Perth

After Sydney and Cronulla and Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road, I was already feeling staggered at how spoiled Australia is with desirable places. Then I arrived in Perth. Around the Victoria coast I was starting to need long sleeves and trousers at times, but stepping off the plane at Perth on the last day of February I was hit with bright sunshine and 35 degree heat that had me muttering 'endless summer'. Then, on Saturday, when the spectacular views of the skyline and Swan River came into view from the vantage point of Kings Park, I said to myself "come on Australia, you're starting to take the piss now".

Perth is just awesome. A city of around two million people, it has almost doubled in size over the past 25 years and is still growing, and indeed booming - cranes punctuate the skyline and a big new quayside development is underway. While Sydney felt like an American city and Melbourne a European city, I'm not sure what Perth feels like, besides a lovely place to be. Built where the Swan River meets the sea, you are never far from water, and all this water combines with the greenery of the many parks and trees to make the place look fantastic. While the CBD overlooks the river, travel just 15 minutes West and the city meets the ocean, such as at Cottesloe, where the beach is splendid and the sunset I caught there on Sunday evening was magnificent. An interesting aspect of Perth is its vast distance from the nearest major metropolitan area, Adelaide which is over 2,000km away. Furthermore, Western Australia is a giant state, almost four times the size of Texas, yet over 90% of the population live in the small South West corner where Perth is situated. As a result, you don't have to travel far from the city to find yourself standing all alone on an isolated beach. Perth is lively, uber-modern, affluent, pretty, enjoys a blissful climate, and seems just reeks of 'quality of life'. However, all this has added up to make Perth become one of the world's most expensive cities.

The weather was scorching on Saturday and it was a great day. A girl I met in Hong Kong showed me around the city, then in the evening we met up with some her friends and went to the Urban Orchard, a garden which welcomes you to pick its fruit and veg and plays host to live music every night. My expectations for the band weren't high, so I was delighted to learn that they were a ska band and even happier to discover that they were really good. The band were named Special Brew and had folk of all ages up on their feet 'skanking'. Skanking is a unique style of dancing done exclusively to ska music and basically involves hopping up and down swinging one leg out and then the other. It's a lot of fun and actually makes for a good workout. One of her friends, a Belgian, was asking if I liked punk and wanted to go to a show with him that night. He was a bit surprised when I said yes! It's mightily rare to meet someone who likes the same punk bands as I do, so we were both quite excited and with midnight approaching my friend and the Belgian's girlfriend went home while we headed off to see Perth punk band The Decline. The crowd was small and pretty flat and the venue wasn't the best with the band playing from a hole in the wall rather than a stage, but The Decline were rocking and it was a good time. Moreover, I had been hoping to attend a punk show in Oz without expecting it to actually happen, so at 1.15am I walked back to the hostel a happy man.

View of Perth from Kings Park

Monday to Friday I will be staying with a family on another help exchange. They live a 15 minute train ride from the CBD, so I'm greatly looking forward to getting to know the city better.