Days 3 - 6

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We woke up early on Monday morning and headed into town to pick up our “Chubby Camper” van that is ironically named “Sandman” (you’ll find out why it’s ironic later). We checked out of the hostel and, after some help from an Australian that “used to be a Pom”, we hit the “Brand Highway”. Calling it a highway is quite deceptive as it really is just two lanes long with overtaking lanes every 20km or so. We also passed loads of road trains and they are seriously scary! They make our little camper shake like crazy; they are the biggest trucks I have ever seen and they can be up to 36 metres long! We were on this road for 400km and it is just the most crazy, long straight road with hardly any passing cars and miles and miles of land as far as the eye can see. Driving along you can see why they need road trains - there can be no towns or roadhouses for miles and miles, they will drive from the likes of Perth to Darwin and drop off their goods along the way. As we drove you could see the landscape change as we were coming in closer to the coast, it became less arid and more luscious, but still nothing like anything you would see in the UK; even though it gets greener and you see more plants, you can still tell that those plants are made for hot weather. Along the road, just on the outskirts of town, there were leaning trees - some of which were bent at almost 90 degrees, they were really odd looking but apparently they occur due to salt winds that cause them to bend. At this point we were closer to the coast then we were going to be for a long time. After driving the whole length of the highway, stopping only for lunch, we arrived in the second biggest town in Western Australia (WA - the Western Australians have really big state affiliation, they advertise all their products as “made in WA” and there are posters all over the place and radio ads promoting Western Australia and advising citizens how they can make their state better and stuff; when we were in the doctors surgery there was a sign up about how trainee doctors may be onsite but that this will improve WAs medical care so please could we bare with them and stuff like this. We have a theory that WA may very well be Australia’s version of Texas and the deep south; it is the biggest state and the least populated, because of this we think they feel isolated from the rest of the country and we feel they are culturally different (but obviously it is all a theory at the moment, we shall see when we get to the east coast how true it is) many of the inhabitants may never leave WA in their lifetime and they have this weird state affiliation like the confederates. We get the feeling that everything is a bit more cosmopolitan on the East coast and they are actually aware that the rest of the world exists - Normal rugby is not actually televised in WA; they are only interested in “Ozzy rules” - Australia played NZ last week and it wasn’t on telly here) Geraldton later that evening - we covered 420km in 5hrs! -we stopped at a caravan park named “African Reef”, headed to Woolworths, the supermarket (the main stores here are “Woolworths”, “Coles” and “Big W”), and bought some ice and food for dinner. It was here we discovered that our Esky was broken. Uh oh. We don’t have a fridge on the camper so if we are going to get away with living it cheap and cooking ourselves every night then the Esky is a MUST. Luckily, when we called the company the next morning they were fine about it and told us to buy another one, and they would refund the difference when we delivered the camper back to Darwin. So again we set off but this time we were driving along the North West Coastal Highway and again it was the same kind of views, long straight roads, with red soil, and bushes along side us. Only this time there were less cars. We were headed for Monkey Mia which we had heard was great but it was 150km off the highway but we decided to go for it. We left the last road house on the highway full with petrol and hit what is essentially an A road (although it is barely different from the highway - it just doesn’t have the random overtaking lanes) and I started to feel sick. I held it in for as long as I possibly could and Andy was trying to push to get us to the next road house but it just wasn’t happening and so we had to pull over. I had said “I’m really not feeling great but I can last longer but the next time I speak it means we have no time left” so when I spoke Andy pulled over but unfortunately, in his haste to get me to a safe spot to be sick, we drove into soft sand on a verge and got stuck! Andy was not impressed to say the least but all I could do was jump out of the car. We tried to push “sandman” out of the sand but it wasn’t working, we were in deep. So we were in the middle of nowhere, in the baking sunshine kilometres from anywhere and well and truly stuck. Luckily, about 5 minutes later, a 4x4 came over the hill so we flagged it down. This really nice Australian woman tried to help us out, she couldn’t tow us as it was a work car and so she wasn’t insured but she helped us dig around the wheel with a shovel and gave us this cool little instrument that let some of the air out of the tires to git it more traction. We were so close so many times so in the end she just towed us anyway. So, drama over, we were on our way again and I was feeling much better - not that I could have said anything if I wasn’t! We got to Monkey Mia and it really was lovely. It was a really busy campsite and we almost didn’t get a spot (it is THE only thing in the area, no one lives there, everyone lives in a town called Denham which is about 25km away) but we did so we ate dinner and then had a couple of beers over looking the bay watching the sun go down. The next morning we had to get up at 7.30 to see the dolphins (the highlight of Monkey Mia) and they were AMAZING! Since the 70s dolphins have been coming into shore and at first the tourists used to feed them whenever they wanted and whatever the wanted - chips and all sorts. So as the years went on the dolphins were dying out in the area as the mums were not teaching their calves to hunt for themselves and they were relying on the tourists to feed them which obviously isn’t good. So now what they do is have controlled feeds in the morning, there are three a day but they first feed in guaranteed; after that it is up to the dolphins whether or not they come into shore. So we walked down to the beach at 7.30am and there were about 50 people all along a small section of the shore line, as we got closer we could see the dolphins and they were awesome - if you stand in the water calf deep they are about 1.5m away from you, they come up sooooooo close! At first there were about 4 but then as time went on it got up to about 7 or 8. Two women came out and were talking about the dolphins for half an hour, talking about their environment and age and how they live etc. etc. and then at 8am they were fed. Random people were picked from the crowd (we weren’t one of them) and given a fish to hand feed a dolphin but they al kept swimming up and down and jumping in and out of the water and they were total posers swimming alongside us allowing us to film them and take pictures. It really was worth the extra 300k driving, and a stint stuck in the sand! As the dolphins arrived so early we were on the road by half eight and we had intended to drive to a town called Carnarvon and stop there for the night, but we were doing to well we decided to continue on to Coral Bay. Coral Bay was lovely, the sea was lovely and warm and we had a great night there with other travellers. It was really packed so they put us into an overflow area; we were the first to arrive but it soon filled up with about 15 other hired travelling vans (they are all over the country from various different companies but we always give each other a wave!). We were talking to a group in the car next to us when two Germans (the two Joes) that were ridiculously drunk just randomly started talking to us. It is obviously not funny if you weren’t there so I won’t go into details but they were the best entertainment - telling us all about the chicken farms they had been working on and all sort of random funniness. After a night of merriment and fun we set off in the morning for our final destination of our first leg of the journey and arrived 150km down the road, 1700km from our set off point and in just 3 days (at one point we did 720km in 24hours), at Exmouth - pronounced by the Ozzies as ex mouth. As it was only noon we were able to set up camp properly, we even managed to work out our gazebo eventually, and we just chilled out for the night ready for an early start on our PADI dive course!

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Comments

[yvonne swallow]

your trip
It's lovely to read your adventures. Feel we are there with you if only!