Perth

Perth is a very isolated city. It is the most isolated city you can drive to on earth. Only Honolulu is further from a major metropolitan area. The next city is equal or larger size is Adelaide, 2700km (1680 miles) east of here. However, Adelaide is the most boring city on earth. No one wants to go there. The next closest city actually worth going to is Melbourne, which is 3425km (over 2100 miles) from Perth. That is over 36 hours of driving with NOTHING in between except an occasional small town. To compare, imagine living in Los Angeles and having to drive to Atlanta to get to the next good sized town.

Most Australians have never been to Perth or their own west coast. It is simply too damn far away. For less money they can fly to New Zealand, Bali, or even Los Angeles.

From Perth, it is shorter and cheaper to fly to major cities in South East Asia (SEA) than it is to fly to the major Australian east coast cities of Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. I can fly from here to Bangkok, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Saigon, Cambodia, and Indonesia cheaper and faster than going to Sydney. That is one of the reasons I took this contract. It can literally fly into Bangkok for the weekend.

Perth itself reminds me a lot of San Diego. It is very spread out. Most people live in 4 bedroom houses in the suburbs for 60 miles around Perth. The traffic is not bad. There are only two freeways. There is no smog to speak of.

Housing is a good deal, at least to a California boy. For example, you can buy a very nice 4/3 house in a good suburb within 10 minutes of the beach for less than $500k AU, which is $250k USD. You can get a nice house with a pool and everything else a few more minutes inland for as little as $120k USD.

The costs of everything else are not as bad as I expected. It depends on how you look at it. The prices of cars, gas, food, computers, clothes, etc are about the same as in Santa Barbara when you measure it in US dollars. However, I have learned that is a mistake to measure the price of things in this way. The reason is because most Australians don't make as much money as in the US. Just because the Australian dollar is half the US dollar does not mean the Australians make twice as much in Australian dollars as their US counterparts.

For example, a pair of new Levi jeans cost about $80 AU, which is about $40 US. About the same really. However, an Australian will have to work on average about 50 percent longer to buy that pair of jeans.

Medical care and insurance is much cheaper here. However, their medical care seems to be excellent. They do not have the high insurance and salary expenses here. For example, when you register your car, part of the registration is your annual liability insurance. In other words, the State insures the car, not the driver. If someone is hurt in an accident, they file a claim with the State Insurance Corp. The premium you pay is based on expected losses for cars of the similar weight and horsepower. If you want insurance to pay for property damage claims from an accident you cause, you can purchase that from any private insurance company just like in the States.

The weather here is warmer that Santa Barbara, but not much more. For a couple of weeks in February it gets up to 41 degrees centigrade (105 F). That is why being at the beach is nice because in the afternoon the sea breeze kicks in and lowers that temp to something tolerable. It does not freeze here. Lately in December the hottest is has been was about 32C (90F), and lows about 10C (50F). The air is very dry, much like Tucson.

The water temperature is warmer than California. You don't need a wetsuit here. What is nice is that it is not warm like in Florida or the tropics. It is still cool enough to make you catch your breath when you dive in, like a cool swimming pool. The beaches are very nice. The sand is very soft, white, and clean. To answer a question posed to me, yes the beaches are topless.

There is very little rain. Right now there is a daytime sprinkler ban, and you are only allowed to water you lawn at night one day a week. The reservoirs are very low because there was no rain in the eastern side of the mountains last winter.