Perth to Broome, travels in WA

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Another retrospective blog, these things really are a labour of love. Hope your all doing well xxxxx

There is an advert running in Australia at the moment that urges people to visit 'real Australia', in Western Australia. Indeed it is a shame that the majority of backpackers miss out this wonderful part of the country, focussing on the east coast, WA is a bit more untouched but maybe thats part of its charm and appeal....

Perth (population 1.3 million)

I flew into Perth and with hindsight now I wished that I had stayed there much longer, I really did like the city. However as a backpacker on a budget I could not turn down a free ride to a place just short of Darwin, my ultimate destination.

When I first arrived in Perth I obviously didn't realise it but I must have been jetlagged or severely jaded. I asked the taxi driver if I could go to Fremantle and he politely informed me that this would cost me 'fifty bucks', I told him that according to my Lonely Planet it should only be about twenty and that I would wait for the bus. After twenty minutes or so I turned to my trusty LP in order to look up my hostel only to find out that actually it was NEWBRIDGE where I needed to get to. Anyway I eventually got there and got a bottom bunk in a very agreeable hostel called Underground Backpackers.

The first thing that I realised was that Perth was HOT but once the sun went down it was incredibly chilly. Before I got to Perth I thought that all of Australias climate was very similar i.e. hot but on the way into the city I got talking to the taxi driver and he informed me that he and his wife had moved to Perth from Sydney because of the difference in climate. His wife has asthma and the climate in Perth was far better for her condition apparently.

Pens at the ready...another fact about Perth is that it is the most remote mainland city on earth, it is closer to Singapore than it is to Sydney-which it is 3 hours behind. There is also a ridiculous amount of flies around the city and this is because of the fact that it sits on the Swan River.

Also whilst I was in Perth the Socceroos qualified for the World Cup and you honestly would have thought that they had won the whole competiton. God bless em!

The Ozy Guide to Protesting

On my first night in the hostel I got talking to two aussie guys who were attending a union rally the next day. John Howard is currently trying to bring in many changes to peoples industrial relation rights and workers contracts, and is coming up against a fair amount of opposition. These rallies were planned nation wide and as someone interested in the topic I thought I should go and have a gander at what all the fuss was about.

I arrived just in time for the end of the rally warm up and the head honcho was urging people to 'get out there and make a good darn racket'....I believe that maybe their rally chant could have conveyed a bit more of the argument in hand..."Who's a W***ER?"..."Howard" didn't really prove as a convincing argument but I was quickly learning that this was the aussie no nonsense approach!

Travels through WA

I was meant to fly into Australia on 10 September however didn’t actually arrive until 14 November as I stayed in SE Asia much longer than I had intended. I really wanted to be settled in Sydney a couple of weeks before Christmas which meant that I had to pretty much fly up the West Coast of Australia. I was lucky enough to get a lift with my friends Andy and Trish, people who I met in Vietnam, also in the party was their friend Rich who was out on a 3 week holiday.

Getting on the road eventually...
And so on Friday afternoon at 3.00 p.m. our journey began. We eventually got out of Perth after a stop at Coles Supermarket for our supplies and to sort out our esky (which was soon to become our must have essential camping item). This was followed by a stop at a camping shop to buy a Billy can and then we were off to Cervantes up Route One. We arrived relatively late but were able to park up for the night at the camp site. It was our first night camping, it was cold, I was eating Chicken noodles but I couldn't have been happier. The night sky was lit up with thousands upon thousands of stars, the great thing about being out of the city is that there is no light pollution to ruin the night sky and there is nowhere better than in outback Australia to see the sky, it’s just covered by an amazing blanket of tiny lights. A totally different perspective to the stars that we see in the Northern Hemisphere.

Day One: Cervantes Caravan Park

We stayed in Cervantes Caravan Park, I gave this place ***3 STARS it had relatively good facilities and an area where we could play cards, which soon became our nightly ritual along with our game Guess The Celebrity(20 questions, yes or no answers only). We set off early the next morning; again this would be a recurring theme to our trip as we had a relatively tight itinerary to stick to. We set off after cereal and being eaten alive by a population of 20 million flies. The Australian flies aren't just irritating, they are infuriating....they try and go up your nose, in your ears, in your eyes and there is no getting away from them unless you wear a fly net over your face, they are totally relentless.

People come to Cervantes to go to The Pinnacles Dessert, a very random series of limestone pillars in a desert setting- it felt like being on some far off planet; I imagine that they are even more eerie at dusk fall or at night. You could turn 360 degrees and be surrounded by these orange pillars as far as the eye could see. The park is quite a size and so we had to drive around it in our van (space buggy it felt like with the strange surroundings). Although they were bizarre, The Pinnacles were strangely hypnotic.

