Since yesterday was a public holiday and the kids last day of break before the next term, we decided to go out and get acquainted with the area a little more. One of the items that's been on our agenda for a while is the city of Mandurah. It's about 45 minutes south of Perth and is actually the 2nd largest city in Western Australia. However, the TransPerth commuter train goes to Mandurah so some people live there and commute to the city. While it is a seperate city it's also considered, by some, a suberb of greater Perth.
The road to Mandurah is Mandjoogoordap Drive. Not kidding (above).
As we arrived in Mandurah we didn't really know what to expect. We read that the bayside portion of Mandurah is a very nice harbour area with restaurants, boating, crabbing and some local wildlife. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot, and even before we were able to park, we spotted some dolphins swimming about 10 meters offshore from where we were. We thought that was pretty cool. However, as we discovered they are basically local residents and are there all the time.
We decided to go on a 1 hour cruise (a 1 hour cruise) around the harbour. The dolphins followed us out of the harbour and all the way to the ocean. It took about 10 minutes and the whole time they were almost within our reach. Above you can see Keva looking at the dolphins as we're going. There were four of them: two moms and two babies, the youngest of which was only 3 weeks old. The dolphins use the boats wake to propel themselves through the water. I don't know if they were playing, lazy or something else but it was a neat experience for all of us.
After the dolphins hitched a ride with another boats wake we were toured around the local "community". This community is like no other I've ever seen. All of the streets are canals (like Venice) and all of the homes are enourmous. The hundreds of homes in the area have both land and water access for cars and boats. The average plot of land costs $1 million, although, one area was released for $300,000 per plot and sold out in 12 minutes. The original community was owned by one family for several generations. Several years ago they sold the land, minus the area where their home and barn stand, to a developer for $1.5 million dollars. Needless to say, that develop has made their money back many, many times over. The dolphins will occasionally even swim up the canals. How's that for a backyard critter?
One of the other claims to fame of the area is crabbing. Apparently, anyone can do it with no experience, you just need a crab net which is sold at the local store for $9. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to go crabbing but maybe next time. Regardless, we went to scout out the crabbing location. On the way there we saw this:
The name of the business in the strip mall is called "Just Cremations". Their slogan is "Prepaid Funerals: The best time to organize your funeral is when you're Alive and Well!" Catchy.
The crabbing area itself was quite picturesque. Nearby we discovered a couple of walking trails. One of the trails went around this lake (marsh/swamp/slew?) The water was black and still and it was full of dead trees. The lake and trees were covered with hundreds of ducks.
On the way home we stopped at the Fremantle port hoping to catch site of the USS Vinson (?), the US aircraft carrier that disposed of Osama Bin Laden's corpse in the Arabian Sea. We didn't find it but we're hoping to this weekend. What we did find is a whole bunch of people who either can't read or don't care- example above.
As we were leaving Fremantle we saw a bunch of other stuff like an old whaling station, the oldest building in Western Australia and the lighthouse (above).
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