My next stint across the great land that is known as Australia is my road trip from Darwin down to Broome this again is quite a large distance which will take over 20 hours but is only an inch on the map, and for this I have recruited a new face for the journey: Bob from Holland who looks a bit like Dirk Kuyte….fortunately for me I still had two of the old new gang still with me although I do think it is because of the cheapness of the travelling and not my company or wit that has kept them with me however I was excited about Western Australia which covers 1/3 of Oz and is 10x bigger than England as I have been told it is much more relaxed and the majority of the backpackers are older so fingers crossed. I am now about half way around the ‘big loop’ here and am on time however I do need to take some more time to get to Perth as it is starting to get cold and I know I have been moaning about the humidity and temp in Darwin and the North but I just had rain today all day (16/5) and it was a stark reminder of how depressing rain and clouds are.
The theme for this trip was camping so to enable me to spend less money with that I took the girls down to B W (sort of like a super Woolworths) to get the camping gear they would need also giving them the advice I had been given earlier on my travels however this fell on death ears when it came to paying a little bit more but more on that latter. There are many places to camp throughout Australia whether it be in a free rest stop, in a national park or in a camp site so I left Darwin without a plan of where to stay compared to the Alice trip where everything was planned to the last detail this either makes people more excited or scared but being a professional non planner this was like second nature to me so I reassured the team that “all would be well and what’s the worst that can happen” to which the girls thought that those words must have been someone’s last words.
The first place we stopped was Litchfield national park which is around 2 hours away and is on par with Kakadu but is more assessable with 2WD again this is a problem as many of the best places to visit or roads to drive are not sealed or have rivers cutting through them so a 4WD would be amazing to have as I would be able to go anywhere but this would bring its own hazards as we are quite safe on the highway but on unsealed roads with no reception and a broken vehicle is the difference between life and death. It does seem like all the national parks have the same thing but I decided that this road trip I would take longer and see more instead of constant driving so we visited the water falls, rock pools and swam in the billabongs which were croc free for the day, many of the falls have swimming and many people decide to climb to the top and ‘tombstone’ into the water below however this is not my thing as people don’t often know of the hidden rocks and they end up paralysing themselves so I opt out of that same reason I didn’t get a Thai Massage in Bangkok I like my back working if its not broke don’t try and fix it. Litchfield is a very dry place sparse of green and is full of termite mounds, thousands cover the site and they range in sizes from traffic cone size to 10 meters tall. Litchfield is a relatively small national park when compared to its sister Kakaduu it’s only the size of Ireland.
After a refreshing swim the girls and Bob had their first taste of ‘camping’ and the advice I gave them to buy a 4 person tent for the three of them now seemed a good idea well worth the extra 10 bucks, the only way to describe the three of them in their three birth tent was like fat guy with thong on (cramped). The camping was cheap only $6.60 each which we didn’t even need to pay as the ranger did not come round, the only thing I can say about camping though is that it is boring as you generally have to set up camp before nightfall then eat by then its 19:00 and there is not much too do unless you have booze or the Swedish National Bikini Team in the next site so camping is a bit boring. After we left Litchfield we busted through the boarder from Northern Territories into Western Australia…well less busted more searched and checked: drugs, illegal immigrants, booze, pornography, dead hookers in the boot, Rolf Harris DVD’s I hear you ask………NO!! There is much worse contraband around like fruit, honey, vegetables’ and seeds stuck to our flip flops, I honestly thought that I was going to be cavity searched it was that serious, however the Dutch guy was not too bothered but he is Dutch after all……is jam ok is marmalade safe shit is my nutella safe swirled in my mind oh my god it reminded me of Bali airport where the death penalty is mandatory for being a mule, I am surprised they didn’t have sniffer dogs specially trained to find the deadly egg plant or highly toxic sunflower seed! Well Mr Jobs Worth he didn’t check every bag and we had two bananas, we are surely on Australia’s most wanted right now and I can expect them to make the next series of Underbelly* about this incident…….Underbelly: The man from Del Monte – International fruit smuggler
Driving these long distances people do not understand how tiring it can be as I do not have the luxury of closing my eyes for 5 seconds let alone the ¾ of the journey the rest of them close their eyes while the rest of the time they read their books so when I drive a stint of 10 hours when I get to the campsite set up the tent cook dinner I am exhausted and generally want to go straight to bed but when I do I get called antisocial or grumpy. In the last blog I commented how the people I travelled with have to go to the car umpteen times in the night to get stuff they have forgot so with me going to bed at 18:30 I decided to let them have the car keys a move I later regretted and the only way to describe it is like in the story Pinocchio where he becomes a real boy and goes to the carnival and runs amok the boot which was 3 feet away from my tent must have been opened at least 25 times with the last being at 02:00 WHAT THE HELL DO THEY WANT AT 0200??? I didn’t even ask as it would have been something ridiculous. In this second camp ground we got to camp 50 feet from freshwater crocodiles which we got to see being fed but don’t worry the Australian says they are only freshwater they wont attack……..Its a bloody crocodile I don’t care if it prefers salt or freshwater if its got more teeth than the Jackson family then I don’t want to camp near it without rangers with 12 gauges guarding me! Lucky for me one of the girls is always happy-go-lucky and accommodating to my moods and it’s never long before I get brought around with her 24/7 happiness. When driving long distances with out any stimulating conversation (e.g. “Start a conversation” Jess: “I ate 7 kiwis once and was sick….but I don’t blame the kiwi”) you start to think a lot and I think I might have worked out why I am not having the best* time during the last few trips, its because I have not met a ‘mate’ and I don’t mean making noises or flapping my coloured feathers I mean a mate like Jay and Eddy in Thailand or Geoff and Gav in India or Hally/Jess/Tony/Nea in Cammy B or John/Oli/Tim in East coast I need that person you can have a crack with who is much like you……….I need to meet some English! *With that said the girls are quite good to travel with and Jess will probably carry on travelling with me until Perth so I can’t be all bad and I am having a good time experiencing a different kind of travelling.
