I'm in Perth at the moment, spending a few days with my sister Sheena.



We've had a great time walking, talking, eating (I've discovered that I'm rather partial to lemon curd and pistachio muffins!  If anyone has a recipe ...... please let me know) and whale spotting.

Our first walk involved Bob, another new "best friend".  We had a wonderful time playing ball on a beach north of Perth (after which I found the delicious lemon curd and pistachio muffins!):



Then we headed into King's Park close to Perth's CBD  to have a walk around the beautiful botanic gardens.  These gardens are really lovely and remind me a lot of Kirstenbosch Gardens near Cape Town.  It is lovely just wandering around the gardens, and the war memorial is rather special with a very solemn eternal flame:



and the memorial itself is set on a hill in Kings Park overlooking the city of Perth and the Swan River.



We had planned to have lunch at a little restaurant in the gardens, but when Sheena phoned to make a booking she was told that it wasn't open to the public as Hillary Clinton was having her lunch there which I thought was very mean of her.  She really should have known I was in town.  So instead we opted to walk on the tree top walk in the Park.  This isn't as high as some of the tree top walks in Australia, but it does give you a great opportunity to get up close to the high branches of the trees.



It is difficult to show perspective when you're high up, but here is the walk from ground level which gives you an indication of how high into the trees you go:



Because Hillary ruined our original lunch plans, we went instead to Woolly Latte's, which was probably a better choice for me anyway!



 

The humpback whales are still migrating down to Antarctica at the moment, so it is a great time to take a boat trip out of Hillary's Boat Harbour to find some.  This was such a great trip, and one I highly recommend you do if you're in Perth (or Brisbane, for that matter, but I was too late to see them in Brisbane this year).  I'm afraid that despite taking about 150 photographs, many (and I mean MANY) were blurry pictures of the sea, or perhaps a splash.  But I did get one lovely one of the mother and her calf which we stayed with for quite a while, just off Rottnest Island.



And as you can see, the weather was perfect!