We spent the 1st of March in Melbourne, the capital and largest city in the state of Victoria.  With a population of almost 4.5 million it contains almost a fifth of the entire population of Australia.  There is more background in the post of our first visit, in 2018,  most of which will not be repeated here.  But you can take a look:   https://baderjournal.com/2016/02/26/melbourne-australia/.

     One day is certainly not enough to fully explore a city of this size and we had seen some of the things at the top of our list last time.  We decided this time we would go into the city and follow (loosely) a walking tour Melbourne has published to see Aboriginal art.  The maps were available near the city hall so that is where we headed after breakfast.  We had thought about walking into town (maybe 2 miles) but as you can see in the picture the skies were dark and cloudy and rain was forecast.  Melbourne’s excellent tram system had a stop across the street from the dock, so we bought return tickets and boarded the tram.  An older local fellow bent our ears for the whole trip about the places he thought we should visit but, although he was just being nice, we had already planned our day.  We left the tram very close to the town hall, visited the information office for our map and sat down on a bench.  While Mary studied the map I took a few pictures, of some very red flowers, of a small sculpture of a dog on the sidewalk, of the Town Hall and of the interesting 1932 Art Deco Manchester Unity Building.

     We walked to Spring St, which has been the center of government here since the mid 19th century, and a number of grand old Victorian era buildings are still in use there.  Parliament House was the centerpiece and is the reason this is considered the center of government.  A long building in classical style fronted by a row of pillars, it was originally built in the mid-1850’s with additions over the next few decades.  But it has never been completed, most conspicuously the dome in the original plan is still missing.  It was the home of the Australian Parliament while Melbourne was the national capital in the early 20th century but now it houses the parliament of Victoria.

     The front steps of Parliament House are often the venue for political demonstrations.  We visited there on the day after the commencement of the US war against Iran and there was a small group of demonstrators on the steps.  There were no signs and no slogans and no speeches (at least while we were there) so we weren’t entirely sure what their position was.  They had an Israeli flag and an Australian flag along with four Iranian flags, so that seemed like a rather mixed message.  But we have learned since that the Iranian flags they were flying, with a golden horse in the middle, were abandoned by Iran at the time of their Islamic revolution and the golden horse was replaced by a red and white design.  Apparently the old flag is used today by people seeking an end to the Islamic state and a return to the old government.  So that seems to make the demonstrators’ message clearer as support for the attack on Iran the day before.  Still not sure, but that is what seems likely.

     Across the street were some more notable Victorian buildings.  The Princess Theater dates to 1857 and was rebuilt in 1886.  It is the oldest entertainment venue on the continent of Australia.  The Windsor Hotel (once known as the Grand Hotel) first opened in 1884 and was greatly expanded in 1888.  It is the last of Australia’s 19th century grand hotels.

     This area had a good bit of green space, including several parks decorated with statues and other public art.  Next to the Parliament House was a sizeable park with some statues, but the only pictures we have are of some of their beautiful flowers.  In front of Parliament House was a mosaic with an Aboriginal motif copied from an 1890 painting.  This commemorates the area’s history as a traditional gathering and ceremonial place of the Kulin aboriginal people who lived here. 

     To the right of Parliament House was a small park called Gordon Reserve.  It contains a statue of Charles George Gordon, a much admired English general who died defending Khartoum in Sudan in 1885.  The statue was erected in 1887 and is a copy of a statue that once stood in Trafalgar Square in London and now sits on the Victoria Embankment in front of the British Ministry of Defense.  Also in Gordon Reserve is an elaborately sculpted fountain in a Victorian style.  Called the Stanford Fountain, it was installed in 1871 shortly after its creator, William Stanford, was released from prison where he had been since he was about 15.  The fountain was made of bluestone from the prison’s quarry.  While difficult to see in our photo, the central pillar is adorned by the figure of a boy.  Stanford died in 1880, reportedly from inhaling too much stone dust.

     Earlier in this area we happened past what we think was the Old Treasury Building, opened in 1862 and now a museum.  What was notable was the nicely dressed wedding parties standing outside, apparently waiting for their turn for a ceremony since the Marriage Registry for Victoria is in this building.  Unfortunately we were looking for the Parliament Building at that time and neglected to take a picture, but it was still worth noting.

