travel – The Travelling Guinea Pig

Homeward Bound

I had two and half weeks to kill in Melbourne before flying home, and my plan had been to relax, catch up with friends, and visit all of the things in the city that I didn’t have time for before. This worked well for the first week, but then I got ill and spent the second week in bed having nightmares about making the 24-hour journey home with a cold and a stomach bug. Thankfully I got over it in time to go snowboarding for the day at Mount Buller and to do a few other bits and pieces in my last few days, and it gave me a bit of time to evaluate my time here.

The main thing I’ve learned about Australia is how little I knew about it before I came here. If someone tells me they’re going to the USA for a holiday, I would immediately ask where; New York, California, Florida, New England, different parts of the US have different implications in my head, and I have a sense of general cultural context that tells me that there is a lot of variety in the country, even only ever having been to one part of it. But despite being roughly the same size as continental USA, my knowledge of Australia a couple of years ago was incredibly vague. I knew the names of the cities but couldn’t have placed them, and my mental cultural map of the country would have included the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru and the Sydney Opera House, with the rest filled in with beaches and deserts and vague notions of vineyards and sheep farms.

My ignorance, in which I’m sure I’m not alone, made me subscribe to the ‘just a hotter version of Britain’ view of Australia; the fact that I didn’t know what was here made me certain there wasn’t much to draw me here, and four years ago Australia was really very low on my destination wishlist. Even when I did decide to come here, I was more drawn by the prospect of visiting friends than of seeing the country itself.

But of course I was wrong and ignorant and if you think you’re not bothered about visiting Australia then you’re wrong and ignorant too, because Australia is the most interesting and diverse places imaginable. It’s got everything, from rainforest to desert, pumping metropolis to barren outback, every kind of beach you can think of and literally hundreds of national parks.

During my six months here, I have worked in the big city and on a farm; I’ve surfed, hiked, snowboarded, sea kayaked and scuba dived; I’ve slept under the stars, swam in waterfalls and hot springs, and been to a concert in the Sydney Opera House. I’ve made spectacular road and rail journeys and experienced every season and weather system there is; I’ve seen wild kangaroos, emus, quokkas, camels, koalas, kookaburras, dolphins and seals; I’ve eaten Anzac biscuits, vegemite, kangaroo, shark, Tim Tams and enough flat whites and smashed avocado to last a lifetime; I’ve learned about Aboriginal culture, convict history and even the mysterious world of Aussie rules football. And most of all I’ve learned that there are many different sides to Australia, and that every corner of this country has its own character, reputation and feel about it. There’s a lot going on here and there’s a lot to see; it’s a pretty big country after all.

I’ve also been reminded, in a more personal way, of one or two things about myself. One of my hopes in working in Australia was that I would find my ‘dream job’ and be inspired in a particular career direction. That hasn’t happened exactly but what has happened is that I have remembered some of the things that I really value and enjoy and seemed to have forgotten about at various points. Being outside and being active, reading great books, my family, being on and in and around the sea, and of course writing. Rediscovering all this and exploring this wonderful country has left me feeling much calmer and relaxed about all sorts of things, almost as if I’ve had a big long holiday.

But I’m ready to go home now, and I can tell because as well as missing my friends and family, I’ve started missing other things as well. Proper bacon, having my own bedroom, the BBC, normal plug sockets and road signs, familiar accents, the furniture in my parents’ house, people tutting. I’m looking forward to going home (although not the journey to get there) and to getting back to real life.

So thank you for reading and for all the lovely comments I’ve received through various avenues, it’s been a pleasure.

“Then the wind will set me racing

As my journey nears its end,

And the path I’ll be retracing

As I’m homeward bound again.”

Time on the Farm

One of the aspects of travelling around that can get a bit wearing after a while is the lack of routine. It’s very liberating at first, being able to do whatever you feel like whenever you want, but after a while I start craving structure, responsibility and routine. This was certainly true as my time in Perth came to an end and I got the train south to the small rural town of Waroona, for two weeks of volunteer farm work.

I found Hamel Homegrown, run by organic farmers Fiona and Anton, on WorkAway, the same website that I used to find my volunteering placement at Yellow House in Kuala Lumpur. The deal on the farm was the same, and similar to most WWOOFing and farm work projects; working five hours per day, five days a week, in return for food and accommodation, and the rest of the time free to relax and explore.

Fiona and Anton started the farm just over twenty years ago, after spending much of their twenties travelling around the country ‘doing the hippy thing’. On the twelve acre plot they have a small orchard and a chicken coop as well as rows of crops, and they grow small to medium quantities of all kinds of fruit and veg, which they sell to organic wholesalers, at a farmer’s market, and from a honesty-box stall on the driveway. They’ve worked hard – in Fiona’s words “it took a long time and a lot of work to become profitable” – and have amassed a huge amount of experience and knowledge of their trade.

Working hours were 8:00am to 1:00pm, and I quickly got into the routine of early mornings and freezing cold starts. Along with the part-time staff, almost exclusively members of the extended family, and Francis, another volunteer from Uganda, I moved through a wide variety of jobs from picking and cleaning beetroot, packing lettuces and picking citrus fruit and pumpkins to cleaning up garlic, mulching and weeding and planting onion seedlings. We had a mid-morning tea break together on the veranda, during which I heard the local gossip and got to know everyone better.

It was surprisingly satisfying spending so much time outside and getting my hands dirty doing such physical work. After the first day my body ached from all the bending and lifting, but I had more energy as well, and the more I did the more I was able to see what organic farming is all about. More than just not using chemicals it seemed to me to be about not fighting against nature but working with it; a huge amount of effort was put into improving the soil through mulching and making compost, and instead of waging war against weeds and pests, they were pretty much accepted as inevitable, although some beds were covered in black matting with holes cut for the plants to poke through, in order to prevent weeds in the more delicate crops.

