Fremantle and Perth, Australia

We arrived at frematle, finally! This is the 2nd stop in Australia on the cruise and its also our final stop of the cruise trip. The ride here was particularly wobbly and noisy and I didn't sleep so well. Glad the cruise is over. I will miss mom and dad though. They will continue on for another week and get off at Melbourne. I was trying to help them with the transit arrangement when they get there. Hope that everything will go well for them. I won't see them until the Panama cruise.

So yes, I was quite concerned about the luggage problem when we get to Fremantle. I like to spend more time before saying bye to mom and dad but it was a little problematic if we have to carry our heavy backpacks around. Turns out that Australian visitor booths are super helpful. We left our packs at a coffee shop storage room while wandering around.

We walked around the market and Ellie played a bit at a sea side park. She and rian also went up to a ferris wheel. Then we all had a big seafood lunch. The seafood chowder was huge and the chilli mussels was super yummy!

After that we went to another maritime museum about ship wreck and then it is time to send mom and dad back to the boat. After we said our goodbyes. We took a train to go to Perth. It was easy and only took about half an hour to get to the Perth city centre. After we got off the train, rian was in charge of getting us to the hotel. But he got the map upside down and took us to the opposite direction :)

after we settled down in the hotel, we went for a nice dinner with yummy burgers and fries and beer! This marked the beginning of our New Zealand trip. One interesting bit about the hotel is the shared bathroom. We need to go out to the hallway, punch in a code to use the bathroom.

The flight to go to Auckland is at night. So we decided to spend the rest of our time in Australia in the zoo. We had to take a ferry there and so that was also fun. Got to see the nice scenery along the swan river side.

We had no trouble finding the bus stop to go to the airport. We were there way early so we had another coffee break. Daddy got a affogato (coffee with ice cream) and Ellie got a babycino (hot cocoa in a tiny cup).

One problem we had was that we found out the hand carry limit is 7kg and not 10 kg. We quickly moved a bunch of the heavier things to rian's and Ellie's backpacks. And it was a ok. The layover was in Sydney and the big problem was that we need to recheck again there. It didn't sound so bad until we found out that we need to take a bus to go to a different terminal. Tired, and carrying big backpacks with a sleepy child made all of us a bit cranky.

See ya Australia. New Zealand here we come!