Time for a bit of culture after all that time in Asia, so it's off to Oceania. Sounds posh doesn't it? Turns out to be Western Aus. We drove around a lot and did a bit of diving.
The flight from Singapore was uneventful (as these things should be) except for dramatic views of Shark Bay and most of the West coast of Australia. We planned to drive up the coast later so flying down it made us realise what we were in for. Gazing down at pristine white coral beaches and interminably long, straight roads, we flew on down to Perth where where it all turned to cloud, wind and rain at the last minute - it's mid-Winter here.
We managed to last 2 days in Perth before we'd had enough of the British weather. We visited "picturesque Freemantle", which was like Scarborough on a wet November weekend. We knew when we were organising this trip that it would be Winter down here, but we'd not taken into account the effect of 3 months in the tropics. We were cold. We knew it was nicer "up North" (isn't it always?) so we hired a car and started driving. 460km later, we're in Geraldton and it's still cold and wet.Another 200km and the sun came out so we stopped at Kalbarri!
Kalbarri claims 350 days' sunshine per year which is good enough. The town sits on a dramatic coastline with rugged, red sandstone cliffs for miles and surrounded by a 186,000 hectare National Park (sounds big!). The park makes for some dramatic walking, following the Murchison River as it carves red and white banded gorges through the sandstone. This is the only place where you can see the so called Tumblagooda Sandstone i.e. red and white stripes like a marble cake. A very impressive sight - it looks like those novelty bottles of stripy sand.
The access road to the park consists of 26km of gravel, which is entertaining in a hired Hyundai compact; especially when everyone else has massive 4wd monsters. The park ranger had assured us that we would make it though and we did, although it's a little embarrassing when you have to park between a couple of trucks that look like they belong in Robot Wars. This is outback and walking in the scrub is hot and dusty work. The desert sun is relentless and there's little shade but it's good to be out in the open. We'd missed the sense of space which we'd last had in Siberia back in April (brrr). As in Mongolia, the skies are enormous and a very deep blue. Turns out that the desert is in bloom at this time of year so it's not quite as desolate as it might be.
No monkeys here but you can interact with dolphins [whatever that is supposed to mean]. This place is another day's drive North of Kalbarri and there's a dolphin research station here. A few of the dolphins seem to like visiting the beach each day (wonder if it's anything to do with the fact they get fed by the rangers). Quite a business has sprung up here parting tourists with their dollars. You get to stand in knee deep [cold] water whilst a dolphin or two swim around you showing off. Not worth the drive we'd say as you have to take a 100km detour out on to a peninsula to get there. We did stop at a place called Hamelin Pool on the way to see the Stromatolites. These critters are 1900 million years old and were one of the first building blocks of life. For some reason, they're still alive and well and living by the old telegraph station at Hamelin. They don't do much though, they just seem to sit around in the shallow sea water doing passable imitations of rocks.
Next up was a mammoth 700km drive to Exmouth up in the North West corner of Western Aus, the most Westerly point in Australia and also the furthest point North we'd be driving. We'd now driven 12 deg of latitude North and were back in the tropics - there was even a sign at the side of the road "Tropic of Capricorn". Although it's Winter, days are very hot, sunny and cloudless. Feels about 28 deg C. The entire peninsula up to Exmouth is fringed by the Ningaloo Reef which is reckoned to rival the Great Barrier Reef. As such, we thought we should take a look so we booked 2 days' diving. In the end we cancelled the second day as the first was so unimpressive. If this is as good as the "Great" Barrier Reef gets, we'll not even bother getting wet over there. You could see about 5m under water and we saw a couple of blue spotted rays, two turtles, one reef shark and a wobegong. Not a bad tally under normal circumstances but the water's cold, the visibility rubbish and there's hardly any coral. Even the Red Sea is still better than this. It's certainly not worth trekking all the way up to Exmouth just to dive.
In addition to Ningaloo just off shore, there's also the Cape Range National Park and we spent a couple of days hiking the canyons. Or call it trudging through scrub in the dusty heat, depending on your point of view.
The entire North West is red. It seems that the whole of this area is composed of iron ore. So, with the ground 67% iron, the land literally rusts. It's bright red especially at sunrise. It's also extremely lucrative to the Hammersley Mining Company (now Rio Tinto) which has huge open cast mines here right on the edge of the Karijini National Park.
We drove the 600 km inland to the rather amusingly named town of Tom Price (Mr Price spent years researching the feasibility of mining the ore but died without seeing his dream come true). Here we took a tour of one of the mines and saw those massive trucks that made Tonka Toys a fortune. The tyres on the dump trucks are 3.8m diameter and cost about £10000 each.
