Oct 2008

As Kununurra is where I left the last blog entry I guess it makes sense to start this one there as well…

There’s isn’t much to Kununurra town, but we did head up to Kellys Knob lookout to make the obligatory childish innuendo’s you have no choice but to make in a place called Kellys Knob. We also took a day ’s drive out to Wyndham, population 800, to visit a Crocodile Farm. While waiting for the croc feeding tour Rachel popped in to the bathroom and when she flushed the toilet half a dozen frogs fell out from under the rim in to the toilet bowl. I think that gave her more of a fright than the large 4.2 metre croc they have penned up, who was captured from a river after he had eaten 24 dogs…one while still on a leash! Before heading back to Kununurra we had our photo taken by the town’s 20 metre concrete crocodile (one of the ‘big things’ dotted around the country) and soaked up the fantastic panoramic views from the five river lookout. Back at the campsite we got chatting to a friendly family of Grey Nomads. ‘Grey Nomad’ is a name given to the retired Australians who leave their home for months on end and travel around the country in caravans. We bumped into them frequently along the way down and spent the evenings drinking their beer and eating their cheese. At one point they thought their water in the caravan was tasting a little odd so they checked the hose and found that for the last couple of days they had been filtering their drinking water through a dead frog!

Our next stop was Halls Creek, pop 1289, which according to a Bank West’s quality of life survey is the worst place to live in Australia. I’ve read stories of drunken adults collapsed in the streets, men standing in the middle of the highway masturbating at two in the afternoon and a young mother walking down the street holding her baby at her breast while drinking from a can of VB. It sounds like a dark episode of the Simpsons or a night out in Swindon. Luckily we didn’t see any of those shenanigans while there and we soon moved on to Fitzroy Crossing, population 1,500. Like Halls Creek alcohol seems to play a big part in community life here. At 12pm locals suddenly appeared from all directions heading for the pub. I don’t think the world has seen a migration like this since Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. We duly followed them in to The Fitzroy Crossing, the oldest outback pub in the Kimberly region and where men in Stetsons play pool and drink cans of VB while listening to Country and Western. They even had a sign up which said ‘if you spit in the garden you will be banned for 3 months’! After a swift beer we headed for a walk and wonderful boat cruise around the Geikie Gorge, then back to the campsite before the next days drive to Derby.

With Derby being short on decent tourists attractions (a Boab Prison tree and a cattle trough being the highlights) we just stopped for a quick Barramundi lunch and drove the 220km to Broome.
Broome was one of our favourite towns of the trip. It developed around the pearling industry so we took a tour of the Pearl Luggers Museum where we got to taste Pearl Meat and play with a $100,000 pearl. It’s also known for its sunset camel rides along Cable Beach, Broome’s version of a Blackpool Donkey Ride. The biggest problem we had was choosing which company to go with…Do you chose 'Red Sun Camels', who, according to their leaflet, ‘have the longest and most photographed camel train’, or 'Broome Camel Safaris', where you can ‘feed your camel a carrot and meet Broome’s only true camel lady’ or maybe 'Ships of the Desert' where you can ‘meet Chris who makes all his own comfortable saddles by hand’!?! Even though meeting Broome’s only true camel lady was intriguing, I imagined some centaur like creature with a head of a woman and arse of a camel, the 'Red Sun Camels' won the day as it was the cheapest. Over the next few days we drove out to see some dinosaur footprints, walked through the Broome Museum, had Mango Beer at Matso’s Brewery and caught a movie at the worlds oldest outdoor cinema. We could have happily stayed here for a few weeks, especially as our Dutch neighbours at the campsite let us siphon off their electricity and tolerated me pressing my grubby little face up against their caravan window to watch the Euro 2008 highlights. But we had to leave at some point, so we drove on through Port Headland and Port Sampson in to Exmouth.