The afternoons were my own and after a shower and some lunch I spent most of them reading and relaxing, or walking around the local countryside with Francis. The landscape was not too different to the UK really with lots of green and woods and farmland, and the Western Australian winter was much like the English spring or summer, so it was very pleasant to walk around. A few times I walked to the town along the railway line, and one afternoon Fiona lent me their old ute and we went for a drive and a look around the nearby Lake Moyanup. The truck was ancient but worked well enough once I’d figured out how to take the handbrake off – instead of a horizontal handle is was a thin lever below the steering wheel that you twist and push in – extremely retro!

In the evenings Francis and I would cook, using the wonderful fresh fruit, vegetables and eggs at our disposal, and watch television with Fiona and Anton. They were very welcoming and over the course of two weeks I met most of their extended family; children, grandchildren, nieces and all, and they took me to their Pentecostal church and introduced me to everyone in the town.

Two weeks flew by and I would have been happy to stay longer. Given my inherent laziness I hadn’t been sure how I’d get along with such physical work, but I found it incredibly satisfying and relaxing being outdoors all the time and getting my hands dirty, and Fiona and Anton’s outlook on life and on growing things was brilliant. I felt quite calm as I returned to Perth, resolving to find a community garden back in Brighton and promising Fiona and Anton to keep them updated with my progress.

After a few more days in Perth, this time in the slightly more interesting suburb of North Bridge, I took an overnight flight back to Melbourne, to see my friends there and prepare for the impending journey homewards.

Perth and Fremantle

I have a theory about trams; if a place has a tram system, you can tell immediately that it’s got something about it. San Francisco, Nottingham, Melbourne; all quite different, but all good places to be, with lively cultural scenes, interesting architecture and a real sense of history. As for Perth, well, suffice it to say that Perth clearly and definitely does not have any trams.

It’s not an unpleasant place to be as such; the city centre has a few good museums and galleries, a great zoo, a nice park overlooking the business district (which when I went was packed with young people playing Pokemon Go), and the recently regenerated Elizabeth Quay. It’s just that none of it has any kind of uniqueness, none of it makes you think ‘oh, this is what Perth is all about’, it was all a bit generic and uninspiring.

I’m being very unfair of course, and it’s probably a question of expectations. I’ve met plenty of people who have lived or stayed in Perth, and everyone seemed to speak quite highly of it; it’s a place that people emigrate to, or do a semester abroad in, and generally seem to have had a great time. I was expecting quite a lot I suppose, compared to Adelaide, about which everyone who lives or visits there seems to say ‘meh, it’s alright’. Growing up in Milton Keynes and working in Coventry has given me a soft spot for underappreciated towns, so this review of Adelaide made me resolve to see the best in it. Perth on the other hand, didn’t sound like it needed my goodwill; it has a reputation in Australia for being an up-and-coming, self confident kind of place, and after all, it’s one of the most remote cities in the world so surely it should be some kind of cultural beacon. As it turns out, the distance from anywhere better just seems to have given people much lower standards.

Luckily however, I ended up spending most of my time in Fremantle, a completely lovely and infinitely more interesting suburb of Perth. As if to prove my point, within minutes of leaving the train station I saw a local tour bus decked out to look like a tram.

The original port of the Swan River Colony, settled in 1829, Fremantle feels very much like a self-contained town, rather than a suburb of Perth, with its own trendy feel and rich maritime history. Nowadays it’s a popular seaside spot with pretty streets, a nice parade of cafes and shops, and some great cultural spots. My hostel was in a refurbished wing of the town prison, the other end of which is an excellent museum, and in the harbour was the Leeuwin II, Australia’s largest working tall ship. 180 feet long with three masts, it’s a real pirate ship, and the charity that maintains it offer sailing training day and week-long trips in the summer months, as well as youth education programmes. Already in a swashbuckling mood, I visited the Shipwreck Galleries, a museum telling the story of a range of ships wrecked off the Western Australian coast. The main event is a huge piece of the hull of the Batavia, a Dutch East India Company ship which was wrecked north of Perth in the ultimate swashbuckling story of mutiny, murder and revenge.

A visit to the Perth tourist information centre seems to indicate that the best things to do in Perth are day trips where you get away from Perth, so with this in mind I went to Rottnest Island, a half hour ferry ride from Fremantle, and hired a bike to cycle around the car-free island. Australia seems to have a real knack for perfectly matching landscapes to activities, and it was excellent terrain for biking; not too steep but lumpy enough to be a bit of a challenge, with clear routes and lots of little beaches and viewpoints. It was sunny but not too hot, the colour of the water was pretty incredible, and there were lots of quokkas, marsupials native to the island, curiously sniffing about.

Quokkas

Rottnest Island

Cycling Selfie

My final day in Fremantle was a sunny Sunday at the end of the school holidays, and there were lots of families around. While the 15 degree weather was pleasant to me, like a fresh Spring day in the UK, here it was the depths of winter, and the cafes and restaurants were advertising soup, hot chocolate and even mulled wine. I must have been starting to get homesick at this point, because the families I saw walking along the sea front reminded me of my own family at different points in time, from the young children whining about how far they’d walked, to sulky teenagers lagging behind looking at their phones, to grown up children catching up with their parents, some with children of their own.

I got fish and chips for lunch, which was a massive disappointment; the batter was way too light and crunchy, the chips were nowhere near fat and greasy enough, and I got plastic cutlery instead of a little splintery wooden fork. But the seagulls were comfortingly intimidating and aggressive, so I felt quite at home.