The reason for coming out into the back of beyond was to visit the Karijini National Park. Tom Price is a mere 100km from the park which is deemed convenient in this part of the World. The part of the park we wanted to see was 46km up a dirt track so the poor Hyundai took a pounding yet again. The scenery is spectacular and some of the walks would not be allowed in Britain. We ended up climbing down a knotted rope to get to Handrail Pool (the handrail doesn't reach all the way down, hence the rope). We also went down one gorge which was so narrow and flowing with water that you had to brace one foot against each side of the gorge to keep from falling into the cascading water! Karijini is a spectacular park - again everything is rusty red and very dry and dusty.
We'd run out of time in the North and had to return South to the poor weather for a few days.
We blasted 1800km from Tom Price down to Albany in 2 days of relentless driving; stopping en route only to photograph emus and to sleep in the almost deserted and curiously named ex-gold rush town of Mt Magnet. We had a week left before our Perth-Darwin flight and wanted to see some of the area South of Perth. This is the area the first settlers saw when they arrived in WA. In contrast to the rusty desert landscape up North, this area is very reminiscent of England. Rolling pastures, black and white cows, trees and rain. Bet when they settled, they had no idea they'd landed in virtually the only hospitable part of the country!
Arriving in Albany, we checked into Albany Backpackers where you get free Internet access and chocolate cake. What more could a person possibly need? We'd come to Albany to see if we could dive and we could, so we did. Albany's a great little town with an impressive granite peninsula which made for some good walking and scrambling over cliffs. There's a huge 21MW wind farm which supplies all the electricity for downtown Albany which is quite an achievement and tells a little about the climate.
Over the next few days we meandered North from Albany towards Perth aiming to be back for our Sunday morning flight to Darwin. We followed the coast past Augusta which is the most south-westerly point in Australia (that's 2 corners down and 2 to go). This is wine country and we thought we'd visit at least one vineyard and see how all that New World plonk is produced. However, all the trips to wineries are simply bus around as many as you can in a day "sampling" as much as possible. There's hardly anything about how the actual process works so we didn't bother.
Surf's up along these beaches and there's reputed to be some mighty big rollers coming in off the Indian Ocean but we knew how cold it was from the diving! The coastline is spectacular and is well provided with walking trails.
All that remains is to return the hire car which we've had for 3 weeks and see if they try and slaughter us for taking it off road. We don't think there's any damage but it seems to be full of red sand which is a bit incriminating.
The state of Western Australia (WA) covers some 2 million square kilometres which is really quite huge. There's about 1.5 million people living here and about 1.2 million of them live in Perth. So there's not a great number of people to be found. We discovered whilst driving up and down WA that it consists of vast tracts of emptiness punctuated by the occasional collection of hardly anything. One stretch of road across the Nullarbor desert runs perfectly straight for 146km - not even a bend!
We got used to planning our driving by the distance to the next road house. Generally, these places offer fuel (for vehicle and driver) plus beds/showers (free for truckers). They seem to be placed strategically where the towns are inconsiderately far apart and not drivable on one tank. These places are shut at night which is OK as you'd be mad to drive after dusk anyway. Why? The wildlife is largely nocturnal - read on.
Many of the roads are so featureless, the only way to tell you're moving is by the dead kangaroos passing the windows. Generally, there'd be a dead kangaroo or emu every few hundred yards. You can spot them in the distance by the crows hopping about on the road accompanied by a solitary eagle. Always the same crowd hanging around the carcass and always they leave it until the last minute to hop casually to the road side as you barrel past. The road-kill we're used to (hedgehog and rabbit) is replaced by kangaroo and emu. Inevitably enough, the roadhouses [petrol stations] sell road-kill rather like the UK has pork scratchings or hedgehog crisps.
Covering huge distances by car, we soon grew accustomed to the sight of the infamous Australian road train bearing down on us. These behemoths have huge bonnets and cabs, just like the American trucks, but they are pulling not one, not two nor even three, but four articulated trailers. They travel at a huge rate of knots and stop for nothing. Witness the number of dead kangaroos lying by the roadside. Kangaroos are big and there are not many things which could hit one and come out unscathed. These trucks do! It takes some nerve to try and overtake one. Those pulling three tankers of petrol are particularly scary. Chatting with one Road Train driver, he said you would hear a kangaroo impact but not feel it. In one truck-stop we saw a poster for "Doug's Tugs" which is a road train haulage specialist. They had put together a road train over 1km long and driven it for 8km to claim some kind of record. After a while you start to feel sorry for the normal articulated lorry drivers. They must feel so inadequate with only one trailer.