In Exmouth we had a small hiccup when our petrol gauge went down quicker than an Amir Khan boxing opponent and we almost ran out of petrol 90km from town, but apart form that we had a lovely couple of days hiking in Cape Range National Park and braved the cold water snorkelling on the Nigaloo Reef. We then drove to Coral Bay and took a wicked day trip out to Snorkel with huge Manta Rays and come face to face with turtles and Black Tip Reef Sharks. Once we had had our fill of underwater critters we drove via Carnarvon’s Big Banana to Monkey Mia. Now don’t ask me why it’s called Monkey Mia, sadly there are no monkeys there, but there are plenty of dolphins and big Pelicans which reminded me of those Lancaster Bombers from the Dambusters as they flew low over the water. Every morning the wild dolphins come up to the beach to be fed and have their photo taken by a frenzy of camera totting tourists. On the first feed of the day I was very lucky to be picked out the crowd to give a dolphin a fish, unfortunately Rachel wasn’t…her mouth said she wasn’t bothered, her eyes said I’m going to kill you in your sleep. Fearing for my health we hung around and waited for the dolphins to come back for a second helping, which they duly did and Rachel got the chance to feed one for herself. In the afternoon we drove to Shell Beach, which is a beach made of tiny cockle shell’s 6 metres deep, then over to see the Stromatolites. 3500 million years ago these Single cell oxygen releasing organisms helped create the conditions for more complex life forms to exist and evolve. There are not much to look at, but if it wasn’t for these little fellas we wouldn’t be here today. So big-up to the Stromatolites.

On the way down to Kalbarri National Park the landscape changed and the weather suddenly turned for the worse. There was a burst of trees, the road became twisty, sheep appeared out of nowhere, it started to rain heavily and Tom Jones came on the radio….after all the hours of driving and we go and find ourselves in bloody Wales…we really should have stayed in Broome! Things didn’t get much better in the morning and our plans for the day were ruined as the mighty morphin Park Rangers closed the dirt roads heading in to Kalbarri. So after a quick look at the craggy cliffs we drove on down to the cool Shipwreck museum in Geraldton. Not far from Geraldton we stopped by a great little wildlife park in Greenough, which is run by two women from Fremantle who’s only previous experience with animals was watching a few old Steve Erwin videos. There’s a little 1 year old joey kangaroo that hops around the shop and you can buy some food to feed the animals around the park and stroke a snake. If you tire of the sheep, goats, kangaroo’s et al you can pay a few dollars and they’ll happily throw you in with the dingoes. While there we bumped in to the owner of a pub in Port Denison who invited us over for a drink if we were going that way. Not to seem rude we popped in for a swift half. It quickly turned in to quite a few swift halves and we soon found ourselves being dragged along to the landlord’s own house for a few beers then on to the Cray Fishing end of season party at another pub across town. With this being the highlight of their year, everyone was packed in to the beer garden watching a cover band playing rock tunes (imagine Fred Durst after he had eaten all the pies) and all having a jolly spiffing time. The next morning with hazy memories and hangovers we drove to Nambung National park to see the The Pinnacles, where we hung around to watch the sun go down over the sand dunes and headed back for a deserved nights sleep in Cervantes.

The next day we made our way through the suburbs of Perth and Fremantle using a cartoon map which looked like something you would get with a McDonalds happy meal and found ourselves in Rockingham. Unfortunately the ‘all-seeing-eye’ Lonely Planet failed to tell us that in the winter all the penguins bugger off and the town pretty much shuts down. So after hexing the editor we headed for Busselton. Bussleton has the longest wooden jetty in the southern hemisphere and not a lot else so we soon found ourselves driving down the road to Margret River.

The wineries are not at their aesthetically best at this time of year, but it’s a lovely area with or without the grapes on the vines. On a spring-like day we spent hours driving around having free tastings. Here’s a tip for you, tell them it’s your birthday and they’ll give you more expensive wines to try!
It’s not just wineries though, there’s breweries too and also the chocolate shop with vats of free chocolate buttons and not forgetting the cheese shop with free cheese tasting. Who needs to buy lunch when you can just stuff your face with marinated feta when the old lady behind the counter has her back turned! Being the designated driver I had to entertain myself in the shops while Rachel was tasting the wine. For some weird reason in one gift shop everything they sold was green. So I started to touch each object and whisper “oz” under my breath, hoping tick-tock might magically appear…looking back I think I may have had too much chocolate by that point. Oh and if you we wondering, out of all the wines Rachel tasted the Tassell Park Chenin Blanc was the best…hint hint.