     We left the Spring Street area to walk to what is apparently the motherlode of Aboriginal Art at the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria (called NGV).  This was a pretty lengthy walk along city streets, passing several blocks of what appeared to be old commercial buildings (except for one that said it was a mosque) and along a street overlooking the railroad tracks.  The Gallery building had a very distinctive modern design on its front facade.  The NGV was founded in 1861 and has more than 75,000 works in its collection in several locations.  The Potter Centre opened in 2002 to house the NGV’s Australian art collection, numbering some 20,000 works.  This is a beautiful museum where we spent most of our time with the Aboriginal art, although there were a number of rooms containing other Australian art.

    Our next objective was the Melbourne City Library.  On the walk there we passed the statue of Matthew Flinders, the first to circumnavigate Australia in 1802.  It was erected in 1923 outside St Paul’s Cathedral on Swanston Street.  It took a while to find the City Library, located on a side street with only a very small sign.   It is a little small for a city this size, but Melbourne has a number of other library locations.  Note that this is the city’s central public lending and research library, not the fabulous State Library that we visited on our first visit.

     One more thing on the must do list before returning to the ship was to find a gelato shop.  It turned out there was a very good one on a pedestrian lane running right next to the library.  The lane was called Degraves Street and the shop was called Piccolina.  There were several cafes nearby and tables with umbrellas out in the street.  The tables were full, but as we came out of the gelato shop a nice fellow who had finished his meal stood up and offered us his table, which we gratefully accepted.  Melbourne has a number of these relatively short and narrow pedestrian lanes which are considered a feature of the city.

     Buoyed by our delicious gelato treat we walked back to the tram stop near the town hall and rode back to the dock, along with one of our waiters who had shore leave to visit the city.  To our surprise, given the forecast, we did not encounter any actual rain during our visit although the skies were mostly cloudy and sometimes looked threatening.  We sailed away in late afternoon, as usual.

     We anchored off Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island early on February 27.  It’s just a handful of miles from Adelaide so no problem getting here early in the morning.  Last time we were here, in 2018, we signed up for a 9 hour excursion that would take us across the island to visit some of the most prominent landmarks.  But we ran into a cyclone (quite an adventure) that delayed our arrival by four hours requiring all the long excursions to be cancelled.  You can see that visit (including the cyclone experience) here: https://baderjournal.com/2018/07/02/penneshaw-kangaroo-island-australia/.  So we signed up for the same excursion for this visit and were able to complete the whole thing.

     So we tendered into Penneshaw in the morning to meet our excursion bus and off we went.  Even though our guide Robert drove pretty fast on the less than perfect roads, the long morning drive across the island through mostly forests and fields made us wonder if we had made a bad choice.  One interesting thing we saw in the southwestern part of the island was fields of low green growth with taller dead white trees.  This was the result of the massive forest fires here in 2020 which not only destroyed much woodland but also killed about 80 percent of the Koalas who lived there.  Koalas are slow, low energy animals who live mostly in eucalyptus trees, whose leaves are most of their diet.  Their natural response to danger is to climb higher into the trees but that didn’t protect them from the wildfires.  A massive effort to rescue the survivors was undertaken and today the population has rebounded to between 15 and 20 thousand, maybe 40% of what it was before the fires.

        Eventually we reached Flinders Chase National Park, named for Matthew Flinders who visited here in 1802 and named it Kangaroo Island.  It was established as a nature reserve in 1919 and made a national park in 1972.  Our first visit was to Admiral’s Arch, a natural bridge overlooking the rocky ocean shore.  Getting to it requires a very long walk along a boardwalk that descends and then goes around Cape du Couedic to reach a wooden stairway up to the arch viewing platform.  Very nice seaside views from the boardwalk.  Less than a mile off the coast were the two Casuarina Islets.

     The arch is said to have been formed by erosion from ocean waves but when we were there the ocean looked too far down for that.  Maybe it was different in the past or during other seasons.  The walls and top of the arch look like a cave formation, very uneven with what look like small stalactites.  It was quite windy the day we were there, especially on the exposed viewing platform, which is why Rick isn’t wearing his hat in the picture below.  We understand that this area is frequented by large numbers of Long Nosed Fur Seals, but on the day we visited we only saw two of them.  Maybe it was the wind.

