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Perth!
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After a 3 hour flight from Alice Springs, we arrived at Perth, the world's most remote capital city (capital of the state) . We then picked up our home for the 10 days in Western Australia! It was a Maui campervan! We were very excited to get this, I had never stayed in a Caravan before, and Marie was especially pleased as it had a built in shower and WC! Imagine eating out for 3 months.............actually it is heaven tehehe, but we were excited to go to the supermarket and buy 10 days worth of food that we specifically wanted to eat. Talk about thinking of everything! We got shown the camper, but they forgot to tell us some fundamental things, like how to make the bed up, they didn't tell us how to stop the van from draining straight out into the road (we only found out 3 days later!!) No chemicals, and the water ran out 2 days into the trip! However we finally managed to work it all out! Once the technicalities were worked out, it was great to have the freedom to stop anywhere, and not have to pay for a hotel! In Western Australia, you can pretty much stop anywhere they don't have the no camping sign or in a town!
We headed over to my mates place, John Lipscombe. I had worked with him in London, and now he has moved back to his home. We parked up at a very leafy part of town, and we felt a bit like a gypsy in the neighbourhood! Our timing was not the best, because Emma had just had a baby girl days before, called Sylvy! We were very privileged to have met Sylvy! Also on our first night we had local tour advisor JV to help us! He had travelled around Oz before in a dingy!!So he was full of lots of great advice. We spent an hour or so discussing the options of heading north to the Ningaloo Reef or south to the wine region of the Margaret River. Heading north was a very long drive (2 days at least) but the destination was fantastic, heading south was an much easier drive, but the weather would be dodgy. In the end, after it rained all night in Perth on the roof of our tin can, we decided to bite the bullet and head north to the sun shine, it's not every day you can drive to a reef area, and we figured the Wine Regions were something we could do much closer to home in Europe.
The next morning, we got our supplies, and got on the road! The journey was very interesting, for the first hour the landscape was quite a lot like the UK, it reminded Marie of the areas around Gloucester. Then the areas were wine regions, with wineries dotted all along the road. The landscape then dramatically changed to arid scrubland, with rolling fields full of interesting things like emu farms and lots and lots of cows and sheep. We stopped off on a great beach just south of a town called Gladstone. It was fantastic to just stop where we wanted, have an amazing beach just outside and watch a fantastic sunset with some sun downers, then jump back into our campervan to make dinner and have a sleep.
Next day another long day's drive, the weather now was nice and hot, and we passed lots of farming areas, and very few town on the way up. We stopped at a great spot for lunch, which overlooked the flat landscape of the surrounding area. Finally just before sunset we arrived at our destination Coral Bay! Only to find there was no space at any of the only 2 camping sites in town, (typically we had timed it to coincide with the kid having holidays so all the camping sites in town were booked up) This could have been cool we have a sink a campervan full of food, toilet and shower !!!!!!!!!! Unfortunately for us this is when we discovered the toilet was full, and we had no water for the shower and cooking and this town had a ban on campervans filling up in their town and in Australia style the next town was 2 hours away. We had been driving since 7 and now it was getting dark so we shamefully snuck into the camp site and filled up lots of large bottles of water to cope for one evening. On the bright side we had a bed and that is usually the thing we are looking for every evening. The beauty of having our campervan was that it didn't matter, we just drove a little way out of town and parked up in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere! The stars were fantastic out here. No light pollution, and it was so fresh waking up in the middle of the field!
More thumbnails ...
Where I stayed:
Our campervan
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