Exmouth to Perth via Northampton

As in Broome, I had a vague intention of finding work in Exmouth in order to fund more diving and generally stretch out my dwindling funds, and this time I got as far as walking around the town looking for adverts on shop windows and notice boards. But, when it came down to it, I couldn’t quite summon the motivation to apply for service industry jobs, and the thought of staying in the town’s friendly but poorly maintained backpackers’ hostel helped me decide to move on south towards Perth. The questions then was how to get there. I had no luck finding another campervan relocation, and although the bus I’d taken down from Broome did continue another seventeen hours to Perth, I wasn’t keen on the idea of another overnight journey in a rattly, funny-smelling coach.

So it was with some relief that I heard about Red Earth Safaris, a small, Perth-based tour company that run eight-day trips from Perth to Exmouth and back again. Although they stopped for the sights and activities on the way up, for slightly less than the cost of a public bus ticket they offered a spot on the day-and-a-half return leg. And to sweeten the deal, food and a night’s accommodation was included, so I signed up online. Having spoken to some people at the hostel who had done the tour and was expecting a similar set-up to the tour I did in Alice Springs; some kind of small bus with 10-15 people, a fairly structured itinerary and an informative guide who would slip into ‘storytelling mode’ when he told the anecdotes he’d told a hundred times before. I was surprised then on the morning we left Exmouth to be met by a guide and just two other punters, in a car. As Nicola the guide explained, all of the other guests had opted to end the tour at Monkey Mia, several hours south of Exmouth, and so with so few people it made sense to carry on in the car rather than the big bus. It wasn’t what I was expecting but it made for a much more comfortable journey, and felt more like an informal road trip than a tour.

We set off after an early breakfast and drove all day, stopping for breaks at the funny little roadhouses along the way. We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and the 24^th Parallel, the border of north-west Australia, and the landscape gradually changed as we made our way south. Green replaced orangey brown, fields replaced bushland, rolling hills replaced flat plains. We stopped for lunch in Carnarvon, in banana-growing country, as as we pushed on we passed fields of wheat, rapeseed and sheep, as well as plenty of wild goats (which apparently are quite a problem given their tendency to eat anything and everything). As we drove Nicola told me about the area and some of the things I would have seen on the journey up, while the two other passengers, a pair of grumpy German teenagers slept in the backseat. Nicola wasn’t a professional tour guide – she and her husband had just bought the company after he had lead groups for the previous owners for the last seven years, while she was an English language teacher and administrator for an ESL college in Perth, and was taking a break to consider a career change – and her unrehearsed storytelling style gave the journey even more of a road trip feel.

Our stop for the night was a hostel in Northampton, a town spread along the main road with 868 residents and three pubs, imaginatively named Top Pub, Middle Pub and Bottom Pub. Our accommodation was a former convent build in 1917, and now a hostel in the style of what I imagine hostels were like about fifty years ago. No light and bright spaces, no backpackers’ drinks deals and promo photos of young people having fun, no reception even. To get in we rang the caretaker Maureen, who came to meet us with a big bunch of keys and showed us around. We were shown the kitchen which didn’t seem to have changed since 1917, the living room with furniture that reminded me of my Granny’s house, and our simple bedrooms. When old buildings are repurposed, especially when they become hostels, the interiors seem to be refurbished to such a degree that they can lose their character, but here there was no chance of that as nothing, from the wallpaper to the furniture to the pictures on the walls, seemed to have been changed. It was quite nice really, and a beautiful building, but very, very cold.

The next morning we set off early again and hit the road, passing by the town of Geraldton, scared some emus crossing the road, and stopped to have a look at one of the area’s ‘leaning trees’, trees that are bent so much by the strong winds that they grow horizontally. We came into Perth through the northern suburbs, which reminded me very much of Milton Keynes right down to the roundabouts. Arriving at lunchtime, Nicola dropped me off at the YHA Hostel in the city centre, and after nearly a month of small towns and deserted bushland, I was back in the hustle and bustle of big city life.

The Watery World of Exmouth

Somewhere along the 17-hour journey from Broome to Exmouth, the season pattern changed from wet-dry to Summer-Winter. In Broome and Darwin, being in the middle of the dry season meant temperatures in the low to mid 30s and relatively low humidity, but in Exmouth – still technically in the tropics – the winter season meant it was suddenly 10-15 degrees cooler and rainy. Had I known, I might have stayed in Broome for a couple more days…

The overwhelming majority of visitors to the Exmouth come to see the Ningaloo Reef, which stretches 160 miles along the western length of the North West Cape peninsula, a twenty minute drive from the town. People come for snorkelling, scuba diving, and at this time of year boat trips to swim with whale sharks. People don’t hang around in the town unless they’re forced to by, say, inclement weather, so there’s not much touristy development in the town; a couple of surfer clothing shops, a single cafe, two supermarkets and a few pricey restaurants is about all there is in the town ‘centre’, as well as a scattering of shops to book reef excursions. It reminded me in that way of Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies, where I lived and worked a few years ago. The village of Lake Louise is pretty nondescript; people come to see either the lake or the ski hill depending on the season, and then they move swiftly on to Banff, a more charming place to wander around, with lots of amenities and eateries. Also, although Exmouth has a much more substantial static population than Lake Louise, the workforce is largely driven by transient workers, in this case diving professionals who work for the whale shark and scuba diving companies. The similarity between this group and Lake Louise’s hospitality and ski bum population was highlighted on the Friday night a week after I arrived, when the bar next to the hostel had its weekly party night, and all of the dive boat staff came out to play. Just like in Lake Louise, the local economy can’t support a nightlife scene as such, but there are enough young working people to support a weekly dance night in the otherwise deserted and low-key hotel bar. Very nostalgic.

Although it’s on the opposite side of the peninsula to the Ningaloo Reef, Exmouth does have a beach, known unimaginatively as Town Beach, which I walked out to see on my first day. It’s not particularly well-regarded compared to the fine sand and clear water further around the coast, but it was what I think of as a ‘proper’ beach; brown, gritty sand scattered with a heavy dusting of pebbles and sharp shells, a strong smell of seaweed and a breeze that whips the sand and grass up from the dunes right into your face. After the hot sun and immaculate white sand of Cable Beach, it made quite a refreshing change, and walking on to the small harbour I had a good nose around the fishing and sailing boats.