     On higher ground back from the ocean stood the 82 foot tall Cape du Couedic Lighthouse.  Opened in 1909, it was automated in 1957 and since 1991 the three former lighthouse keeper’s houses have been available for park visitors to rent.  We saw it fairly closely from the parking lot and in the distance as we drove away.

     Remarkable Rocks is the name given to a group of large granite boulders sitting near a cliff some 200 feet above the ocean.  They have been sculpted naturally by wind, rain and sea spray over some 500 million years into formations that look a little like works by Henry Moore.  Remarkable Rocks sounds like a remarkably English name to us, but it is quite appropriate.  We parked some distance away and you had to walk on a flat boardwalk until we reached the rocks, which were on top of a low hill of granite.  The orange blotches on the rocks are lichen.  From inside the formation on the hill the rocks made for a stunning display.

     It was time for lunch so we drove to Emu Ridge Eucalyptus Distillery, the only remaining example of what once was a thriving industry on Kangaroo Island, to eat our box lunches.  The lunches were distributed in what appeared to be a lunchroom and they were quite good for box lunches.Many of us took the meal outside and sat at picnic tables set up on the grounds, some with welcome shade.  It turned out that koalas hung out in the eucalyptus trees near our picnic tables.  As you would expect, once spotted they drew a crowd & we were among them.

     After lunch we boarded the bus once again to drive to Seal Bay, which has been a protected reserve for Australian sea lions since 1954.  These sea lions are an endangered species and Seal Bay’s colony of about 800 is the third largest in the world, accounting for about 5% of the total population.  When we visited there were only a few dozen at the beach beneath us (possibly more on other parts of the beach).  To visit the sea lions required another long walk down a boardwalk from the visitor’s center.  Visitors can only step onto the beach in the company of a park ranger, who gives a lot of information and also makes sure no one approaches the sea lions.  Rick took the ranger tour on the beach while Mary stayed on a viewing platform at the top of the hill.  One thing she saw that those of us on the beach did not was the skeleton of a juvenile humpback whale that washed up in this area during a storm in 1984.

     On the beach we were able to walk around a bit to take pictures, but never to walk near the sea lions.  The park ranger was quite good at leading the tour and explaining everything, but was careful to corral any wandering visitors.  We think these were all females along with their pups, and they really weren’t doing much for the most part.  But still quite fun to see.

     One of the mother seals apparently climbed up one of the wooden stairways, where she stretched out on a step for a nap.  But her pup followed her up there later and looked to be interested in lunch.  But the mom didn’t respond so the pup went back down to the beach.  This was the most activity we saw here.

     It was time to head back to the tender dock in Penneshaw so we all piled back into the bus.  But we made two more stops before the end.  First we stopped back at the Emu Ridge facility at the request of some of the passengers.  It turned out they have a lot more than just a distillery.  There was a cafe and a store where we bought some honey produced by the last pure Ligurian bees in the world, who are only found on Kangaroo Island.  An animal rescue operation there had several kangaroos in residence.  We also spotted another koala while we were there.  The second stop was at an overlook of a large bay that we think our guide Robert told us was called Baudin Beach.  Just before we got there Robert gave us a stern lecture that this area was very dangerous, with an unfenced cliff that would be easy to fall over if walking through the rough sand and stones.  So he admonished us not to wander beyond the road.  Nevertheless, one woman (who you can see in the photo) started walking toward the cliff as soon as she exited the bus.  Robert was really furious and yelled at her to come right back, which she reluctantly did. 

     From there it was back to Penneshaw to board the tender back to the ship.  It had been an excellent day, starting out seeming like a disappointment but ending up as one of the highlights of the voyage.  As the tender pulled away we saw cormorants on the rocks (they were there on our last visit too) and not to be overlooked, a sea gull.

     It took two sea days to reach the harbor of Adelaide on February 26.   The port is a long way from the city so the best way to get there is on a train, which is what we did on our first visit here in 2018.  We spent the day on that visit with our friends Bill & Robert exploring the very interesting downtown area of Adelaide, which is the capital of South Australia and a big city of about 1.4 million. You can see that visit here:  https://baderjournal.com/2018/07/04/adelaide-australia/.

     On this visit we wanted to see some of the surrounding countryside so we joined an excursion going into the hill country around Mt Lofty.  Our bus drove (and drove some more) through the suburbs into Adelaide, through downtown Adelaide, then up into the hills beyond on the other side from the port.  So we saw quite a lot, but from the windows of the bus. 

