Sue Zann Toh

I have a sort of tradition of going somewhere and doing something on, or near, my birthday. I’ve gone down south to Margaret River for a 3 day romantic getaway. I’ve gone up north to Lancelin for a bit of quad biking.

This year I went down south again, but this time only one hour to Mandurah with a stop over at the Serpentine Falls for a quick swim.

The water was cold and refreshing on such a hot day. Hard to believe it’s meant to be autumn with temperatures up near and in the 40’s. I ended up slightly sunburned, mostly on the shoulders.

We wandered down to Mandurah and had a fish and chips lunch at Nino’s, then on the way back to the car we spotted a boat hire place and decided to take a boat ride. I thought it was pretty good value, $45 for an hour on a motor boat cruising around the Mandurah canals. We actually went for 2 hours, which was more than enough to explore pretty much all the canals and all the nice luxury houses and boats on the canals.

We weren’t fortunately enough to spot any wild dolphins in the main canals, but nevertheless, it was a fun afternoon.

I steered the boat for a little while, but I nearly got us stuck in shallow water so I decided to hand the controls over. It wasn’t very hard to steer and the boats have quite a decent turning radius. They only went up to 8-9 knots, which is roughly 15 kmph, and the speed limit in the residential canals was 5 knots.

After the boating we made our way back up to Perth and zonked out on the couch in front of a couple of DVD’s.