Northern Territory Pubs (12th&13th Nov)

Traveling down through the Northern Territory was amazing. We didn't get up to Darwin unfortunately, needed to find work, and since we were generally too late for fruit picking, we were heading back to sheep country.
Some of the places we found were amazing though. In Kataramku we found a place called Bitter Spring. This tiny little place was actually one of the highlights of my trip. The hot springs in Aus (actually only saw any in NT) weren't caused by underground volcanic activity, as the ones in NZ, but by the sheer heat and ground temperature.
Bitter Spring was a whole stream/creek/spring that was bath temp warm. The idea here was you start in this gorgeously warm pool and float down stream. Ever so relaxing, and then I tried it with my snorkel. The result was utterly breath-taking. To start with, the water was a clear, pristine, turquoise blue. And it turned out to be at least 15ft deep, and so beautiful, like an under water jungle or another world. There were fallen trees and so much green: underwater plants everywhere, vines, algae like mosses. So green, so magical, like a fairy world, everything just waving gently in the current without a sound. The banks in shadow, so much colder that the main flow but if you were lucky, hiding fresh water turtles, which were beautiful, such incredible movement. Amazing way to spend the morning.

And the pubs in the afternoon. Firstly Larrimah Wayside Inn, or as I like to think of it, The Pink Panther Pub, possibly due to the massive pink panther out front. The pub itself had a bar area about the size of the bar top. Drinks were not intended to be drunk inside. Through a little door, a room full of snakes, in tanks of course, but many snakes. Then a whole zoo with sleepy wallabies, angry emus, talking parrots and really crazy crocodiles. Little crocodiles that kept attacking the fence of the enclosure, but was a bit camera shy, and a parrot that wanted a cup of tea. Awesome.

Then on to the pub in Daly Waters which appeared in the book: 

"A sign out front says 'Angle Parking, Any Angle.' A set of traffic lights blinks in the dust. Inside a blackboard offers Toe Stead Samiges. Overhead, a line of g-strings hangs above the bar. Since 1893 the Daly Waters Pub has been humoring drovers, telegraph linesmen and even airmen from Quantas. Nowadays, tourists do most of the re-fueling, but please don't fall for the one-hole-golf-course trick."

What it fails to say is that this pub is about the entire town- the campsite, fuel station, post office, everything. And inside, yes a row of g-strings hang above the bar, according to a rule on the pool table underwear is donated if you get 7-balled during a game. Then there's the I.D's that cover every available surface of the bar, so many you now have to donate money to add yours. Currency of all types adorn the walls along with rows and rows of sports jerseys. Every available space is filled with something. Even the beer garden is filled with flip-flops/thongs.
Then there's the clientele. If the guy I
worked for in NSW thought shearers
were a 'rough lot', god help him if he
ever met ringers- the guys who work
in the cattle yards.
Our experiences in Daly Waters were
memorable. Jack Daniels. Shot guns.
Airstrips. Car crashes. Stitches. Blood
& Orange Juice. Experiences to be
lived not told. Between us we left with
 a fractured hip and 2 stitches above the eye.

Katherine (9-12th Nov)

And so the Northern Territory stole my heart. After the bareness of WA, it was so alive! Trees, and so much water. We drove towards the rain. The smell of dust; of musty, wet, eucalyptus. So fresh. Petrichor. That beautiful smell of dust after rain.
And when the rain caught us, it was so sudden, so hard. A down pour would last less than a minute, drop the temperature by more than 12'C and all trace would vanish almost instantly in the heat.

The rivers, so huge and full, and, after so much desert and heat: utterly amazing!- lined with their bottle-shaped trees, so shaped I imagine to store water. Rivers, running through gorges and canyons as we crossed the Kimberly's!


And we arrived in Katherine, to a campsite with a pool, and a river, on the banks of which I will always kid myself that there were crocodile tracks. Either way it was beautiful.

