Perth and my intro to couchsurfing
Hello from Perth, the only major city on the West coast of Australia. My flight to Perth went fine, 4 hours long showing just how big Australia is! It was the longest flight I’ve ever taken on a discount airline and despite their statements telling you not to take food on to plane (so they can sell you food in flight) everyone seemed to smuggle something onboard, including myself.
There’s a 3 hour time difference between Perth and Melbourne at the moment due to the fact that WA already changed daylight savings time for the Spring and Victoria didn’t yet. So I arrived in Perth with the local time being an hour after the flight started with a pretty cool sunset visable from the plane. Though the sun setting just after 6pm now is crazy, I’m too used to long days!
I had decided to use Perth as my first official time couchsurfing through the website (if you don’t know what that is, google it). I’d sent several requests before hand and had one accepted. My host lives near the airport and was able to pick me up from there, great start to the couch surfing experience. Tonight is my second night staying at his place and it’s been great.
I spent today exploring the city centre mainly, walked up to the botanical gardens here (i’m guessing there’s one in every Australian city?). The ones in Sydney are still my favourite. There is a fantastic view of the city from the gardens here though.
Perth is substantially smaller than Melboure with just 1.5 million people here. Still big enough though, with plenty of stuff in the centre. They seem to have a good transit system throughout the city too, made up of trains and natural gas powered buses, though the bus drivers here seem to be related to some of the more acceleration happy tram drivers in Melbourne.
I still cannot get over how similar stuff looks to parts of America here, in the suburban residential areas especially but in the city too! Just a little side note, I’m about as far away from Iowa right now as I am going to be on this trip, almost exactly half way around the world…
Tags: Australia, Travel
Adam
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