Note 24/05/2014 - I wrote this almost 6 years ago and it was not intended to be a formal review. It was my personal experience of a not so great road trip. In hindsight I do not think lack of planning was the problem, we actually planned quite a bit, it was the fact that we hardly had any money left. The amount of times I heard myself saying, 'it's be nice to return here without a backpack'. Backpacking is an amazing experience but I wish I'd had more money when I was trvelling. Then I could have experienced all those amazing things that people do on holiday. Western Australia does have nice scenery, good weather and would probably make the perfect (Australian) honeymoon destination. I guess Australia just was not one of my favourite places.
We decided that we should see some more of Western Australia while we were here so we planned a 2 week road trip to Broome and back. The reason for us driving back to Perth was because the car hire company wanted to charge us a relocation cost which was more than the car hire itself.
We set off early and after managing to find ourselves on a road that suddenly ended we ate McDonalds and headed off on a more successful journey to Kalbarri. It took us over 9 hours to get there including a stop off at the pinnacles along the way (a very strange sight). The last bit was through a pitch black national park without phone reception, we realised later that this is normal in Western Australia. We managed to miss our check in at the YHA so instead we stayed at a lovely B&B called Lola Rose - I recommend it highly and she does a really nice breakfast too!
Denham - Another long day in the car, the roads here are so incredible boring. It's what I imagine driving across another planet would be like, all red sand and small bushes. The highlight of our journey was guessing what the piles of bones on the side of the road used to be and the dead cows are truly fascinating, they seem to inflate like a blown up balloon right after they die. We did get to see the shell beach which as the name gives away is a beach entirely made of shells, personally I think I found the cows more interesting.
Coral Bay - We woke up at 6:30am and went to Monkey Mia to feed the dolphins. They are wild ones which come into the bay to be fed every morning. It was actually a nice, free (we couldn't work out where you paid as everythnig else was closed) experience. The dolphin people talked a little too much (there's only so much you can take in at 6 in the morning) but in the end we were able to hand the dolphins some dead fish. We drove for the rest of the day only stopping for a Chicken Treat (WA's favourite fast food), when we arrived at the YHA in Coral Bay we found out that we couldn't take our beers in so instead we smuggled them in like teenagers and then drank the rest on the beach...there's really not a lot to do here but it is very pretty!
Exmouth - On the way here we saw a massive (and I mean massive) bird eating a Kangaroo, it's wingspan was ridiculous!! Surprisingly enough, there's not a huge lot to do in Exmouth either but they do have wild emus walking around which is always fun if not a little scary (Rod Hull's was a little violent, we weren't sure if these would be!!).
Karratha - Another day in the car......we arrived in Karratha where's there's nothing, but there was a hostel with a tele! We chatted to some lads at the hostel and their highlight of living there was visiting Woolworths!
Broome!!! - Yes we finally arrived in Broome which we had heard nice things so we were hoping we'd like it. Our hostel was a really nice resort with a great pool and bar area. The rooms are a little odd. We were lucky to get one upstairs with air con, the only problem with this is that the walls don't join up to the roof which means you can hear in detail what everyone in the other 3 rooms are doing. I really did feel sorry for the guy next door desperately trying unsucessfully to persuade a girl to sleep with him and the family with the small children the other way that had to listen to the drinking games from the furthest room.
Broome really didn't get any more interesting than that, we attempted to see the staircase to the moon twice but the moon didn't actually appear. We also tried to see the dinosaur's footprints but couldn't find them. It's a nice enough place to go to but so is Hull and I'd never recommend anyone to drive across Europe to spend a few days there!
The drive home was a different route, we stopped at Munjina (hehehe) where Lucy made friends with some local miners and then we had a very scary stop at a nice little place in Nallan. We stayed in the shearer's quarters on our own, the lights went off at 10pm so we sat in the pitch black trying to stop the bugs (millions of them) from crawling in our ears. The scariest part was the fact that it looked like the set from a horror movie, I kept expecting someone to pop their head over the wall chainsaw in hand!!
We were back Perth way a day early due to rain so we drove East to Hyden. We stayed in a really nice cabin in the Wave Rock national park. The rock itself is actually a really cool sight, it literally looks like a wave.
After a quick visit to Bambu and a pizza from our favourite dominoes we went to the airport to catch our flight to Sydney. Western Australia has been nice (all 6500k of it that we saw) but I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone to go out of their way to go there. The beaches are lovely and Fremantle and Perth are nice towns but you really are far away from everywhere and if someone asks me again if I've seen the film Wolf Creek (which incidently is not far from Broome) I'll scream!!! no I haven't and I never will!!!