It’s useful and usual to have a car here, because the main land-based event is to visit the Cape Range National Park on a drive up and around the peninsula. Luckily I was able to catch a ride with some people I met at the hostel and we went for a drive through the showers to have a look. It’s pretty amazing the effect the weather has on the landscape; on a hot sunny day the undulating scrubland of the bush looks parched and sandy, but with a little rain and cloud it is suddenly transformed to a green but desolate place. It reminded me so much of the North York Moors, I half expected to see Kate Bush dancing around in a leotard. Dodging the showers, we made a brief, windswept stop at the Vlamingh Head Lighthouse, before going for a short but energetic walk around Mandu Mandu Gorge, a pebbly dry river valley surrounded by steep green and orange slopes. We then headed to the popular snorkelling spot of Turquoise Bay, which on that grey, windy day was all but deserted, and had a rather pessimistic and ill-advised go at snorkelling in the rough swell. After quickly giving up on that idea I had a bit of time to look at the amazing colours of the landscape – the turquoise shallows then the deep aquamarine of the water over the reef, blending into the ominous dark purple of the clouds – before the heavens opened and the rain started.

This rain continued all afternoon, and for two more full days, during which my scuba dive trip was cancelled and there was very little to do except hang around the hostel and wait for the weather to improve. But eventually the worst of the weather passed and my temporary travelling buddy Cat and I hired a car and went for a drive, and although we followed almost exactly the same route as I had done a few days before (there’s pretty much only one direction to go for a drive from Exmouth), a bit of sunshine changed everything. We stopped by a viewpoint for the wreck of SS Mildura, a cattle ship sank off the tip of the North West Cape in 1907, which is juuuust about visible from the shore, and had a second, less windswept visit to the Vlamingh Head Lighthouse.

The views over the land and the sea were lovely, not to mention the imposing figure of the pylons of Harold E Holt Naval Base. The site was leased and developed by the US Government as a communications base at the height of the cold war in the mid 1960’s, and the town of Exmouth was established 6km away at the same time to service the base. The naval base has the distinction of housing the highest freestanding structure in Australia in the form of the central mast, as well as being named after Harold Holt, a previous Prime Minister of Australia, whose premiership came to an abrupt end in 1967 when he went for a swim in Port Phillip Bay in Victoria and was never seen again. After a lunchtime picnic stop at a packed Turquoise Bay, we headed on for a walk along the Yardie Creek Gorge, the only permanent river on the North West Cape. It was very pretty and enjoyable, slightly scrambly walking, and we even spotted a few tiny rock wallabies scurrying around on the cliff.

As the weather improved, so did the prospects of my being able to do what I came here for; to get out on the water and see some wildlife. The most popular excursion from Exmouth at this time of year is to take a boat trip to spot and snorkel with whale sharks, the biggest and most docile species of shark. Unfortunately it’s also the most expensive excursion on offer and as awesome an experience as I’m sure it is, I couldn’t justify the $400 price tag. Instead I spent an afternoon sea kayaking along the coast, spotting turtles coming up to the surface for air, pelicans grazing the water, and looking at the swampy mangroves growing along the shore.

But the main event for me was my scuba diving day. I had been hoping to do some more scuba diving since I did my Open Water course in Thailand, but I when it came to getting in the water I was really quite nervous. I hadn’t dived in five months, I’d never dived with anything less than one-on-one supervision, and I was suddenly hit by the knowledge that I was very inexperienced and didn’t know what I was doing. As I got into the water the feeling got more intense as the current and the swell were much stronger than anything I’d experienced in the still waters of Thailand. Hanging onto the mooring line as the rest of my group started to descend, I decided in a hyperventilating panic that I couldn’t go through with it, turning and explaining to the group behind me that I needed to get back onto the boat. Luckily however they helped to calm me down, reminding me that the surface is the worst part of a dive, and when my guide noticed I was missing and came back up to find me, he was very calming and kept a good eye on me as we began the descent. As soon as I got away from the waves of the surface I felt much better and had a fabulous dive. On this and the following dive we saw a couple of friendly sea snakes, a huge stingray floating overhead, a big reef shark scouring the bottom, as well as some lovely corals and lots of pretty little fishies.

After finishing the dives and returning to the hostel, it was sunny and warm enough to sunbathe by the pool, and I spent a while picking the brains of diving instructor Keenan. It was really good to be diving again, great to learn from the pros and improve my skills, and quite elating to have conquered my fear and panic and to have not given up.

Relaxing in Broome

Broome is a small town perched on the Dampier Peninsula in the far north of Western Australia, about as far away from the state capitals as it is possible to be. The town developed around the pearling trade, and because of this is one of oldest multicultural towns in Australia, as Japanese, Chinese and Malay divers came to work on the pearling ships from the mid 19^th Century onwards. While pearl farms are still big business in the region, the town now lives on tourism, attracting a primarily domestic market for some Australian sun in the winter months.

The town centre is made up of two streets lined with cafés, high end gift shops, galleries and pearl shops. Also on the main street is the Sun Cinema, where I went one evening to see Finding Dory (to get me in the marine life mood for my next destination, the Ningaloo Reef). The oldest operating outdoor cinema in the world, it opened in 1916 and has rows of deckchairs facing the big screen, only slightly more comfortable than normal cinema seats. As the trailers started we realised that we were sitting right under the airport flightpath, and the thundering of aeroplanes passing over our heads every half an hour added a certain drama to the experience.

