Destination IRONMAN (and IRONMAN 70.3) Western Australia: Part 1

I’d been covering races for IRONMAN for about a decade when my family finally sat me down for “the intervention.” The gist of their message was simple: you travel to some of the world’s most amazing spots, and all you do is work.

“From now on, every place you go, you have to take in at least one sight,” my wife and three children dictated one night. (The ironic part of all this was I routinely rushed back after an event in order to spend less time away from them.) Since then I have done my best to appreciate some of the incredible destinations triathlon can lead us to.

Which is why, when IRONMAN and the folks from Tourism Western Australia invited me down under to cover this weekend’s IRONMAN Pro Series race in Busselton – IRONMAN 70.3 Busselton – I jumped at the chance to arrive a few days early and take in some of the sights from this side of Australia. This will be the first of three photo galleries from my adventures, covering my first few days after arriving in Perth.

Fremantle and Perth

There’s no quick way to fly to Western Australia from North America, and while there are flights into Busselton airport, your best bet is get yourself to Perth, the capital, and then drive down to the race site, which is about a two and a half hour drive. My flight from Toronto took me through Vancouver, then Sydney. I have known people to make the trip through Singapore, as well, but it seems like mine is the most common route. I won’t try to sugarcoat it – it’s a long flight. (Once you get here, though, it’s completely worth it.)

My main goal for the first few days was to get to Rottnest Island, so I purposely organized an AirBnB in Fremantle, which is Perth’s port city. I spent a morning cruising around Fremantle, riding past South Beach, which was hopping with families enjoying the last of the school holiday. The west end of Fremantle is worth checking out, too, with a number of bustling markets set in the historic buildings. Most of the buildings you’ll see in that end of Fremantle date back to the 1890s – according to the tourism folks, “it has the State’s highest density of heritage-listed buildings.’

While I was in Perth, Australia was playing India in a cricket test match, so I avoided heading downtown, and didn’t take in any of the suggested sights like Elizabeth Quay or the Perth Cultural Centre. There are lots of other beaches close by, too, but if you’re heading down to Busselton for the race (or to Rottnest Island – see below), you’ll have lots of spectacular beach opportunities, so taking in some of the other Perth activities might be in order.

As a photographer, sunrise and sunset shots are always a goal, so I did make a trip up to King’s Park where I was able to take in the city skyline. The park has lots of cultural heritage on display and is also the home of the Western Australian Botanic Garden.

Time your trip so you can take in the sunset.

Rottnest Island

Rottnest Island is famous for quokkas. The island got its name from Dutch explorers, who mistook the small marsupials for rats. (“Rottnest” means “rat’s nest” in Dutch.) There are a reported 10,000 quokka’s on the island. It’ll be pretty much impossible for you to make the trip to Rottnest without actually seeing a bunch of them.

There are a few different ferry options out to Rottnest Island. I ended up booking on the Rottnest Express and included a rental bike in the package. There are two other ferry services and, if they don’t offer a bike rental, once you get off the boat in Thomson Bay, you can head to Pedal & Flipper and organize one. There’s also bus service throughout the island, but riding a bike would definitely be my suggestion.

I only had about five hours (I would suggest booking the ferry and getting on the earliest option and heading back as late in the day as you can – I didn’t have that luxury), so I jumped on the bike and headed towards the most western point of the island. Along the way I checked out the Wadjemup Lighthouse (which is where I got the shot of the Quokka checking out my camera) and found myself stopping more than often to get shots of the incredible scenery along the south shore.

I took a few detours along the way, so I had clocked about 16 km (10 miles) by the time I got to the end of the island. It was certainly worth the ride – while I didn’t have a long enough lens to do them justice, it was fun to get some shots of a pair of Ospreys in their nest. The winds can gust up to 118 km/h (almost 70 mph) at that spot, and it sure felt like it was blowing that hard when I was there, but it didn’t seem to phase the pair at all. At that end of the island you can also do a bit of a walk to a lookout where you can see a colony of long-nosed fur seals. Unfortunately, I really needed that longer lens to get any shots of the seals – they had just finished feeding and were floating on their backs in the water, so I mostly saw their fins flapping in the distance as they lay on their backs.

The ride back to Thomson Bay along the north shore ended up being a bit quicker (about 14 km or 8.7 miles), even though I found myself stopping again and again to take in the many secluded white-sand beaches along the way. You’ll want to give yourself time on the island to enjoy some of those beaches.

I made it back to Thomson Bay with lots of time to grab some lunch and check out a few more Quokkas as they roamed around, then got the ferry back to Fremantle. From there I drove straight down to my next AirBnB spot near Margaret River. My two days there will make up the next part of this series. Stay tuned for lots more coverage from Western Australia.

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