the island. Our boat was a rigid inflatable (a rib) which was so sturdy it could crash directly into the waves, negotiate the rising swells and turning on a patch of water the size of a credit card, leering several feet up above the water at a 45 degree angle and making everyone grin from ear to salt-splashed ear.

We started the tour in the deep-water channel eagerly scanning the horizon for humpback whales, a species which is currently on its long annual migration south. The desperation was almost palpable with everyone constantly leaping up, pointing with an excited arm then dropping it again dejectedly and, of course, firing up their cameras, but for several minutes we didn’t see anything. Our guide’s commentary became increasingly desperate but then suddenly several humpbacks appeared, three on one side of the boat at first then two on the other, then a juvenile right up close. Camera shutters clicked excitedly all around the boat but I just watched in awe – no photograph can do this justice.

After the whales moved on we continued to cathedral rocks to watch New Zealand fur seals lolling around on the rocks and regulating their body temperatures by diving underwater, leaving just one flipper in the air. A cormorant was feeding its chick on a ledge above us and out to sea a pod of dolphins glided serenely by. I’d forgotten how much being in Australia is like being in a giant wildlife park and was slack-jawed in admiration of this unique continent.

Back on the island I basked in some deceptively harmless sun (I now have red shoulders and a radioactive looking forehead) and got up close to several quokkas, the unique marsupials which call the island home, but quickly ran out of time. The ferries to Rottnest are timed so that if you’re on a day trip you only get five hours on the island – not nearly enough to even scratch its sandy surface. I didn’t get to the saltwater lakes, the windswept “west end” or the snorkeling trails (I didn’t even pick up the bike included in my ticket) but I did get to the Rottnest Hotel for a drink on the terrace. And I did get to see those whales.

At home far away

Flying from London to Australia is strangely like being in an Anglophone bubble. On my flight from London to Singapore almost everyone on the plane was either an Aussie or a Pomme and even in Singapore airport the signs were all in English and the TV tuned to Channel Newsasia with its role call of the most recent Premier League results in perfect Queen’s English.

After almost 24 hours of travelling it’s hard to believe you’ll end up somewhere English speaking. For that amount of effort, passengers from the UK are usually rewarded with exotic spicy aromas, an indecipherable language and locals wearing turbans, wheeling carts or leading donkeys. We expect something different, exciting, perhaps even scary. But my first few hours in Perth I talk to as many Brits as Australians, check into an international chain (the YHA) and am served a drink by an Irishman. It feels like home immediately.

I joined Two Feet and a Heartbeat’s Eat Drink Walk Perth tour as soon as I arrived last night and found that half the group had lived in London so found myself talking about Enfield and the tube network. Determined to appreciate my location a bit more I drank wine from Margaret River but paid as much as I would have in central London which was something of a shock – the last time I was here an Australian dollar was worth about 40p; now it’s more like 60p.

Everything I pay for seems very expensive but Perth has definitely changed a lot since I was here five years ago. So many cool little bars have opened up since the government made it easier to get a liquor licence and the CBD is a lot hipper than it was the last time I tried to get a decent drink in it. Perth only has a population of about 1.5 million people so it can seem overwhelmed by the backpackers and Brits abroad if you go to the wrong areas (Northbridge, namely) but the city centre feels very Australian and you can almost see the mining money pouring in. This is definitely a city on the up and judging by the number of cranes poking their heads over the skyline, it’ll be a whole different place by the time I come back.