     We drove up the 2300 foot Mt Lofty, named by Matthew Flinders in 1802 when he led the first circumnavigation of Australia.  In 1885 a tower more than 50 feet tall was erected at the summit to serve as a surveying marker and later as a navigation aid.  In 1902 it was named the Flinders Column in honor of Matthew Flinders.  Today it is part of a lookout area with panoramic views of Adelaide that includes a gift shop and a cafe.  Looking in the opposite direction from Adelaide you can see the more than 100 foot tall Mt Lofty Fire Tower, which has been used since it was built in 1980 to keep watch for forest fires.

     We drove on to our main destination, a small town (population less than 2500) in the mountains called Hahndorf.  It was founded in about 1839 by a group of 188 immigrants from a town in Prussia (today it is in Poland) who had sailed from Hamburg on a ship called the Zebra.  They were a Lutheran congregation fleeing religious persecution.  The voyage took about four months, arriving in South Australia at the end of 1838.  They settled together on land they purchased in the Adelaide Hills where they founded a German speaking farming community.  They named their settlement Hahndorf after the captain of the Zebra, Dirk Meinerts Hahn, who had taken an interest in the group and was instrumental in helping them find and purchase the land.  While some other Germans emigrated to Australia during this period, Hahndorf is the oldest continuing German town in Australia.  We understand that descendants of many of the original immigrants still live here.

     Hahndorf struck us as a rather arty town largely catering to tourists.  It was two or three blocks long so we walked up one side and back on the other, passing a number of gift shops, artist galleries and restaurants.  There was a museum telling about the town’s history, but it was very small and most of the building seemed to be devoted to the gift shop.  There were, however, a couple of nice churches.  Pleasant enough, but not the best choice for the one day available in Adelaide.  We met up with our friend Karen, who was in town on a different excursion, and we ate in a nice German restaurant called The Haus Hahndorf.  Mary and Karen had Reuben sandwiches on a pretzel bun and Rick had a very good sausage platter with sauerkraut and a big bready pretzel.  Among other things we saw while walking around town was a statue of Captain Hahn and a very Bavarian looking beer advertisement in front of the restaurant.

      After lunch we found a gelato place for dessert, then returned to the bus for the drive back to the ship.  It was early autumn and the streets of this town in the mountains were quite colorful and made for a pleasant walk, as you can see Mary and Karen enjoying that in the picture below.

     We spent February 23 in Albany, the oldest town in Western Australia.  Founded in 1826, Albany now has a population around 35,000.  We had an interesting visit here in 2018, https://baderjournal.com/2018/07/06/albany-australia/, most of which will not be repeated in this episode.  This time we took the shuttle bus into the center of town and walked around from there.

     The most noticeable building as we left the bus on York Street, the town’s main street, was the old town hall with its tall clocktower.  The building opened in 1888 and the clock, imported from England, was added in 1891.  Today the building houses a theater and an art gallery and markets often appear in the open space next door, as one did the day we were there.

     Just up the street from the town hall was the Albany Public Library.  Although it traces its history to the Albany Mechanics Institute formed in 1852, today it occupies a modern building that opened in 2003 (and was being renovated when we visited in 2018).  The library has a nice program lending ipads to seniors who may not otherwise be able to read ebooks.  And its high tech book drop requires you to scan the book you are returning to open the slot, presumably to discourage the deposit of non-library objects.  After walking through the library we left by a back door into an open field and at the top of the stairs was a large boulder with a metal snake sculpture climbing around it.  This town has many sculptures decorating its open spaces.

     Mokare was a Noongal Aboriginal man who was instrumental in promoting peaceful coexistence between the Aboriginal and European communities during the early years of settlement (and even before then).  Mokare was living with the government resident, Alexander Collie, when he died in 1831.  Four years later Collie, at his request, was buried next to Mokare on a spot where the town hall now sits.  The graves were exhumed and Collie was reburied in Albany’s cemetery, but there is no information about what happened to Mokare’s remains.

     Today there is a statue of Mokare in Alison Hartman Gardens next to the library.  It was first erected here in 1978.  Nearby is a plaque mounted on a boulder explaining that this was a joint reconciliation project “funded by the Aboriginal Affairs Department and the Town of Albany.”  The statue stands on a round brick platform with low walls embedded with tiles created by regional school children.

