Advertisement
Published: March 30th 2007
Edit Blog Post
So... not had chance to update for a while have been doing a fair bit of driving and been quite remote places.
Since last update with drove from Exmouth to Port Hedland which is really just an industrial type town lots of road trains, trains and miners! It had also recently been hit by a bad cyclone so were lots of trees down and floods.
From Port Hedland we were advised to go straight to Broome..about 7 hour drive as there is nothing really in-between. Broome was a really nice place first proper town for a while, had a china town, amazing beech which was stayed near called cable beech (although has a lot of stingers in water... if go swimming advised to have 2 litres of vinegar with you in case) the beach is miles long of white sand! Also had an impressive Chinese graveyard there for all the Chinese who died around 1889, they were hit by a cyclone while searching for Pearls which the area is famous for. While in Broome Elton got a bit screechy so took him to garage and had to have two new belts put on.. Complained to wicked and they
paid for a room for the night and 15% off our next camper vans. We stayed in Broome for 3 nights and then moved on due to a cyclone about to hit a little south but they said may cause road closures due to flooding.
From Broome we planned to go to Derby about 3 hours away but go there to find loads of drunken Aborigines and a run down town with not much to do (not what the brochure said!!!) We then thought we would travel to a place called Fitzroy crossing (against the advise of an English bloke we met who said it was another shit hole, but we needed to head that way) we got there and filled up with petrol and the man at the garage said if we did not leave now we could get stuck there for up to 3 weeks due to a flood heading towards town. So we set off again another 3 hours down the road to Halls Creek, the drive was interesting... due to clocks going back it had become dark earlier than we thought and there was a massive thunder storm...(Chris was scared)...the dark is a problem over
here because of the amount of animals around the roads (Cows, Kangaroos, sheep, goats, snakes, lizards) and if you hit a cow or kangaroo as you can imagine it causes a lot of damage! We finally arrived at Halls Creek to find a scene similar to Croydon loads of drunken abbo's screaming and shouting... we opted for a motel room that night!
We left early the next morning to go to Kununurra. The drive there was amazing through mountains (the Kimberley’s) saw waterfalls, eagles, and generally amazing scenery. It is quite surprising these small towns are so run down when they are in such amazing places... it seems a lot of people complain that the aboriginal people are not really helping themselves they just sit around getting drunk, beg and are generally be a pain. (That is obviously not all of them just a selection). We also hit a few flooded roads of the route, one particularly bad bit where we stopped for a while with a couple of French (fit) girls who were also not sure if they would make it through... after a while a bloke with a 4 x 4 came passed and stopped and said
if we go for it he would push us through if we got stuck, luckily little Elton just made it through and so did the French girls who stayed with us for rest of journey in case we hit any more flooded roads.
So we are now in Kununurra which is a really nice town, think we will be here for about 4 nights. Yesterday we went to a Zebra Rock gallery which mines this zebra rock which is the only place in the world that has it (if not guessed the rock has zebra stripes in it). The place is on the main river Ord, and they have a jetty which you can walk out on and feed the Catfish in the River which there are literally hundreds and also a couple of Turtles. We also saw a few Crocs swimming in the water! They were only 'Freshies' which the locals say are ok to swim with (we are not trusting that) there are also Saltwater ones around which are the dangerous ones! We were planning on hiring a 4 x 4 for a couple of days and going into the mountains but due to the bad weather
we are not able to so will have to do that when we go to Kakadu National Park.... next few days we are hoping to go canoeing on the river to see more crocs closer up!!
Will hopefully give you an update early next week when we are in Katherine (first stop in the Northern Territory).
Hope everyone is ok... and have a good day at work, we are about to go relax for afternoon by swimming pool!
Chris and Mel
xx
Advertisement
Tot: 0.136s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 12; qc: 61; dbt: 0.0582s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Srinivas
non-member comment
Hi from India
Chris, I want to do the same travel in Western Australia....I want to do camping and hiking trip....for about 4 to 6 months (really long term)... Can you share your camping experiences in Western Australia??