The next day Colombo Sherlock and the doctor from Diagnosis Murder decided we should only drive 3 hours to Kunnuroo and camp there so we can go to a Rodeo cue whip crash sound and ‘yea haa’ We explored everything Kunnuroo had to offer with its markets and town centre so with 25 minutes wasted we went back to the camp site and the girls and Bob went to swim where I tried to have a well earned cat nap. Another problem with camping is that you cant get into the tent in the day and sleep its like walking into a pre heated oven (fan assisted) so I laid the sleeping foam mat on the grass and tried to get a couple of hours before the big event that night well after 20 minutes of broken sleep I awoke thinking I was on a slip and slid mat I actually had to shake the mat of my sweat so with that feeling dizzy from losing half of my body water I went with the others to the pool to cool down which is where I met the first English person who was half decent the first since the Whitsundays. The Rodeo was everything you would expect line dancing bad clothes and the smell of cow pat and that was just us! The speaker on the tannoy was incoherent much like the tannoy on the tube stations so we had to get the jist of it ourselves how long can the man stay on the bull and to be fair they were not that good see I have stayed on the mechanical bull for a good full 120 seconds on the ‘shit scared’ setting so I was not that impressed when a lot of them fell off 3 secs after the gates opened 1 second before I got the camera recording! The event was full of the people you would expect but it was a good night and well worth $15.
That night was a washout no not the Rodeo but it rained all night and I forgot to put the water cover on the tent so I was in the car and the other three stayed in their leaky tent….alas our love affair with camping ended with that night and had to beg and seduce the manager of the next stops motel to drop his $50 buck a night each to $35 which she did so we could have a bed. With a room to ourselves we charge up the million electrical items every backpacker/flash packer has, lucky for us the motel has a multitude of plug sockets unlike the bloody hostels which have a measly 2 sockets for 8 people. One thing I have noticed about the West Coast is that there is so many French people this maybe because we are camping but I am getting quite concerned about how many there are as they tend to be the rudest…..however there are no English people seeing one is a unusual as it seems to be French and German.
Before Broome we went to Geikie National park to see its gorge which was a 2 hour trek then along the river bed where we got to see more crocs……see photos below but really it is pretty much the same thing in Australia and the drives are becoming less rewarding as I have seen all this before in every other state the only one I think that might be quite different would be Tasmania but we will see.
We finally got to Broome and the caravan park that I was recommended as it was very social we were told by others that it was disgusting soooo we ended up on another campsite which was cheaper so it all worked out in the end. The trouble with me getting to Broome was the one thing I wanted to do was the ‘staircase to the moon’ which I could have missed by a day and would then have to wait a month for the next one but luckily I only have 10 days to wait so figuring I will never be here again I will chill out for 10 days here reading and relaxing so I can see this wonderful event.
Broome is famous for its 80 mile beach called Cable beach, this beach is one of the nicest I have seen it has white sands and azure sea its famous for its sunset and for the low tides at full moon where the moon reflects on the mud flats and creates the illusion that there is a stairway to the moon. Stinger season is just about ending so unlike Darwin we are actually allowed to enter the sea. Broome is a very small town but has some cool little cafes and bars but it is very expensive here, I am expecting that the entire places bar Perth on the West Coast will be expensive as it is much less built up compared to the East.
Some of the activities coming up in the coming months will be: Fruit picking, swimming with Whale Sharks, cage diving with Great Whites and skydiving but with 10,000 km clocked up and 13,000 more to go there is still much more to tell.
*To my English chums Underbelly is the only good show to come from this place as it portrays famous Oz criminals in a glamorous light.
Enjoy work everyone
Well Mr Grumpy, you must have been using all of your persuasive charms that night to get the motel owner to drop the price of the rooms. Imagine begging for the reduction in the price of a hotel room back home, not a chance!
ReplyDeleteGlad your keeping a safe distance from those Crocodiles.
But Skydiving Chris......YOU MUST BE MAD!!
P.S. Just make sure the person who packs your parachute is not an ex British builder. You know how slap dash they are!
Love Mom xx