     In the platform floor are several colorful round medallions representing the Aboriginal seasons created by local Aboriginal artists.  Each plaque includes Aboriginal symbols representing the weather during that season, with the English months and the indigenous name for that season written along opposite edges.  Below are five of them:  Meertilluc (Feb – March) Reddish color represents heat and the symbols represent the sun;  Pourner (Apr – May)  Circular symbols represent water holes and depictions of turtles that are hunted during this season;  Mawkur (June – July)  Lines and blue dots represent rivers full with heavy rain and u-shaped figures represent people sitting around fires to keep warm;  Meerningal (Aug –Sept) Spring in the southern hemisphere, so the circles represent blossoming flowers and berries and the connecting lines represent roots;  Maungernan (Oct – Nov)  Symbols depict banksia flowers that appear during this period and the orange also represents warming temperatures.  Beruc (Dec – Jan) was there as well but we don’t have a picture of it.

     We walked down York Street, which gets steeper as it descends toward the bay.  We stopped to see St John’s Anglican Church, the oldest consecrated church in Western Australia, which opened in 1848.  It was built of local stone by the people of the town and could have held the entire population of 170 when it first opened.  The church and rectory are in a park-like setting with nice gardens.  While the outer doors were open when we visited the inner doors were locked so we could not go inside.  On the grounds is the Albany War Memorial, unveiled in 1921 to honor locals who served in World War I.  Plaques with the names of soldiers from World War II and Korea were added later.

     We continued down York Street and turned left on Stirling Terrace, then walked on to the old post office.  Originally built in 1869, the building was expanded in 1895 when the clock tower, then about 64 feet tall, was added (it was extended another 20 feet in 1901).  The clock tower contains a spiral staircase supported by the outer wall.  The building also served as a courthouse in its early years and in the 1870’s was the site of the town’s first telegraph office.  It served as the city’s post office until 1964 and since 2002 it has been part of the University of Western Australia.  It is an attractive building.

     On the way back toward York Street we walked up the very steep Spencer Street to see the Albany Museum of Surfing, which sounded pretty interesting.  But looking through the large window when we got there it looked like just a thrift shop with a few surfing items in the window.  It may be that more surfing artifacts are on display further into the shop but we will never know because we decided not to go inside.

     We continued our walk down Stirling Terrace past York Street and after a while came to the Museum of the Great Southern off to our left.  The museum was small (and free) but pretty comprehensive.  It covered Aboriginal history, western colonization, convict history, early whaling, local natural history and Albany’s experience as the departure port for the ANZAC troops in World War I.  There was also a good exhibition about Chinese immigration to Australia over several decades and an informative exhibit about the effects of the White Australia Policy (under which nonwhites were barred from emigrating here).  The museum was full of interesting photos and explanatory placards but seemed a little light on artifacts, which is why we took no inside pictures.  The museum is on the site of the first European settlement here and part of the museum (we think the left side in the picture below) is the Residency Building constructed in 1850 to house the government representative in town.  We didn’t go inside the Eclipse Building but we did walk up as far as its front porch where we saw some interesting metal bird sculptures.

     Tired and hungry we walked back up York Street to have lunch at the pub in the Albany Hotel where we ate on our first visit.  Across the street from the town hall, it is billed as the oldest licensed pub in Western Australia (apparently another pub in the state is older but wasn’t licensed when it opened  . . . what good is a pub without a liquor license?).  The pub dates back to 1836 but the hotel wasn’t built until 1852.  We had delicious fish and chips here as we did the first time, although the waiter (who must be new, we guess) didn’t know they served fish and chips.  You can eat on the front porch, but that was too hot for us.

     After lunch we looked for awhile for a gelato place but all in vain.  So we walked a few blocks to the last thing we wanted to visit, Dog Rock.  It was a longer walk than we remembered from our last visit but maybe that was just due to the hot weather.  Dog Rock is a natural granite outcrop that has been known to the Noongar Aboriginal people as Yacka (“wild dog tamed”) for a long time and it is thought to have been an ancient territory marker.  The black and white dog collar was first painted around the base in 1937 when the Automobile Club complained that it was a traffic danger because it extended into the road.

