Reporting live:

Here I am in Perth. Predawn after an evening chasing the sunset from Canberra to Adelaide and then into a very black and empty west. Most of that must have been over water - the Great Australian Bight, to be precise - but I couldn't see anything. The moon, the fingernail sliver of a moon had held the sun's tale down under the horizon, and there was nothing outside. How the pilots navigated us through that vast blackness is a mystery.

Inside I was happy, so long as they kept the spiced tomato juice coming. One of the music channels was playing every San Francisco song ever written and I was happy to listen. Qantas now flies into SF three times a week and this was one of their ways of marking the occasion.

Me, I was happy to relax and listen and remember that lovely city.

Spent a half hour in the wrong spot with other wrong-spotters waiting for the shuttle, and by the time I eventually made my hostel it was eleven o'clock, and that's early morning to my Canberra body, so I rolled into bed and began snoring.

Today I look into the art gallery a few blocks away, meet the local BookCrossers for lunch and then have a shufti at Fremantle. Tomorrow is a day of travel back across the continent - daylight this time - and a few minutes shy of midnight I'll be catching Cathay Pacific for the redeye to Hong Kong.

Later:
Pardon the waxing lyrical. Feed me spiced tomato juice ten kilometres up and this big goofy grin spreads over my face. I love it.

I gave the movie a miss and concentrated on the sound channels. To celebrate Qantas returning to San Francisco, Glenn Baker had been conscripted to find an hour's worth of San Francisco songs, and when I hear Judy Garland belting out "San Francisco, open your Golden Gate, I can no longer wait, I'm coming home!" I smile happily, because San Francisco is on my itinerary and I'm looking forward to enjoying that beautiful city once more.

All too soon we're gliding into Perth. The priority tags on the luggage work their magic and I'm outside waiting for a shuttle into the city. Unfortunately the signs point to a waiting area that the shuttle drivers don't seem to know about and I waste a half hour of increasingly chilly evening before I trudge off to the correct area.

I checked into the YHA in Perth, a brand new hostel in the old St John Ambulance building, and after all too brief a sleep, I'm up in the dawn looking for a shower, freebie wifi, newspaper, breakfast...

To my shame, I can't find anything open when I poke my nose out. Nothing but a Macdonalds, and I read the local paper over a Big McBreakfast. My aim is to lose weight on this trip, and I'm not making a good start!

But I have a packed day today and I need to get a solid basis for exploration.

Why Perth, I can hear you saying? Well, I can get four flights within Australia and I'm only allowed one Sydney-Perth or Melbourne-Perth sector. But whoever wrote the rules didn't include Canberra, so I can fly Canberra to Perth, and Perth to Melbourne, two long transcontinental legs giving me piles of miles.