We took one more morning winery tour of the oh so fancy Lewelin Estate and then from here we went on to the National parks around Pemberton, where I climbed a tree. This wasn’t any ordinary tree though. I climbed up 60 metres of a pegged Karri called the Gloucester Tree, which is an old fire lookout from the 1940’s. Look at the photo’s and you’ll understand why I needed a change of pants half way up. Great view from the top though. We took a few short forest hikes looking up at the Karri’s (the third tallest trees in the world that can grow up to 90 meters) and around a lake, then back via another brewery and passed fields full of wild kangaroo’s and emu’s to the campsite. The next day we dropped in to the fantastic Jewel Cave, full of little crystal stalactites, then headed down to the most south-westerly point in Australia, Cape Leeuwin lighthouse, where the Southern and Indian oceans meet.

By this point our brains had absorbed so much I don’t think they could soak in much more and we were running out of money fast. But we had just two stops left on out trip before we could settle down in Perth for a few months. First was a trip to the ‘Valley of the Giants’ tree top walk, which is 60 metre platform up in the tree canopy then, after shooting through Denmark, we went to Albany. It’s a nice town with a replica of the Amity, the ship which bought the first settlers to Western Australia from Sydney. The top tourist attraction here though is Whale World! a fun place for all the family! It’s an old whaling station which has been turned in to a museum and tells the story of commercial whaling in Australia, which ended in 1978. Have a look at the size of the saw that was used by the Flensers to cut the whales head off!

From Albany we drove up to our last stop Fremantle and spent our last few dollars on a beer in Little Creatures Brewery, the best pub in the world. It was now time to update our CV’s, visit the hairdressers (I had mine done by a school girl who seemed to have learnt to cut using a Play-Doh Barber set) and kit ourselves out in cheap work clothes in preparation for 3 months in a dull office job in Perth. All dressed up Rachel looked as beautiful as ever, unfortunately in my ‘Spend less’ Velcro shoes I looked like a Jehovah’s Witness, such is life. We rented a room in a house in Leederville, living with a German couple and landlord who used to be in the Foreign Legion and found work easily through a temp agency. Rachel worked at the Disabilities Department and I for The department of Racing Gaming and Liquor. After a few days we had slipped effortlessly in to a comfortingly normal 9-5 week day life, spending the weekends visiting places like Kings Park, Whale watching and fishing to make the weeks breeze past. One of our favourite weekends was at the Perth Royal agricultural show, where we got to watch sheep shearing and wood chopping competitions.

Looking back, in the six weeks we had the van we drove over 6000km and was lucky enough to see some of the most interesting and beautiful places in the world, as well as some of the dullest and most depressing like Port Headland. A place where even the lady at the tourist information centre admitted there is nothing to see or do…they wouldn’t even open up the museum unless there was a minimum of 10 visitors! We drove for many long hours down straight roads that looked like they were never going to end and around twisty tree lined lanes over lush green hills that look like the most English of Australian countryside. We passed by miles of flat spinefex infested land, Eucalyptus, Karri and Boab trees and termite mounds that Rachel eloquently described as looking like giant dinosaur turds. We sped over dried up creeks and river beds and through savannahesq plains that make you feel like you’re on an African safari. We had to pull off the road to let road trains scream past (the largest and heaviest freight carrying road vehicles in the world that can be over 150ft long!), overtook crazy Japanese guys on bicycles and was overtaken by 70 year old couples pulling their caravans as they follow the other grey nomads around the country. We spotted Parrots and Parakeets, Cockatoos and Kookaburras, Orb spiders and Redbacks and Snakes. We’ve peered down gorges, in to dark caves, got stung by Jellyfish and watched the sunset over the sea. We drank beer in outback bars, ate our own weight in potato wedges and in the evenings swapped stories with other travellers in the caravan parks. We stopped in small towns with old goals and restored colonial buildings that told stories of Australia’s pioneers, aboriginal clans, flying doctors and the school of the air. We narrowly missed a huge Woma Python sunning itself in the middle of the road, swerved around a Goanna, slowed down to let emu’s cross, was given the evil eye by huge eagles stood like kings protecting their road kill and had to slam on the breaks as kangaroos and wallabies who haven’t learnt the green cross code jumped out from the bushes. To conclude the blog like a poorly written English exam, the Road Trip was really brilliant and that is all I can say about that. As Tin Tin out famously, “here’s where the story ends” and soon we will be in Sydney and Melbourne and I’ll write about that no doubt.