     If you have followed our travels you may notice something missing in this picture:  Rick’s hat, which he always wears ashore to avoid sun damage.  Well, Rick suddenly noticed that too and realized the hat had been left in the pub!  So we walked all the way back there, a little quicker than we would have otherwise for fear it might otherwise be gone.  It turned out that they had found the hat after we left and another group from the Zaandam sitting at a table on the front porch recognized it and offered to take it back to the ship.  They were still there when we arrived back and were happy to turn it over to us.  All’s well that ends well, right?  The shuttle stop was right across the street, so we boarded the bus and returned to the ship.

     After a pretty intense day of exploring Perth we spent our second day here, February 21, on a fairly relaxed walk around Fremantle.   A railroad separates the cruise port from the city but on our last visit in 2018, which you can see here:  https://baderjournal.com/2018/07/09/freemantle-australia/ , there was a large metal overpass for pedestrians to cross the tracks.  For some reason that is now gone but there was a shuttle bus to downtown.  So about 10 AM we boarded the bus with our friends Karen and Donna to ride in to the Town Hall.

     The Fremantle Library is in the Walyalup Civic Center building next door, so of course that is where we headed.  The Fremantle History Centre was exhibiting an interesting collection of  old photos of Fremantle in the library and we spent some time looking at it.

     After looking through a few stores for some items Karen and Donna needed we headed to the Fremantle Markets.  On the way we passed the Old Courthouse, built by convict labor and opened in 1899.  It served as a courthouse from 1899 until 2001, then was renovated and reopened as a bar in 2021.  The Fremantle Markets are only open on weekends so when we went there on a Wednesday in 2018 they were closed.  This time it was Saturday and the markets were jumping.  By the entrance a colorfully dressed woman was painting (pictures, not the building).

     Originally opened in 1902 as a wholesale food market, this building complex served as a packaging and distribution center until the 1970’s.  Restored and updated to accommodate retail spaces, the Fremantle Markets opened here in 1975.  The space now has some 150 stores and vendors’ stalls selling food, crafts, tourist items, clothes and pretty much everything else you can imagine.  On Saturday a lot of folks were there.

     In contrast to the inside, the outside of the Markets was mostly red brick and Victorian style stone entrances, each one a slightly different design.  And inside near the front entrance was Big Red, a 6 foot red Kangaroo.  We had a very good time at the markets.  The only disappointment was Mary’s inability to find a baseball cap that said Fremantle.  All they seemed to have were Perth hats.  We thought that indicated a certain lack of local pride, of which we had seen no other sign.  But now we know that Fremantle is actually considered one of the 30 areas that make up Perth, so that must explain it.

     Most of our group (ie. all three other than Rick) wanted to visit a yarn shop so we set out to find one after we left the markets.  We walked past the Warders Cottages, small rowhouses built in 1851 to house the Warders (we think this means guards) at the Fremantle Prison, which we toured on our first visit to Fremantle.  The prison was built in the 1850’s as well after Britain decided to transport convicts to Western Australia (they had previously been in the eastern part of the country).  These cottages were used for prison staff until 1991 when the prison closed.  Today they are part of a hotel.  After this we did find a nice yarn shop called Yarns on Collie (it’s on Collie street).  The shop was nice and the lady running it was very helpful.  Everybody but Rick found something to buy!

     After the yarn shop it was time to eat, so we stopped into a restaurant nearby called The Rustic Spoon (not the rusty spoon!) for some fish & chips.  The large dining room was mostly empty, so you had to wonder, but the food turned out to be really excellent and made to order from scratch.  And what do you need after a good meal in Australia?  That’s right . . . gelato.  Swan River Gelato was conveniently located next door to the restaurant and their gelato also was made from scratch.  So of course it was really good.   Feeling quite satiated, we walked back to the town hall to meet the shuttle back to the ship.  The area on the side of the town hall where we met the bus was sort of a small paved park.  Among other things there, we saw a statue of John Curtin, who was Prime Minister of Australia throughout most of World War II.  There was also a memorial fountain built in memory of “Comrade Tom Edwards, Working Class Martyr,” who was killed in 1919 on the Fremantle wharf during what we assume was a strike.  And finally there was a very colorful ping pong table with rounded sides instead of legs that upstaged everything else.  After a while the bus came and we drove through the streets of Fremantle one more time to reboard the ship, after two very enjoyable shore days.