My views do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
Fremantle is near Perth, and the only thing I knew about Perth was that it was the place Australians used to describe the other side of the world. We were really far away. The weather made us adjust our itinerary, so we ended up with an overnight in Fremantle. The crew tend to get really excited about overnights. There’s usually a member of the cast who gets a hotel room. If there is an overnight, it’s pretty likely that I still have to do the evening entertainment, so I don’t tend to go out at night. This time I had training in the afternoon of the second day so I wanted to have as much adventure as possible on the first day. Georgie had done some research and she and Bri and I decided to visit Penguin Island. It was an hour away by uber. We arrived with about 40 minutes to wait for the ferry to the island, so we went for a walk on the beach and grabbed some lunch from the cafe to take for a picnic.
On the Island we found a nice picnic spot.
We decided to look for penguins in their natural habitat rather than the ones in the sanctuary. We walked all over the island, looking for penguins but only finding gorgeous beaches with cool rocks and lots of birds.
Bri climbed into the rocks to take pictures
Georgie and I were doing our own photoshoot
These two birds had a very verbal argument
The water was clear and cold
The colors were gorgeous. We spent the day pointing out all of its incredible qualities.
Unfortunately, Penguins go out to feed during the day so we didn’t see any. Instead I decided to take pictures with these statues.
Back in Fremantle, we walked around. It’s a really cute funky city with markets and shops. There were lots of second hand stalls and unique things that definitely wouldn’t fit in my suitcase. We met up with some other friends on our way back, and when they asked how penguin island was, I showed them the pictures with the statues – they all thought they were real penguins!
That night I hosted the Princess Theater and I told the guests that we didn’t find any penguins on Penguin Island, but that my friends thought I’d been able to pet them because of the pictures. It became an inside joke between me and the guests. A couple of days later, during a gameshow that I was doing with Joseph, a guest made a reference to how I was able to pet the penguins on penguin island and I winked and agreed with them. Joseph responded with appropriate jealousy that I got to pet penguins.
On our second day I had training in the early afternoon so we decided to stay close. Bri and I found a great breakfast place, and an outdoor market by the pier.
We had to take a COVID test before we got off the ship these days, so while we were waiting the 15 minutes for our negative result, Kelvin, the Entertainment Director, told us a story about where he had gone the day before to find a statue of someone from a famous band. Then, while we were wandering, we found the statue and sent the picture to Kelvin. He was delighted.
Fremantle was civilized enough that I was able to find a USB that I had been on the hunt for for several ports. We revisited the markets and had some lunch before I needed to head back to the ship. I had wanted to go to the real Perth just because I’d heard of it, but when I looked up things to do in Perth, the article suggested to spend a day in Fremantle, so with my time constraints I felt like I got the most out of the time that I had – some adventures in nature and time to wander around a cool city.