Kimberley Trip, Day 21: Perth to Home

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

This being our last day in Perth, we had a leisurely start, although that was limited by the need to check out of our hotel room on time. We had breakfast in the hotel, finished packing, and checked our bags for the day at the front desk.

We began with a visit to the WA Museum Boola Bardip (Boola Bardip means Many Stories in the local indigenous language), which is located in an area designated as Perth’s cultural center, with theaters and performance venues as well as the Western Australia library and archives. The extensive museum has exhibit halls dedicated to wildlife, cultural, and historical themes. The exhibits, many of them interactive, were well-designed and informative.

It was lunchtime after that, and Kenna remembered a “healthy burgers” chain, Grill’d, that we tried and liked during last spring’s trip to Brisbane. We split a lamb burger, which was a nice change of pace.

We stopped by the Perth Town Hall but couldn’t see much because of an event. The Town Hall is the second-oldest building in Perth, so the receptionist suggested we check out the oldest building, the Old Court House Law Museum. The main room of the building was a small courtroom set up as it would have been in Perth’s early days. The museum also had several exhibits about the evolution of laws applied to Aboriginal people and women, which showed how much things have changed since the beginning of the 20th century and how far we still need to go.

We continued on to the Perth Mint, where we took a short self-guided tour that explained the Mint’s history and how it related to the Australian gold mining industry. It was fun talking with one of the “coin geeks” there. Today, I learned that successive British monarchs face opposite directions when depicted on coins. Queen Elizabeth II faces right, but King Charles faces to the left when he appears on Australian coins.

We then went to Elizabeth Quay for a break and a small snack and watched our final Perth sunset of the trip from there. We walked back to the hotel, collected our bags, and took a taxi to the airport. Unfortunately, we arrived about an hour before check-in opened, but we waited that out, passed through security, and caught our 11:45 flight to Melbourne. After a short layover we caught a nonstop to San Francisco, a 13-hour flight but a comfortable one. It was good to get home, early on June 13. Now for the challenge of staying awake, to get onto California time!

This article is the final installment in a series about our recent trip to Indonesia and Australia. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.