We took the train into town and walked to the Royal Perth Mint. Most of the gold dug up in WA is refined and made into gold bars here. This started in 1899. For the tourist they show the pouring of a bar several times a day. You can touch and try to lift a bar (SD 19.6, in a cage so you cannot take it away). There is a large display of nuggets and reef gold.  It is amazing how rich some of the reef samples are. Rudy had only seen once in Tanzania a small flack of gold in the quarts rock. Needless to say that there are a lot of gold coins and other gold items for sale.

We wandered around the town streets a bit more and snacked again on the food court. It was a bit confusing to find the Cathedral since there are 2. One Catholic and one Church of England. Helen joined us later to show us the Christmas light but the lazer projections were already switched off.

On Saturday Tadgh and Shelaine dropped in at Peter and Helen’s place. They lived next door to us in Brunei and we attended their wedding back in 1994 in Haarlem. We had a great evening telling stories of our time together in Brunei and how our Shell carriers developed over the years. The next day we all met up again at a Malaysian restaurant for lunch. We said our goodbye’s and drove back to Rudy‘s cousin, Carel and his wife Bernadette,  on the other side of Perth. On Monday evening they drove us to the airport to catch the plane to Singapore and onwards to Brunei.

Our trip to Western Australia has ended. We had a lovely time. It exceeded our expectations. The Northern outback was more varied than expected and the Southern forests  bigger. We climbed and hugged a lot of trees, climbed many granite boulders and mountains as well as camped next to wide white sand beaches. Our friends and relatives opened up their homes for which we are very grateful and hope we can reciprocate some time in the future.

We will now spend 2 weeks in Brunei before flying back via a 3 days Singapore stopover to Holland. I will post a video of our Australia experience when I have plowed through all the photographic material. That may take a few months.

Thanks for following us

Rudy and Jamaliah Welling