We live on the most beautiful coast – the west coast of Australia 40km south or Perth.  The beaches are clean, unspoiled (once you get past all the shipyards and such just south of Perth), the water is warm, crystal clear and turquoise blue and the weather, for the most part, fine and warm.

Trouble is, we’re not the only ones to love this place – the ocean around here is full of potentially lethal creatures from great white sharks, hammerhead sharks, blue ringed octopus, cone shells, Portuguese man o’war  jellyfish, sea snakes, stonefish – you name it, we have it and all of it will do you no good whatsoever if you come into close contact.

So we avoid close contact, and went to the aquarium instead, where some other buggers have to capture and look after all these deadly animals.

The Aquarium of Western Australia (AQWA) is only small, but it does have a huuuuuge tank with one of those underwater glass tunnels that goes right around it.  Its amazing – bloody great sharks, stingrays and turtles swimming right over your head.  They even had a diver in the tank (yeah, I know) feeding the sharks pieces of fish (on the end of a big metal stick thing I might add – they’re not totally silly) – very cool

They had all the dangerous critters, including crocodiles (which aren’t found where we are – you have to go to the north of the state for those delightful animals) which were very cool.  Mindful of the need to make the children go ‘ooooh’, they had a touch pool where you could pet some of the less lethal fish and little stingrays.  The kids, needless to say, loved it and were busy harassing poor baby sharks and stingrays for ages until we pulled them away, dripping wet and freezing cold!

Cool huh.

Then we went to have a decidedly average lunch and waddled off for a walk around the shops to stave off the post nosh slump.  At least the coffees were good.

As we were leaving, I spotted the most wonderful spelling fail – hopefully you can see it and are as aghast as I was.  This was a full shop window-sized poster advertising a ferry to Rottnest Island.  Speechless.