We finished work on the 30/08 and the day after started our next phase of traveling. The rough plan was to travel as far north as we reasonably could in the time we had to get some warm weather in and then we would come back to Perth to meet Tris and travel the south coast to Melbourne/Sydney with him. Essentially...mission acomplished!!
We traveled north to Exmouth, living out of the back of our trusty stationwagon for 4 weeks calling into various places en-route. We have stayed in the most amazing places...most of the time in the middle of nowhere with no one to see! We have completely fallen in love with the West coast and it's vast emptyness. Some days we would travel for hours on the main road and see maybe a handfull of other cars. This place is so sparcely populated I think it counts as one of (if not the) most unihabitated place on earth. WA has 2mil people in it and 98% of them live in Perth!!
So the stops went roughly...
(this is a VERY brief overview!)
Cerevantes/Jurien Bay - Closest reasonable place to stay at for the evening on the way to Geraldton
Geraldton - Stopped at a bushcamp called Corronation Beach and had our first (of many!) real cloudless sunset over the Indian Ocean.
Kalbarri - What can we say...beautiful! One of our favorite places so far. We stayed at a bush camp just o
utside the national park and saw some of the best surf I have ever seen. For those that are interested Kalbarri is the home of a very famous break called Jakes. A point that breaks on to a rock reef so close to the shore that the spectators can stand about 10M away from the takeoff point. You can then look down the line as the wave breaks past. We saw this at a good solid double overhead height producing lovely clean barrels!Around the corner there is another (fractionaly) safer point break which me and Lou had some fun on at about 8ft. My first ever reef/point break
and I never want to go back to beachies!! We liked it so much we had to stay for another day!Shark Bay - This is a place that is exactly
what it sais on the tin...a bay full of sharks! We stayed on our own in the national park on the top of a cliff (Eagle Bluff). It was stunning but the photos can do it more justice than I can. We went to a lovely, marine biologist run Ocean Park to see what lurks beneath the waves and learnt loads about the inhabitants of the area. Had a really good time talking to the experts there.Monkey Mia - On the tip of shark bay we went for the dolphins! They have one of the biggest pods around come into the bay to be fed so you can stand on the shore and watch them come and go and play. Quite a touristy thing to do but was absolutely brilliant and really well run. I (Ben) managed to get picked (twice!) to go and feed them in the water...I'm beginning to think the dolphins might like me as it
will be the 3rd encounter I've had with them in the wild!Quobba - Wow...the waves here were absolutely incredible. Monster swells hitting a raw (red!) rock coastline. The banner above the main road in to the settlement is a big piece of driftwood with hand painted letters saying simply "KING WAVES KILL!" Gives you an impression of the type of place we were in. It was a both a beautiful and terrible place all at once. If you don't come away from here appreciating the power of the sea then you never will. We loved it. Stayed in a small fishing shanty village and met a really nice young Aussie couple who are just working and traveling around Oz. Fire on the beach with the roar of big waves and the blowhole spraying water 30ft in
the air and that was it really!!Coral Bay - Picture a paradise bay with hot sun, white sand and crystal clear turquoise sea and a coral reef wading distance from the shore and you will almost be there. Oh yeah it had started getting hot here too! We finally had some decent sun bathable weather!! Got to about 25is degrees here so we did a bit of snorkelling and some lounging in the sun. Treated our selves to a beer in the loacal hotel bar and watched a crooner on the stage too!
Exmouth - What can we say, so good we stayed there for 10 days in total! This place had everything we were looking for. Hot weather (during the day...the evening was freezing!), clear seas, clean empty beaches, a stunning national park to hike in and more surf than we knew what to do with...literally!!
It is the first time I have arrived somewhere, seen the surf and had to stand on the shore as every beach was way beyond my ability to go in!! When we arrived there was a 4.5M swell rolling in over the outer reefs which meant th
at the final surfa
ble wave were coming in with a face of about 25-30ft!! BIG!!! This was film style, tow in with a jets ki territory. There were more surfers on the shore watching than there were in the water which over here is unheard of! After a few days however things calmed a little and we were able to get in and have what turned out to be some of the best sessions I have ever had in the sea. Days of 3-4 hours in the water followed and we both had some of the best rides of our lives. Absolutely awesome!Away from the surf we managed to get into the national park to pitch up camp and stayed with 4 other campers 10M from the beach (with kangaroos!) The only downside to this was the afternoon/night winds were really cold and really strong...I mean tent eatingly strong! Luckily we are now really good, experienced campers now and with our expertise we managed to keep the tent upright and pegged in to the ground altho we resorted back to sleeping in the back of the car as it was much warmer and quieter!!!
The canyons in the park were really good for hiking in which we did on a few days and saw lots of local wildlife inc. roos, emus, rock wallabies, euros (pretty much a small roo) echidnas, spiders, lizzards, snakes and more birdlife than you could shake a stick at! That includes eagles.
What else....
Oh yeah, one small trip we took that I nearly over looked...(as if!!)...
A 3 hour boat trip out into the bay to watch the migrating HUMPBACK WHALES!!! This was an incredble evening trip at sunset out into the bay on one of the local dive boats (that was enough for me...the boat was re
ally cool!!) As we left we told that the whales may or may not be there but we will try and find some. The result was about 5 whales in very close proximity to the boat breaching and flapping and generally causing a commotion! One of the highlights was a mother in very close with her new calf giving breaching lessons. Couple that with a georgeous sunset, some beer and some nice snacks on board and we had what could be described as the perfect evening. Seeing the whales at such close range is one of the very least things we thought we would get to do. Again, the photos Lou got (only a 100 or so!!!!) do it more justice than I can. In short, Exmouth was perfect which is why that is as far as we got northwards!Since then we have shot across the bottom of the country and are currently sitting in a Maccas in Bairnsdale just outside Melbourne while our camper is being fixed! Just got the call to say it's done so we've got to go. Will catch up some more and get the pics up around Sydney. Till then...BYE!!!