It was still incredibly hot though, but less suffocating than in WA.
Hadn't quite hit the rainy season but the storms were coming and I guess clearing the air as they came.
Even so, a lot of time was spent in the pool, even through the rain and the storms and the lightning, well not so much the lightning when the storm broke overhead. It was quite fantastic to be back at a campsite, especially as Katherine is inland, so no sea to cool off in. The pool was heaven! And so lovely in the rain. Warm from the sunlight, pelted with cold rain. So much rain... and so many bats. So many hundreds and thousands of them flying over the tent every evening. The first time I'd seen a colony of bats. Like a flock of birds going to roost!

Being on the riverside was great, perfect for chilling out, and in Casey's case, fishing. Being at a campsite, not just stuck with someone who can't stand fish, he also had people to share his catch with. His catch in this case being a huge Barramundi... cooked up 'nicely' and consumed with many a bottle of wine.

Company at the little tenting section at the back of the campsite were many European travelers and workers, and an Aussie family who seemed to spend their life on the road. Fun Times!

The days spent around Katherine were incredible too- Katherine Gorge and Edith Falls!

Katherine Gorge was amazing. A long, hot walk to the top, and then the view- the view was just spectacular. So impossible to convey the sheer scale of it. Pictures just really can't capture it. If I ever return I want to kayak up the gorge. The height of the cliffs is just incredible.
Thank you tourist boat that got into my pictures. It does do something of an attempt at giving some idea of the sheer scale... and then the long walk back down to the river.
This is about where I should note that there were crocodile warnings along the river, and crocodile cages. So I of course went for a nice, refreshing dip when we got back down. Unfortunately the gorge would have been a little far to swim. (It was a safe place to swim- croc restriction measures).

Now Edith Falls was beautiful. Not quite in the spectacular sense of the gorge, but as the true beauty of nature. It was a long, winding hike up. So hot, but the air was clearer, less humid after the storms. The walk goes up into the bush, giving glimpses of the river; occasional falls; Aboriginal stone pilings; then what I guess is the accumulation of the walk: the pools at the top of the falls. So serene and quiet in the heart of nature, away from everything and everyone. The most relaxing place to just stop and float. Breathtakingly beautiful in my opinion.
And the loop walk continues it's meandering way down the other side.

Northern WA- So Much Heat! (3rd-9th Nov)

It was hot! Nothing more to say.
Really I don't have much to say about this section of our trip. The towns North of Carnarvon have very little appeal, at least to me. Broome has something of a tourist trade but for me it was too hot and barely had an interesting aspect at all, not to mention lacking in anywhere that suited us to stay.
All we could really do was read, swim and shower, with the occasional shelter in a pub, in the hope of being somewhere near the air con. It was too hot to do anything else- up to 42' by 9am and as high as 48'. So humid too.
The sea didn't even have the crystal blue appeal it had further South. There was also a higher possibility of it hiding dangerous things. The heat was incapacitating.

The only things of real beauty were the landscape and the storms. Driving up we saw lightning storms. A red light in the sky at night, and the burnt smell of the effects as we drove on the morning. Sleeping was difficult. Too hot. Even when we set up the tent, the heat would escape from the ground in the evening and turn the tent into a sauna.

The landscape was amazing though. We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn (accounting for the heat) and skirted the Great Sandy Desert. So flat, barren and sun scorched. I tried to describe it as we drove along....

'It's hard to describe, this arid, scorched landscape. So empty of life yet full of it. In the heat of day nothing stirs, save for a whirlwind of dust, like a thin plume of smoke against the clear blue sky. You wander if it is smoke, so common is that too.

Flat. AS far as the eye can see and yet the straight roads seem to end at a crest which never comes. And you continue, and the landscape evolves, but never seems to change.

The soil is always red. Baked red, burnt. And there's grass; yellow, dry, brittle. Tinder. Now it's charred and patchy. Tufts which have held on, survived. Red earth shows. Shrubs, no higher than a man, sparse and stripped of leaves.

You look away. The grass is longer, like a yellow crop waiting for the harvest. Shrubs are bushier, greener, denser. A few trees spring up; slim, silver trunks. A small green canopy, like a prairie top.

The corner turns. There is nothing: scrubby grass, soil. Nothing blocks the view to a ridge of hills, hazy blue, fading far into the distance.

Grass gets greener, but never green. Trees spring up. Tall, thin, green.