Sun Cinema

Inside Sun Cinema

It is a sprawling, spread out kind of town which seems to expect everyone to have their own transport, and which makes it feel bigger than its 16,000 people. There are several attractions spread out along to beachfront (well, mudflats-front) side of the town, one of which is the Broome Museum. Located in the former Customs House and run by the local history society, it offers mini exhibitions on all kinds of things, from the Second World War to sailmaking and ropes, from the Australian equivalent of the Women’s Institute to an impressive but random collection of sea shells. The main event though is a display about Broome’s early pearl industry, which was really interesting although it made me feel a bit funny reading about early divers, knowing what I now do about underwater atmospheric pressure and decompression sickness.

While the beach on the town side of the peninsula is all mudflats and marshland, the western side has Cable Beach, a lovely stretch of white sandy beach famous for sunsets and camel rides. A fifteen minute bus ride from Broome proper, it’s a mini resort town, with its own hostel, bar, and a whole range of hotels, centred around the popular life-guard covered section of beach. From there I followed a walking trail that took me south through the bush parallel to the beach towards the outcrop of Gantheame Point. It wasn’t really walking weather – about 32 degrees – and as there weren’t many people around who thought that walking in the heat was a good idea, the trail was mostly deserted. It was nice, fairly sheltered walking, with lots of birds around. The bushes rustled ominously every so often, and in some spots the sandy path was covered in the unmistakeable curve of snake tracks, but I didn’t come across anything that looks like it wanted to kill me, much to my disappointment.

After a few kilometres I climbed a metal staircase up to the top of the sand dunes and dropped down onto the beach and walked along the shore. Only a short distance away from the busy swimming beach, this section of beach was almost completely empty, with a few sailing boats moored a little way out. It reminded me a little of the beach at Khok Kloi in Thailand, where I did my volunteer teaching a few months ago; quiet and serene, covered with little crabs, but with big sand dunes instead of fancy houses.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Coming closer to Gantheame Point the dunes turned to cliffs and I had a bit of an adventure clambering over orange rocks trying to get up to the road, and reached the carpark and information board covered in sweat and dust. Gantheame Point is home to a lighthouse and a biological research centre, as well as some fossilised dinosaur footprints. Unfortunately they can only be seen every few weeks when low tide is particularly low, so I wasn’t able to see them, but I had a nice time walking around looking at the piles of bright orange rock on the headland, all flat and flakey-looking like slate.

Heading back to Cable Beach, I took my shoes off and walked along the edge of the water, dodging all the washed up jellyfish half buried in the sand like gigantic globs of pinky phlegm. Arriving at the kiosk near the swimming beach, exhausted and dehydrated, I treated myself to an ice cream, a cold drink and a well earned rest.

The main event on Cable Beach though is the sunset, marketed as the best in Australia. The day before my walk, I had spent the afternoon relaxing on the beach and stayed to see whether the sunset would compare with the many, many sunsets I’ve seen on my travels. I got a nice quiet spot on some rocks a little way away from the main beach, which turned out to be right next to the 4X4 track onto the beach. I haven’t seen it anywhere else, but in Australia it’s apparently a very popular thing to drive right onto the beach to enjoy the sea and sand without getting wet or sandy and especially, as it turns out, to watch the sunset. Cars and motorbikes turned up in droves coming onto the beach next to where I was sitting and driving around the headland to the special beach just for cars. The sunset itself was ok, even if I was sitting on Broome’s own Piccadilly Circus, although I found myself spending more time looking at the couple a little way in front of me, posing for artsy-wistful photos of each other gazing towards the sunset. As soon as the sun disappeared the cars started driving past me again in the opposite direction, but soon after that, dozens of camels came across the sand being led towards their farm, fresh from the sunset camel rides that Cable Beach is known for.

I had been half intending to stay in Broome for a while and find some work, but after a few days’ relaxation I decided to move on. I was still in holiday mode and couldn’t quite summon the motivation to look for a job, and as nice as Broome is for a few days of sunshine, I didn’t love it enough to stay for much longer. And besides, I’d seen lots of adverts for diving and snorkelling further along the coast, which had left me impatient to get there as soon as possible. So after four days in Broome, I got the overnight bus to Exmouth, WA.

Roadtrip: The Kimberley

The Kimberley is the northernmost region of Western Australia, tucked between the Indian Ocean and the Northern Territory. It is rugged and harsh, and very sparsely populated with only a handful of towns spread over an area slightly smaller than Sweden, but it also contains some impressive scenery, National Parks and even a lake. This lake, Lake Argyle, was our first stop in Western Australia and our first detour as we left the highway for a while to climb gently up through the red rocks, stopping at the Lake Argyle Resort, perched in a pretty spot overlooking the lake. There are several ways to ‘experience’ the lake, from helicopter rides to taking a dip in the infinity pool, but we couldn’t find a way to walk down the steep bush-covered slope to actually get down to see the water in person, so after enjoying the view for a bit we headed on back to the highway to the town of Kununurra.

I should stress at this point that although ‘highway’ is technically the right word, the Victoria Highway, which runs from Katherine to just past Kununurra, and the Great Northern Highway, which goes from there to just beyond Port Hedland, are not what I would think of as highways. They are mostly single lane roads with a hard shoulder of hard orange dust, and the occasional two-lane overtaking section. They are well-maintained though and very easy to drive, and wide enough for any campervan – they’d have to be to accommodate the road trains, huge trucks pulling two, three or even more trailer loads. They’re pretty intimidating and can throw you off guard when one comes blaring towards you while you’re enjoying the peace and quiet of the empty road.