Day Two: Kalbarri

Kalbarri is a beautiful seaside town within a National Park- the park has 1000 sq km of bushland but unfortunately because of our tight schedule we didn’t get to see that much of it. However we did manage to have a walk along the cliff tops, which give you wonderful views out over the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean. We walked out to a point where you could see some sharks but the sharks didn’t want to play that day, something that normally I am happy about!

Kalbarri was eventful for other reasons.....

My Brush With Death

Although we had a campfire stash of food in our boot the appeal of fresh Fish n Chips by the sea was too much for us. We went and had a few beers and then trundled along to the FnC Shop..We ordered and were told to sit outside whilst it was made. After a long journey I was happy to collapse into the plastic chair sat outside the shop.."Ah this is nice" I proclaimed, to which Andy standing in front of me and looking over my should retorted "Marsland you wouldn't be saying that if you could see what I can"..I thought that a group of Aussie scallies were approaching me but as I got up to my horror I realised that a spider had spun down to within an inch of me...Andy edged forward to get a closer look at the beast (as far as I am concerned) and looking back at us stated "Thats a redback that is"...I was currently reading Bill Brysons Down Under book and so had learnt that the main characteristic was the shape of a red hourglass on its back and yes indeed this mightily looked like such a thing. I wasn't over the moon at this revelation, as Bill Bryson puts it "a Redback is death on eight legs".

I promptly exited stage right..running for the nearest hill under the disguise of "I will go and get the chairs out of the van ready for dinner" and apparently the FishnChipmeister came out and nonchantanly observed said spider..."Yep thats a redback alright and he's a juicy fella en all...we'll have to sort that out".

Kalbarri Caravan Park ****FOUR STARS

Four in a Bed

Four of us sleeping in a van actually wasn't as difficult as it sounded; we managed to get into quite a good routine after we had had our last round of Oh Hell! and finished our beakers of red vino. There was a fair amount of room and assembling the beds and sorting out bedding every night soon became second nature. However there was the odd occasion when everyone was all tucked up and someone realised their wash bag was right underneath everything, meaning a bit of bed disruption.

The earlier part of the trip did lure me into a false security that the nights and mornings were going to be a bit chilly-just how people like it if they want to get good nights sleep hey? However things were going to take a dramatic turn for the hot...signpost Burning Inferno- North. My understanding for the reason of this climate change is that we were entering the area of the Tropic of Capricorn. There are two lines equidistant from the equator: Tropic of Capricorn (south) and Tropic of Cancer (north) and these two invisible lines mark the area that is considered the tropics, therefore bringing with them hot and humid weather conditions.

The people up the West Coast used to love it when you remarked about the heat, a wry smile would creep across their face: it was 36 degrees one day and I remarked to a Petrol Station Attendant that it was a hot day. He looked at me incredulously and shaking his head declared ”THIS IS SPRING!..........Last summer, yeah, one day, yeah, it was 50 degrees in the shade and before that we had three days on the run when it didn’t go below 65 degrees but” (Aussies have a strange habit of putting ‘but’ at the end of a sentence, at first I found this difficult to cotton on to-waiting them to tell me what the ‘but’ was) I was a bit sceptical about the last remark.

Day Three: Shark Bay, Monkey Mia

We got up the next morning and headed for Denham, the most westerly town in Australia and Shark Bay, where the first recorded landing of a European on Australian soil took place in 1616, we decided not to stop in Denham but travelled through to Shark Bay. We'd had a long day in the van and I was so ready for a dip in the sea but I only dared to go in up to my knees, as The Lonely Planet states: ‘It’s called Shark Bay for a reason!’

Tensions were running slightly high as we had all had a long day and were eager to get settled into somewhere for the night as it was starting to get dark. We decided that we may as well head up to Monkey Mia (a Dolphin centred resort) some twenty minutes away because it was somewhere where we all wanted to go. It’s so nice to stretch your legs after you have been couped up all day in a campervan and we got there just as the sun was going down so we grabbed VBs (Victoria Bitter) from the Esky and walked along the beach.

Monkey Mia was the biggest disappointment so far, if you are struggling for time travelling up the West Coast this may be something you could consider leaving out. Admittedly you did get to see Dolphins but it is very staged, they come in to receive their early morning feed before a captivated audience and people are picked out at random to feed them. It was just a bit too much Dolphin Disneyland for my liking and with hindsight an extra night in Coral Bay would have been much better spent. But you have to try these things.