Scorched black; the ground; the tree trunks. Small patches of yellow grass creep back in, surviving, barely clinging on. The leaves; dried yellow, fallen on black ash ground, yet to be whisped away in a gust of wind. A whirlwind? Smoke? The smell of fire.

And everywhere termite mounds. Sometimes few, sometimes many, like a herd of animals roaming into the distance. Silent, unmoving, turned to earth. All red earth. Small and skinny, like wallabies in the bush. Tall and skinny. Or bulbous, like a nightmare. The Elephant Man.

Suddenly a rock, dropped in the middle of nowhere, only as you draw nearer, it's more like a mountain. It towers above you, alone; no gently sloping foothills, no gradually steepening gradients, no accompanying mountain range. It's just there. A jagged rock out crop, dropped without president in the middle of nowhere: red, vegetationless, beautifully beautiful, bare to the elements.

You blink. It's all changed again. A hawk circles.'

Hippy Camp Carnavon (26th Oct- 3rd Nov)

The 26th-29th took us from Pemberton to Carnarvon, a journey of hundreds of kilometers, travelling from a latitude of 32'S to 24.5'S, but barely a blip on a map of Australia!

Our journey took us to Perth for a couple of days, where we stayed in Secret Harbour, a very rich area, almost impossible to find on the map. Where I got to drive a $250,000 Lexus, which has to be one of the smoothest things ever to drive; and to a water park which I found somewhat surreal. I've never been to a proper waterpark before. The UK is just too cold for that sort of thing. It was like going to a theme park, but everyone just wanders around in bikinis and swimwear, just sunbathing and having picnics where ever they fancied. It was a brilliant day though; water slide, after water slide, after swimming pool, after water slide. So much fun, and wandering around wearing nothing but swimwear wasn't so bad after a while.

Journeying north, the scenery starts to change again.Gone is any hint of the forests of the south, replaced by the stereotypical depiction of Australia; hot, sun-scorched, desert... well almost. That really hit in the north, this far south (despite the enormously long drives we were still only about halfway up the west coast) it was still deciding what it wanted to do.

You would get endless kilometers of coastal shrubs, still very green but no trees or anything growing very high. Interspersed with this you get sand dunes, just rising out of the green, until the sand becomes the dominant feature. As the landscape evolved it became nothing but sand again.
You could drive for hours seeing nothing but sand and scrub, and goats, and scrawny cows, just wandering where ever they wanted, so it seemed. These small herds, just sheltering under the poor excuses for trees at the sides of the road were small parts of much bigger herds, spread out over thousands of acres! Some were Western breeds, the type I was used to seeing back home. I definitely saw a few wandering herds of Herefords. Then others were more hump-backed, like you would associate with Africa or India, typically hot places.

Now I'm really not doing a brilliant job of describing this experience. Imagine driving for hours. Straight, sandy roads, burning heat. I was travelling in little more than a bikini by this point. It was too hot for anything else.
We could drive drive for 8hrs a day and barely make it anywhere, on the map or in terms of finding anywhere interesting. All you're seeing by this point is barren scrub-land. The towns, even just a day north of Perth are generally tiny, little more than roadhouses. There's really nothing to see. We stopped over night in Geraldtown which was an actual town, but didn't find much there. By the time we reached Carnavon it was just dry. Dusty, sand-filled riverbeds, which they raced cars on; salt lakes and nothingness!



The place I really want to tell you about is the reason I would chose the West coast over the East coast. It may be obvious by now that I'm not so interested in the big touristy attractions like those the East coast is associated with but finding little gems like this one (and Esperance) just make the West all the more incredible in my opinion...


Just north of Carnavon there is a brown (place of interest) road sign that reads 'Blow holes', by 'just north' I do mean 50-80km, I forget exactly how far. Being of a meandering, exploratory mind, we followed it. It did lead on much further but we stopped at the blow holes, and upon reaching them, found a campsite.
Well campsite is a bit of a stretch of the imagination. In the middle of the sand dunes there were, what I can only describe as a collection of old fisherman's
 huts; corrugated tin huts, a bit
ramshackle and falling down.