Here’s a link to the photo’s…again: http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii40/rachelandjoseph/

Joe n Rachel.x.x.x.

It was mid-June at the ‘Top End’, the sun was shining and the campervan was just a twinkle in a credit card’s eye. Darwin is a nice place and although being the largest city in the Northern Territory it still has a small town feel to it. Its highlight is definitely the Mindil Beach Sunset Market, where you can listen to live music, buy some food and watch the sun go down. We also enjoyed sitting on the dock of the bay eating Barramundi and chips after a walk around the museum and art gallery. We flew here though because this was the starting point for our drive down the west coast of Australia. So the next morning with ‘sweet’ and ‘dude’ tattooed on our backs we jumped on a bus heading for an Industrial Estate to pick up the campervan, which was to be our home for the next six weeks. We were off in to ‘The Bush’ for our Roooooaaaaaaaad Triiiiiiiiiiiip!!!

Now I’ll tell you a news story that lingered in the back of my mind while we were travelling through the ‘Outback’. In May of this year a backpacker was busting to go to the toilet while in a remote part of Australia. They pulled up on the side of the road so the guy could jump out and squat down behind a bush. Just as he was making himself comfortable a Brown Snake jumped up and bit him on his willy!…Now you can’t blame the Snake, who wouldn’t have done the same if you were woken up by a man taking a dump on your head, but it really makes you think about what is out there waiting to pounce when you’re least expecting it. There really are just too many things in Australia that can kill you, it’s quite unnerving. There are Jellyfish and the Spiders and the Snakes and the Sharks, but up here there is the daddy of them all, the Saltwater Crocodile. As the Kakadu National Park leaflet says: “Estuarine Crocodiles are dangerous and aggressive. They have attacked and killed people…Keep away from the waters edge.” You don‘t have to tell us twice! The Backpacker survived the snake bite if you were wondering, but later sadly died of embarrassment.

On our first day we drove 140km east from Darwin, passing hundreds of Termite mounds of different shapes and sizes, Eucalyptus trees, scrub fires and dead Kangaroo’s in various degrees of decay, on the way in to Australia’s largest National Park, Kakadu du du push pineapple shake the tree, ka-ka-du du du push pineapple grind coffee, to the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees, come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody…right that‘s enough of that. The landscape here is fantastic and it’s coincidently where they filmed Crocodile Dundee, so if there was any doubt in your minds, this really is Croc country. As it was getting late we booked ourselves in to a campsite for the night and drove to Woolworths to stock up on food and ice. Now I know what you’re thinking, but honestly Woolies is a proper supermarket here, we didn’t just buy two ton of Pick n Mix and a Lionel Richie CD.
After a pasta dinner and getting some friendly old guys to check our gas bottle (we didn’t want to blow up the campsite or gas ourselves on the first night) we turned in for a surprisingly comfy sleep in the back of our Mitsubishi ‘Breezer’ van.

Kakadu is 20,000 square km of parkland, jointly owned by the local Aboriginal clans and the Government Parks office. Our morning stop was up at Ubirr to see the fantastic rock art painted by some talented aboriginal folk a few thousands of years ago using red ochre and animals blood. While there we climbed up some rocks for a great 360 degree view of the Arnhem land that Mick Dundee called the “Land of the Never-Never” and also spotted our 4th snake of the trip. After a quick browse of the cultural and tourist centre we finished the day with a brilliant Yellow River boat cruise along the Kakadu wetlands. We saw Sea Eagles, Kites, Cormorants, massive Jaribu’s and many other birds I can’t remember the name of as well as turtles, our 5th Snake of the trip and what we were all really there to see, plenty of Crocodiles.