Not that the road is that empty really; the Kimberley is a popular location for Grey Nomads and other campervan enthusiasts, and there are all manner of 4x4s, minivans and caravans on the road – not enough to make it a ‘busy’ road but enough that you rarely go more than a few minutes without seeing another vehicle. The question then is whether the drivers of the cars passing in the other direction are nice people or not, i.e. whether they return the ‘driver’s wave’, as you lift your hand marginally from the steering wheel to acknowledge their presence, and to give your hand something to do. This is what passes the time on these roads…

After making a lunch stop in Kununurra, a pleasant town that was bigger than I expected and surprisingly busy, we carried on driving through the afternoon until we reached our stop for the night on the edge of the Bungle Bungle National Park. Sadly we didn’t have time to visit the Bungle Bungles (or Purnululu) themselves, a rock formation comprising collection of huge stratified beehive-shaped lumps, as it takes a whole day to visit them, so we had to be content with staying in the caravan park on the edge of the National Park. It was fantastically remote and wild, with no lighting and few cooking facilities; the toilet and shower blocks were open-topped basic cubicles of corrugated metal, open to the sky. The stars were awesome.

The third day of the road trip started a little later, as we had been making good time, and we spent the day driving through the flat plains towards Derby, passing through the towns of Hall’s Creek and Fitzroy Crossing. These were the kind of strange, slightly creepy places that I had been expecting, with quite a lot of housing but very few businesses or obvious employment sources. It makes me wonder what the people here actually do, as there’s very little tourism in the towns themselves and there obviously aren’t any cities or bigger towns nearby to commute to. Apart from a supermarket and a primary school, and one or two other bits and pieces, I couldn’t see much that would actually support the population. Fitzroy Crossing particularly had an intensely quiet, ghost town feel about it; I could barely imagine living there, let alone growing up there.

That evening we arrived in Derby (to rhyme with Furby), a decent sized town by the sea. Walking along the tidal mudflats to the wharf it felt like weeks since I’d been near the sea, and I had to remind myself that it had only been three days since I had watched the sunset at the Mindil Beach Market in Darwin. Driving through the bush had had that effect I think, seeing nothing but dust and rock and bush almost makes you forget you were ever near the sea. I can easily imagine how it sent some of the early pioneers into insanity, even before you take dehydration and hunger into account. Back at the caravan park we were treated to a free concert from an Irish guy who has lived in Australia for many years. He serenaded the Grey Nomad audience with his songs (complete with backing track) about the beauty of nature and how the sun shines in the children’s faces, with song titles like ‘Kununurra Man’ and ’90k’s from Darwin’. It was like a cross between an old people’s home and Butlin’s.

The town of Derby is built on a spit of land surrounded on three sides by reedy mudflats and then the sea. As such the town centre stops abruptly on these sides giving way to a vast flat space and lots of sky. It’s really very pretty and we spent the next morning looking around. For a small town it has an interesting history and care has been taken to preserve some of its historical features. This includes the old gaol, a ramshackle, open-sided tin hut which housed aboriginal prisoners in terrible conditions from 1906 until 1975. We also visited the Prison Tree on the edge of town, so called because it was a stopping point for aboriginal prisoners who were being brought to Derby for punishment or forced labour from more rural areas. The tree is a Boab tree, which have important spiritual significance in Aboriginal culture, and they are pretty cool trees. The species dates back 170 million years, while some individual trees are known to be over 1000 years old, and they look very distinctive. The trunks grow outwards, rather than upwards, becoming bulbous and swollen as they get older, but the branches remain relatively small. The tree is resistant to fire and as it grows the trunk becomes hollow inside. Like so many Australian plants and animals, they look a bit ‘not quite right’, like a child’s drawing of a tree, but they’re very nice all the same.

Driving into Broome, with its international airport, street lights, and defined parking spaces, was like landing back on Earth after a trip to space. We were back in civilisation, albeit still hundreds of miles from the nearest city, and I was ready for a bit of rest and relaxation.

Roadtrip: Darwin to WA Border

I had booked my train tickets a few months earlier in a moment of spontaneity, and it was a few weeks later that I started thinking about what I would do once I got to Darwin. To the west there appeared to be more or less nothing until you get to Perth, to the east is Cairns and the well-worn backpacker route of the east coast. I had heard good things about the east coast, but at the same time it sounded a bit hectic, a bit Gap Yah for me, and I quite wanted to do something different. But as I didn’t want to fly and couldn’t afford one-way car hire, transport through the all but uninhabited north west was looking problematic. I almost resigned myself to splashing out on an Intrepid tour, when I came across the idea of rental relocations.

The layout of the Australian road system lends itself to long-distance road trips, and because of the distances involved, many people will do a point-to-point rather than a round trip. This means there are cars and campervans that a returned in one place that need to somehow get back to their origin, and there are websites, like imoova and coseats, where you can find them. The fees are nominal and companies often reimburse some of your fuel, so the only costs are insurance, living costs, and petrol. The caveat is that you have a limited time frame to return the vehicle, and a mileage limit so you can’t take a roundabout route, and you put down a fairly hefty deposit to encourage you not to go AWOL.

Discovering this when I was still in Melbourne, I booked a two-seater kitted-out campervan to drive from Darwin to Broome, in Western Australia, over four days. I reasoned that I could either go on my own and see how I fared mentally with only myself for company, or if I met anyone on the way heading in that direction I could take them with me and share costs. I wasn’t sure which I option preferred (are you more likely to get murdered a) by a random stranger when you’re driving alone in the middle of nowhere or b) by a secretly psychotic almost-stranger while you’re driving with them in the middle nowhere?), but on the train to Darwin I met Cat, a youth worker from Leeds who was interested in heading in that direction and displayed no psychotic tendencies whatsoever. And so, after a few days in Darwin, we hit the road on my second Australian road trip.