And in amongst these huts there was a whole community living; some in the huts, some in campervans, some in tents, even a couple in a bus, just living here for months on end. With stalls selling books, jewellery and other random things, with the occasional traveler stumbling across them.



The situation of this little community couldn't have been more amazing. On the edge of a reef at the north end of Shark Bay (a fact which worried my mother). The reef formed a natural wall, safe guarding a small(ish) lagoon where there were sometimes dugongs and sea turtles but always tropical
reef fish. Calm water and beautiful white
 sand beaches really did make this place
 feel like paradise.


The blow holes themselves, just a little way from camp, out of the lagooned area, were like geysers of sea water, forced through holes in the rocks by incredibly strong and dangerous waves. Fishing up here not recommended as King Waves could easily sweep you off the rocks









Needless to say my days here were spent exploring rocks, getting doused in sea spray; snorkeling on tropical reefs; combing the beaches for bright and beautiful shells; BBQing and drinking beer with hippies; and even borrowing a paddle board to take out on the lagoon! So relaxed and beautiful.

Fantastic place! the only down side was the hour drive back into town every time we needed to replenish the ice in the Esky!

South WA, Home of the Giant Trees (23-26th October)

West of Esperance we soon started hitting some beautiful forests. The driving was spectacular. So different to further East; green and winding, hilly, interesting and constantly lined with trees.
We were heading to the 'town' of Pemberton at my request, not only because it shares it's name with a Welsh chocolate company, but also because of an interesting entry in the book, but more on that later. I put town in inverted commas because even if a place is big enough to make it onto the map out here, it's barely big enough to be counted as a village in the UK.

Heading to Pemberton was a more indirect route to Perth, where we had at some point decided we were going, but it took a more interesting route, following more of the coast line. Unfortunately though it wasn't long before we had car trouble... again. One of the biggest problems out there is that if you make it to the next town, you're lucky. If they have the part you need you are very very lucky, and in Walpole they had every type of fuel pump except the one we needed! And so we had another stop while we waited for it to come!
Fortunately the towns around there are beautiful and interesting. They made me think of Scandinavian chalet towns (not that I've actually been to any) but they had pretty, wooden houses set in the middle of forests in a hilly area. Beautiful.

Walpole was home to the Forest of Giants: absolutely huge gum trees; Karri gums and Red gums mainly, over 70m tall.




And when we finally reached Pemberton, we set out on my quest to find the Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree:

"A total of 130 steel bars (your rungs) and an eyrie of four ladders give you a view above the canopy to die for... or so it feels."

Somehow that description wasn't enough to prepare me. So obsessed with health and safety procedures are we in the UK that the lack of them there was almost unsettling.
This tree is in the middle of nowhere, in a National Park but not a manned park. No rangers. We were completely alone. The metal bars were just that, protruding from the tree trunk, sometimes wobbling.

Sometimes the height between them were as high as my knees, with gaps big enough for me to slip through, and nothing to stop me doing so... all the way to the floor.



A mesh fence, like that which you'd put around a field ran around the outside of the rungs to stop you toppling off sideways, but that is all the safety you get. That and a small wooden platform halfway up.



Thankfully the eyrie at the top, over 100m up, is completely enclosed so you're safe there at least,once you've finally got your breath back from the completely vertical climb. Terrifying and completely exhilarating, especially swaying in the canopy of such a huge tree, looking over a sea of green in every direction about 75m up.

We camped in the forest outside of Pemberton that night. It was one of the few places in WA where parking up and camping is actually allowed. We did a lot of illegal camping in WA. South Australia allows roadside camping a lot more, as does Queensland.

Anyway. it was the last night before the summer fire ban so we set up our little tent (purchased in Esperance), built our little fire and settled down for a couple of beers.

There was another climbable tree in the centre of Pemberton, but our explorations took us out for a walk in Beedleup National Park, where I had heard of another tree, this one with an arch through it. We did have a beautiful walk through the forest but I was quite disappointed. When I heard archway through a tree, I imagined the Californian Redwoods, which you can literally drive cars through. This is what I got, fun but not quite the same.


And thus ended our South West corner adventures. We were on our way north for a brief stop in Perth.

 (Denmark, Western Australia)