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Bearing it all
If we listed poor service in our summary of the highs and lows of 2009, we would have included the Merchant Tea and Coffee Company in Fremantle. It deserves a special mention; there are few places in the world where customers could wait fifty minutes for something as simple as tea, coffee and one shared bread flute, and then for the order be not quite right even after three attempts. Usually, for example, when milk is twice requested to accompany the tea, there would be a reasonable expectation that it would arrive, particularly before the tea is stewed quite beyond enjoyable drinking. Similarly, when an order for a flat white coffee is clarified and repeated, a customer could expect to receive a flat white and not a latte. But this was not the case.
It would be nice to be able to excuse such lame service, or the fact that other tables were piled high with the dirty dishes of customers who had long gone, on the café being busy but this was not so. It was simply hopeless and it was as well we were in good humour and in no particular hurry.
Fremantle itself is a charming little port town, and it is funny how geographical impressions can be so wrong. We both had in our minds that Freo, as us locals call it, was just north of Perth when, in fact, it is to the south. The scene of the great New Zealand victory in America’s Cup yacht racing, the town’s streets are lined with old wooden, verandahed buildings, most of which these days are trendy cafes and restaurants outside which people dine, drink and enjoy the warm days; that is as long as they can avoid the Doctor, the afternoon sea breeze which has, as previously mentioned, something of a sharp edge. There are too the fabulous craft and vegetable markets, including the souvenir stall which had the Steve Irwin-fighting-a-crocodile fridge magnet for sale until it became one of the treasures of our journey.
Meanwhile, the strangest thing has happened, so strange that we’ve been left in charge of Pokie, Nicole’s tame pug while she is away at work. We seem, inexplicably, to have a new found obsession, seeking out animals and being nice to them. Not content with letting cousin Fiona’s brightly coloured parrot clamber all over us (it wasn’t until we got home did we realize that we could have become the new Nauru given the amount of guano deposited on our clothes) and a trip to the Caversham Wildlife Park, most recently we set out with the Perth Zoo firmly in our sights. Right in the heart of the city this is an altogether different experience, a proper zoological gardens where not only do they have the usual array of weird and eccentric Australian animal and plant life but also a worthy selection of endangered species from elsewhere in the world. The African painted dogs chewed on fresh animal carcasses while large elephants lay on their sides being scrubbed in something as frothy as dishwashing liquid by handlers, the meercats did the usual meercat thing, running about and standing with that inquisitive look, the lions, tigers and white rhinoceros lazed in the afternoon sun, and the Galapagos giants moved as slowly as they ever do. The tortoises did what they did in Barbados, and if anyone argues that these creatures are not the most noisy, amorous ones on earth, we would beg to differ. But what took our fancy were the orangutans and the sun bears, or one sun bear in particular. Through a glassed window one appeared to treat Kaelene in quite an affectionate manner, while the orangutans looked simply appealing and human-like as they walked about on two legs..
It is, however, the Australian animals that have completely captivated us. Emus have the maddest eyes imaginable and their eyelids seem to work from the bottom up, quokkas are simply gorgeous little marsupials, the koalas were stoned as usual and the birdlife as colourful as can be. We have learned that wallabies and kangaroos are distinguishable only by size and that neither have an ounce of road sense, the only downside to all of our animal excursions is that we have still not sighted a platypus.
At present, Australia is home to dozens of world class tennis players as they prepare for the Australian Open, and it seems that they are all interviewed either holding koalas or at wildlife parks with these furry animals in the background. Observant locals noticed that when US tennis star Andy Roddick was interviewed on Channel Ten news the other night, it looked as if two koalas in the background were being particularly amorous. Once the initial amusement subsided, it was declared that the supposedly mating koalas were both female and revealed that at times, as they come into heat, female koalas are often “piled up” in warm embrace. We’ve noted previously that these little creatures succumb to the narcotic effects of the local vegetation, and doesn’t that just seem like fun?