Despite being more than twice the size of France, the Northern Territory has a population of just over 210,000. This is the smallest population of any Australian state or territory, including the tiny ACT (Australian Capital Territory) which is basically just Canberra. Around two thirds of this number live in Darwin, so the rest of the Territory is quite spectacularly empty on a scale that I can’t quite get my head around. For this reason, I was expecting our 1278 mile drive to be quite dull without anything much of interest to look at, and that was partly true. I hadn’t appreciated though how long distance driving changes the way you look at things. After an hour or so of driving through the bush, you find yourself noticing the smallest changes in the landscape, and pointing out things that under other circumstances would not be at all noteworthy. Aren’t the patterns on those rocks cool! Isn’t it weird how these bushes are different from those bushes before! Hey look, another termite mount! Cows! It’s weirdly therapeutic, to start noticing and appreciating the differences from one patch of emptiness to another.

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The route from Darwin took us south at first, following the Stuart Highway alongside the train line back to Katherine, and we stopped at the hot springs for lunch. I’ve had disappointing experiences with hot springs before, like in Banff where it was basically an overcrowded outdoor pool – nice views, but the turquoise tiles and chrome steps detracted from the naturalness a bit – but Katherine was lovely. From the car park you wouldn’t know there was anything there, there’s barely even a sign, but as we walked down the steps into the valley, we found a stream, interspersed with pools and small waterfalls, shaded by tropical leafy trees. It was really nicely done, with enough subtle handrails and sympathetic landscaping to feel natural and very relaxing.

Katherine Hot Springs

Carrying on into the afternoon, we headed west along the Victoria Highway passing through the (relatively) dramatic Gregory National Park. We stopped for fuel at the Victoria River Roadhouse, a remote, tiny place where the pump isn’t connected to the tills and they trust you to tell them how much you owe. One of the campervan rental conditions is that we were not allowed to drive between dusk and dawn, primarily because kangaroos have a habit of bounding into the road at sunrise and sunset, so we stopped for the night in Timber Creek, a settlement of 200 people centred around a hotel/roadhouse/caravan park on the highway. The creek itself, which runs along one end of the caravan park, is home to crocodiles (the hotel holds a croc feeding session for visitors every couple of days) and the surrounding tree contain the biggest bats I’ve ever seen in my life. Needless to say we picked a camping spot nice and far away from the creek.

Crocodile

Bats

Keen to get on, we got up bright and early the next morning, and after a couple of hours arrived at the Western Australian border at around 10:00am. Or at least, 10:00am Northern Territory time, as in the excitement of having to surrender all the fruit and veg we’d bought the previous day, we forgot about the 90 minute time change between the states. We didn’t notice until that evening, and spent the whole day living an hour and a half ahead of everyone else. Should’ve had a lie in.

Darwin and Litchfield National Park

All of the cities and bigger towns I’ve visited in Australia have been familiar on some level, whether they felt like they could be anywhere in the Western world like Alice Springs, or distinctly Englishy like Adelaide. Driving into Darwin, on the other hand, I was reminded more of Southeast Asia than of Europe.

It makes sense in a way; well above the Tropic of Capricorn, Darwin is closer to Singapore than it is to Sydney, and feels like a completely different country to the southeast coast. Coming into the city of the shuttle from the railway station and driving along the main drag of Mitchell Street, it reminded me of Phuket, with bars opening out onto the street, little Thai restaurants, and backpacker hostels pumping out the tunes. My hostel was one of these, full of eighteen year old Brits and Europeans out for a good time and making me feel very old.

In the day times, on the other hand, I felt comparatively youthful as I wandered around reading information boards surrounded by the same class of retired couples who had been on the Ghan. As well as the train travellers were the Grey Nomads, the Australian baby boomers who upon retirement buy a caravan, leave home – sometimes selling their houses – and spend months or years at a time driving around the country in a permanent state of vacation, often to the horror of their children.

Darwin is a bit of a confusing town; on the one hand it is a major city, the capital of the Northern Territory with an interesting history, lots of growth over the last few years, and a few hipster cafes to rival Melbourne, but on the other it feels like a bit of a backwater, left behind by the bigger cities in the southeast, with ugly buildings, tacky gift shops and few good restaurants. The buildings at least aren’t really it’s fault; all but leveled by Japanese air strikes in the Second World War, and then again by a cyclone in 1974, the city centre is all concrete. Having said that, the recently revamped Waterfront precinct is pleasant (despite reminding me a bit of the newer parts of Central Milton Keynes), and most of the inner harbour has been turned into a swimming area which is very pleasant. It’s also the location of the first attack on Australian soil by Japanese forces in the Second World War, which sank more ships than Pearl Harbour and lead to the city being evacuated.

Most people coming to the Top End go to one of the National Parks in the area, and I had booked on to a day trip to Litchfield National Park, which is a couple of hours’ drive away from Darwin and famous for having excellent waterfalls and swimming holes. Which surprised me when I heard about it, because I was under the understanding that northern Australia in general and this part of the Northern Territory specifically was Crocodile Country, which to me suggested that swimming anywhere might be a bad idea. But in typically casual Australian style, it was explained to me several times that I was perfectly safe for two reasons; it’s only saltwater crocodiles that kill humans, the freshwater crocodiles (or ‘freshies’) tend not to attack, and although saltwater crocs do come to Litchfield, it wasn’t the season for them to be there anyway. It was difficult not to see the crocodile warning signs stating a little too ambiguously for my liking that swimming was permitted, that saltwater crocodiles are not usually found here at this time of year, and that freshies rarely attack humans. But, I rationalised, the water was extremely clear, so I had a decent chance of seeing them coming, and besides there were plenty of people around who looked like they’d be slower swimmers than me.

I tend to think of waterfalls as a bit of a tropical backpacker cliché, but I have to admit Litchfield does it well. We went to three swimming spots with assorted walking trails, waterfalls, streams and pools, and all of them were lovely. There was enough signage and maintenance to feel like the area was looked after, but it was left alone enough that it still felt natural and serene, and although there were quite a lot of people, you never had to walk or swim far to find some peace and quiet. And of course, every carpark had seating areas and public barbecues. At Wangi Falls I climbed up the rocks into a hot tub-sized rock pool, at Florence Falls I swam behind a waterfall, and at the Buley Rockholes I just sat with my feet in the water, and it was all very lovely.