Monkey Mia Camp Site: ****FOUR STARS

Day Four: Coral Bay

And so after the Dolphin parade we sped off up the coast, destination: Coral Bay. I had heard really good things about this place from people, so I was eager to see what it was like. We rocked up quite late but still managed to get a spot at a campsite, we had driven 750 km that day and even though the roads are straight you still really need your wits about you, especially when it gets darker (you actually shouldn’t drive through the night) because Kangaroos jump out across the road. Unfortunately we saw so much road kill on our journey, even a cow once which must have got hit by a road train-which power across the country.

Coral Bay was everything I expected and more, a beautiful little sleepy resort- a village more than a town (population 950) sat on a bay with turquoise waters. You only had to go ten metres or so in the sea and you could see some wonderfully coloured fish and coral- even if you were a diver there was very little need to do so-you could see so much from just snorkelling in this place.

We spent two days in Coral Bay, we had been on the move so much that it was just nice to chill out, spend a full day somewhere and not be in the car. I took the opportunity to chill out on the beach, slapping on the Factor 30 every other minute-not loving the no ozone layer above Australia! We also went on a really long walk along the beautiful beach which blew away the cobwebs, someone had mentioned they had seen turtles nesting along this walk- but unfortunately we didn’t get to see them.

Day Six: Coral Bay/Nanatura Roadhouse

On the second day we went out on a snorkelling boat trip. Every day for the last week, Manta Rays had been spotted on the trips and it was quite an operation for the boat-they get a spotter plane out to look for them - apparently this is the best way to identify them. We got to see a couple of Manta Rays, they are very chilled out and laid back creatures and it was cool just to see them float along without a care. They also took us snorkelling to an area known as a Reef Cleaning Station, where we spotted a couple of Reef Sharks.

After our boat trip we had to rush back to the campsite to set off before it got dark, we had left our campervans keys with the lovely couple from next door- Pat and Betty as our battery had run down and Pat had very kindly said he would sort it out for us. I did consider the prospect for a minute that Pat may be halfway to Broome in the campervan but then I couldn’t really see, Grandfather of seven and pushing 70 Pat flying down the freeway in a campervan which said ‘Honk if your not wearing underpants’. Truly he was such a nice guy obviously this was never going to be a real concern!

And so we set off again, our destination for the night: Nanatura Roadhouse. And so very exciting for me we were actually going to park up in a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere for the night-I sensed ADVENTURE. I think I have mentioned before I am somewhat fascinated by Roadhouses, I appreciate that they are not overly interesting places but it is the fact that they are the only thing for miles and miles-highlighting how remote this land can be. I think Roadhouses are almost romantic places- obviously I wouldn’t want to be taken on a date to one but I mean more due to their isolated blot on the landscape status.

We rocked up and grabbed a drink outside watching the road trains roll by, it was seven o’clock in the evening yet the temperature was still mid thirties...it was like desert heat with a hot wind to boot. We were met with a proper road house sight- a bunch of truckers all sat round a table with their long beards and big bellies, all chewing the cud over a tinny. As there was very little light to cook we decided to sample the culinary delights that the roadhouse had to offer...when in roadhouses, do as the truckers do. NB I have just realised as I am writing this that I do refer to the dining experience a fair amount, apologies to all those none foodies...

Nanatura Roadhouse *** THREE STARS

Day Seven: Broome

We set off first thing (5 a.m.) and I sat up front with Rich whilst we let Trish and Andy sleep. We had a massive drive ahead of us: some 1082 km to be exact. We ended up tired and relieved to be in Broome. Fortunately Trev (see Life on the Road Blog) broke up the journey for us-what a star he was.

Broome was our first stop in the area known as The Kimberley’s, one of Australia’s final frontiers. The area is home to dramatic climate change and beautiful landscapes and really represents the road less travelled. Broome was once famous for its pearling industry which peaked in the 1900’s when at the time it supplied 80% of the worlds Mother of Pearl. The pearls were mainly used for buttons but the industry took a sudden nose dive in the event of plastic buttons and today only a handful of boats actually operate.

Broome was really hot. On our first night I woke up at 6.30 a.m. and I think that I must have had a bad dream : coupled with the fact that I felt like I had fallen asleep in a Turkish bath it was so excruciatingly hot, there was even condensation dripping off the inside of the van on to us- it was hideous.

There is a lovely beach at Broome but unfortunately at that time of year there is also a high population of Box Jellyfish and so you can’t swim there unless you are prepared to risk your life for a dip in the ocean. We stayed at Cable beach Campsite, it was a family run affair and both the facilities and the people were lovely. Broome was a relatively nice town, there was a fair amount of aborigines that seemed to be aimlessly roaming the street, this sight was sadly more and more evident as we travelled further north of this area.

Cable Beach Camp Site ****FOUR STARS

To be continued...

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