Swan Valley, Perth

We're currently staying in the Swan Valley, in the northern suburbs of Perth. Last year in Perth we stayed at Rockingham which is well south of the city, so we thought we'd check out the other side of town this time. We're planning to stay here for nearly 3 weeks and to spend a lot of days playing golf, but we are also doing some tourist things.

The Swan Valley is renowned for food and wine, we've visited a couple of wineries so far with more planned. We've also checked out a couple of breweries and of course the local chocolate shop.

The town of Guildford is at the southern end of the Swan Valley, and is of such heritage value that the entire town is classified by the National Trust. We've done the heritage walking trails around town, and were suitably impressed by the gorgeous old houses and civic buildings and the magnificent plane trees.

For a change of pace, we visited the Gravity Discovery Centre about 40km further north. This is attached to the brand new Australian International Gravitation Observatory, a high tech facility that is part of a worldwide project to try and measure gravity waves, which have been hypothesised but never actually observed or proved. The Discovery Centre had all sorts of weird and wonderful displays, plus an outdoor scale model walking track of the solar system. Poor old Pluto has been removed after its demotion from planet status a few years ago.

When we were in Kalgoorlie last year we visited the Charlotte reservoir, where water piped over 500km from Perth is stored. This week we visited Mundaring Weir, where the water originates. There was a very interesting display in the original No 1 pump house at the weir covering not just the physical design and construction of the weir and pipeline, but the political shenanigans as well. There was so much public criticism and ridicule of the grand scheme that the chief engineer, the now universally admired C. Y. O'Connor, committed suicide only a few months before the opening of the pipeline. We spent a lot longer here than we had expected, and found it very interesting. It makes you wonder what government in Australia would attempt such a challenge these days, they are much too risk averse to tackle such huge nation building schemes.

Unlike the cold and wet south east of Australia, Perth is still in the grip of drought, and Summer has well and truly started. To escape today's 37 degree heat we went to an air conditioned cinema for the morning screening of 'Let Me In', a so-so horror flick. We had the cinema entirely to ourselves, so maybe everyone else had seen some poor reviews that we hadn't. We had a fun time, it was just like having our very own giant home theatre!