After another night in one of the campsites we left early for the long drive via Pine Creek to Katherine and Nitmiluk Gorge. Now I have to sadly report that while driving through the last of the National Park we hit a Parrot. The stupid bird shouldn’t have been sat in the middle of the road in the first place, but it’s weird seeing them ten-a-penny in the trees when we’re used to them being an exotic pet locked up in a cage…It’s horrible thinking we just killed something that would fetch us a princely sum back home! Actually it’s weird seeing many of the animals and birds around here. On one particular stretch of freeway there was a ridiculous amount of road kill. It was strewn with dead and rotting Kangaroos’s, Wallabies, birds, rodents, snakes, lizards, cows and even a Water Buffalo. I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on anyone when they built the Darwin University Campus at the end of the road! Anyway after driving for 211km we found ourselves in Pine Creek, a small mining town with a population of 500 and three petrol stations. We didn’t stop long, just enough to fill up on petrol (yes I did drive around all three to find the cheapest one!) and chocolate milkshake before driving off for another 284km to Katherine. Its population of 8000 (the third largest town in a state that’s five times the size of Britain!) is made up with a large proportion of Indigenous inhabitants and Cletus from The Simpsons Australian cousins. This place had a bit of a Hicksville feel to it and the local Woolworths smelt of serious BO. It was so bad it brought tears to our eyes and we had to shop like contestants on Supermarket Sweep. While the Cletus’s drove around in their pick up trucks listening to the duelling banjo’s cd on repeat the Indigenous folks seemed happy enough to sit around on the floor in the shade not doing very much…although to be fair it’s probably what they would have been doing 100 years ago before the ‘Whiteman’ came along and with no bye or leave built a town on top of them! There’s not much else to say about Katherine, we had a nice walk around the outback heritage museum reading about the harsh old country life and the Russian Peanut Farmers from the 1920’s. But we weren’t there for the town anyway, rather the spectacular Nitmiluk Gorge just down the road.

Now if you’ve ever want to test the strength of a relationship come up here and hire a two man canoe for the day. The gorge echoed with shouts of “left!, left! for f#*k sake paddle LEFT!!!!” and “why have you stopped paddling? keep paddling dammit!” and that was just from our canoe! But once we got the bloody thing to go in a straight line and ignored the crocodile traps set up on the banks of the river it was a great way to experience it all. We stopped for a bit of lunch by a trickle of a waterfall just soaking up the views and we surprised ourselves with how far we managed to go, even if on the return leg I had to paddle the last of the four Gorges on my own!

The next day, after an early morning visit from a mechanic to jump start our battery (by the time we had reached Fremantle five weeks later the third mechanic called out finally replaced it) we were off for Timber Creek, a grazing township, population 100. Before leaving Katherine we went to a music store and bought the cheapest pop compilation cd we could find. Listening to ABC Darwin with its phone-ins about country life and farming had started to grate a little so we thought singing along to ‘China in your hand’ by T’Pau would be a saner option instead. Anyway, Timber Creek is a funny little place, it’s a rest stop, a pub and a petrol station and that’s about it. Wolfe Creek is just down the road so if you’ve seen that film you can imagine what Timber Creek is like. In the afternoon they had a fun wild Croc feeding show, although all I could think about was the meat they were using and wondered if it was chopped up Backpackers who had stayed there the night before. We had a few beers in the pub and with all the scary movies ever made flashing through our minds we slept the night with half an eye open. We weren’t woken by any cross burning locals rocking the van, but Rachel did stumble upon a crazy lady pacing up and down in a pitch black toilet block, who then ran and hid in the cubicle when Rachel turned the light on.

The next day we were off again for the drive across the border. After stopping to look a pointless piece of scrap metal called the ‘Beef Road Monument‘ we drove up to boarder control for a van frisk. After a quick check for cane toads and fruit ‘n’ veg we found ourselves in Western Australia on our way to Kununurra, population 5000.

…And this is where this Blog entry abruptly ends for no apparent reason. Tune in next time for the Western Australia leg.

Here is a link to the photo’s again:
http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii40/rachelandjoseph/

Right I’m off to set some Parrot traps. Get your orders in now, I’ve just seen a lovely red one in the garden.
See you later. Joe. And Rachel.x.x.x