Buley Rockholes

Rock Pool at Wangi Falls

Alice Springs and the Train to Darwin

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Australia is a really big country. Even now that I’ve travelled across some of the biggest, emptiest bits, my brain still struggles to really accept it. And in more or less the middle of this big country is Alice Springs, a town in the middle of nowhere if ever there was one. The population is around 25,000, about the same as Skegness, and to get to anywhere bigger you’d need to drive for 16 hours on the Stuart Highway, either north to Darwin or south to Adelaide.

But the strange thing about Alice Springs is that it doesn’t feel particularly like an outback town stuck in the middle of nowhere. You don’t get to the edge of the town to see buildings abruptly give way to rolling desert and think wondrously, ‘if I walked in this direction non-stop I’d see nothing but bushland and desert for 20 days until I hit the Pacific coast’; there’s nothing in the people or the buildings that hammers home that you are in the middle of a desert, with no permanent river for hundreds of miles. Instead it feels more or less like any old small town. The town merges undramatically into the surroundings like towns do, high street becomes suburbs becomes light industry becomes bushland; the buildings are unremarkable with lots of concrete squareness and a few shopping centres; there’s even a Kmart and a Target.

That’s not to say that it is an unpleasant place to be, quite the opposite. As a popular tourist destination there are plenty of attractions to fill visitors’ time before or after their visit to Uluru, including a Reptile House, a Desert Park, and lots of Aboriginal art shops. There are also a few museums, including the wonderfully named Pioneer Women’s Hall of Fame, a collection of exhibits located in the former town gaol telling the stories of the first female European settlers in the outback, and more generally notable women of Australian history. The stories and pictures of these tough women, dressed up in Victorian and Edwardian finery in the heat and the dust, are fascinating, particularly that of Bertha Strehlow. In 1936 for their honeymoon, she and her husband went on an expedition into the outback with a team of camels, fighting thirst, disease and the heat. Bertha became seriously ill following a miscarriage during the trip, and would certainly have died if not for the assistance of an Aboriginal group that came upon them and nursed her back to health.

What is now the town of Alice Springs was originally a hamlet called Stuart, sitting between a Heavitree Gap, a space in the MacDonnell Ranges that is symmetrical and perfect enough to be man-made. First settled in the 1880’s when gold was found nearby, the population remained tiny until the Second World War, when it was used first as a depot base and later as a home for civilians after the evacuation of Darwin. Anzac Hill, overlooking the town and Heavitree Gap, pays tribute to this as well as being an important location for the Arrernte Aboriginal people.

Prior to the town being settled, Alice Springs began in 1872 as a telegraph repeater station on the line from Adelaide to Darwin and from there on to Europe. The site of the telegraph station, a few kilometres from the town, was named after what was mistakenly thought to be a permanent waterhole on the Todd River. The river, named after Sir Charles Todd, Postmaster General of South Australia, is dry for most of the year to the extent that several walking trails go straight through the river bed without so much as a stepping stone. I found this one afternoon as I walked along the river bank to the Telegraph Station a few days after an unseasonal thunder and hail storm and heavy rain. Because of this, parts of the river actually had water in it and arriving at the Telegraph Station I found my trail disappear down into the river and continue on the other side. Instead I followed a trail beyond the Telegraph Station, past a small cemetery housing some of the first telegraph operators, and up to the small rocky lump of Trig Hill. There were no other people around here at the edge of the bush, and I tried not to think about snakes and spiders, but in the end I encountered a much more welcome kind of wildlife. My guide on the Uluru tour a few days before had explained that we wouldn’t see much if any big wildlife – camels, wallabies or kangaroos – because the desert is big enough that they can easily and willingly avoid the roads and the people. But sure enough, on the walking trail I heard a rustle and a whine like a puppy from the bushes, and when I stopped, a young kangaroo hopped across the path, followed by two adult kangaroos. They all froze and stared when they saw me, and hastily hopped on a few metres when I moved, then stopping and staring again to see what I would do. Whenever they moved they went in the same direction as the path, so I followed them in this pattern for about ten minutes; I stopped, they stopped, we all stared, I walked on, they hopped on.

The second leg of my train trip felt much quicker than the first, and was much quieter. While the one Red Class carriage had been full leaving Adelaide, from Alice Springs it was less than half full, so everyone was able to spread out and be comfortable. The sun was setting as we left, and when I woke up the next morning we had left the Red Centre; the ground was brown, although still with a distinct orangey tint, and there was more greenery and farmland. At about 9am the train stopped in the town of Katherine for a few hours, for the all-inclusive passengers to do a cruise along the gorge, and I took the opportunity to go for short walk along the gorge and through the bush. It was a nice surprise excursion, a very welcome leg-stretch, and a lovely first experience of the Top End.

Returning to the train for the last few hours of the journey, I went to get a cup of tea from the café car and got chatting to the Train Manager, Wayne. Once the return to journey to Adelaide was complete, he would be going on a solo road trip to visit his daughter in Mount Isa, in outback Queensland, before carrying on to the north Queensland coast. I told him about my plan to drive a campervan from Darwin to Broome, and not only did he give me my tea for free, as a ‘fellow traveller’, he was also one of the first people I’d talked to who didn’t react like I was doing something scary and dangerous. “It’s a great thing, to drive around the country. Good on ya, mate”.

	Vicki on Perth and Fremantle
	Cheryl Wilson on Homeward Bound
	Mum on Homeward Bound
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	Wandering JM on The Ghan: Adelaide to Alice…