Western Australia – Bungle Bungles, Broome, 80 Mile Beach, Karijini NP, Perth and beyond!
January 10th, 2006We crossed the border into WA late on 30th Nov, though the only immediate differences we noticed were needing to put the clock back 1 ½ hours, and having to surrender all our fruit and veg (which we’d unwittingly got loads of – bad planning!). There’s something like 260 diseases, bugs or other undesirable things they have in the NT that they don’t have in WA, so they’re very strict about not allowing anything risky across the border. Fortunately, they at least let us in after we promised that we were disease-free and had even had a shower each that morning 
The top north-west corner of WA consists of the Kimberley region, full of big rivers and waterfalls, gorges and bulbous boab trees. However, it’s also notoriously inaccessible unless you’ve got a 4WD plus a high tolerance for bumpy roads and relentless heat, so instead we treated ourselves to what turned out to be one of the highlights of our entire trip: a 45-minute helicopter ride over the Bungle Bungle Range (or Purnululu to give it its correct traditional name).
The stripey beehive domes at Purnululu NP (aka The Bungle Bungle Range)
We couldn’t decide which bit was more exciting – the stunning palm-tree filled gorges, canyons and stripey ‘beehive’ rock formations, or just the helicopter ride itself! Our pilot was great, swooping low at over the precipes at 120mph and making fast 90 degree turns into gorges. Given that his favourite phrase was “I shouldn’t really be doing this, but seeing as there’s no-one around today…”, we got to see quite a few added extras that weren’t listed in the brochure
Very happy customers at the end of our helicopter ride over Purnululu NP
Our next port of call was Broome – lovely Broome where we ended up spending twice as much time as we’d originally planned to! Up until now, the searing heat had made it almost impossible to sit out in the daytime and enjoy ourselves, so we made up for lost time here, notching up lots of pool time and getting to work on our tans (or lack thereof!). Cable Beach at Broome is one of Australia’s most beautiful beaches (it’s where we took that ‘Christmas photo’ of the two of us), and being west-facing, it also gets perfect sunsets almost every evening.
The warm, azure waters and blue sky of Broome’s coastline
There are enough great bars and restaurants to keep anyone happy, and a great choice of places to go to watch the sun set. Our favourite spot had to be the Sunset Bar on Cable Beach where we sat out on a Sunday evening, enjoying a drink or three with the sounds of a live didge being played in the background and the sunset turning the sky mad shades of pink and orange through the palm trees…
Gorgeous sunset hues at Cable Beach in Broome
Another really cool thing in Broome was the outdoor cinema – rows of deckchairs out under the stars combined with a full-size screen. It’s a superb way to watch a film, especially if there are any boring bits – there always seemed to be something new in the night sky to check out. Throughout our travels in Oz so far, we’d marvelled at the stars just about every night – I’m sure they have more of them over here, and they’re definitely brighter! Given this, we went on an ‘Astro Tour’ from Broome one night – basically, a bloke with a big beard and even bigger telescopes talking us through what we were seeing and teaching us some great things about planetary movements, navigating using the stars and all the rest. A great experience – we’ll have to do the same for the northern hemisphere when we get back!
We did eventually have to tear ourselves away from the delights of Broome to wend our way down the west coast where many more incredible sights and experiences awaited us.
A giant turtle at 80-Mile Beach preparing a hole to lay its eggs in
At the amazing 80-Mile Beach, we watched as a giant turtle heaved its way up the beach to the dunes where it spent an exhausting ½ hour or so digging a hole to lay its eggs in, then a similar amount of time burying them. Hard work being a turtle!
We also spent a day at Karijini NP which is packed with sheer red-rock gorges and plateaux, and beautiful swimming holes.
Looking across Handrail Pool at Karijini National Park
As well as being stunning to look at, there were loads of opportunities for clambering along the floor of the narrow gorges (which were semi-dry on the day we visited), and for taking cooling dips in the swimming holes.
From Karijini, we went on to Coral Bay - a diver’s and snorkeller’s delight within the reserves of the Ningaloo Marine Park. There we spent a few days snorkelling, checking out the reef sharks, sea rays and green turtles, and generally enjoying the paradise-like beaches and crystal-clear waters.
Reef sharks at Coral Bay
The coral and fish at Ningaloo are very impressive, and unlike the Great Barrier Reef, very easily accessible as there are thick ‘forests’ of coral only about 100m from the shore in places. Fantastic.
We also visited the Monkey Mia further down the coast, which is renowned for the dolphins that turn up every morning to check out the tourists and play around with each other in their inimitable way.
Dolphins at Monkey Mia
Just a little further down the coast, we got well and truly soaked at some frenzied blowholes. Jez got some great video footage but slightly trashed his camera in the process. Oops Still, it made a decent enough recovery, only for me to subsequently spill several glasses of wine over it at a later date (see footnote!).
The frenzied blowholes on the coast north of Carnavon
After many more pleasant evenings at beachside campsites, not to mention the odd bottle or two of wine or VB, we finally hit Perth in time for Christmas and a very welcome last-minute improvement in the weather. It’s been Perth’s coldest summer on record, but just as Christmas arrived, so did some very pleasant 80f temperatures, allowing us to fulfil the ‘Christmas on the beach’ Ozzie cliche!
We spent the days in between Christmas and NY kitting ourselves out with a lovely shiny new surfboard each. It took us a fair few days to find exactly the right boards, and by the time we got ourselves sorted, the surf had transformed itself into classic onshore mush, frustrating our efforts to properly try out our new boards! Whilst in Perth, we also took a day trip over to pretty Rottnest Island where we hired bikes and cycled the entire circumference of it (it’s only 11kms each way admittedly!).
One man and his (new!) board
New Year’s Eve in Perth was great, though the hangover that followed it wasn’t quite so much fun. We headed out from Perth on the 2nd Jan and spent a couple of days visiting my rellies who moved out here 38 years ago. It was great to see them after so long (the last time I saw most of them was in the late 1970’s when I was almost too young to remember it in much detail!) and we experienced the full authentic Ozzie BBQ with them too.
We also spent a fab few days around the Margaret River area. Margaret River is a big wine-producing area so we did the obligatory wine tour, which was fantastic - we even got to blend our own Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot to help teach us a bit more about the wine-making process. The tour was set up for people like us who don’t really know that much about the technicalities of wine, but who enjoy quaffing a glass or two and are interested in finding out what they do and don’t like. You certainly get to try a lot of wine on the tour - something like 40 different varieties at four different vineyards - though by wine no. 36 we were flagging just a bit… Margaret River seems to be all about good living - great wine, great food (cheese, chocolate, olive oil and venison are just a few of the local specialities) and great beaches.
We took our new boards out a few times, though with limited success - it’s safe to say that there’s not a lot of surf breaks around here for the novice-to-intermediate surfer. Hence, we generally spent more time getting pummelled into the seabed than surfing, but we at least got some good paddling and duck-diving practice in!
After Margaret River, we began to make our way down to the very south of WA, only to get unexpectedly stuck in a laid-back little town (Walpole) as the gearbox on our van spontaneously imploded on itself. The best thing is that we only swapped our original van for this one back in Perth a couple of weeks ago, due to the clutch going on that one…
Another van bites the dust
It wasn’t ideal losing days worth of time, but to be honest, we were so pleased that we broke down here instead of the middle of nowhere that we quite enjoyed ourselves. We got to know quite a few of the locals - the RAC pickup guy, the mechanic, the taxi driver and so on - and kept ourselves entertained with the local sights which include the stunning Treetop Walk in the Valley of the Giants - massive, centuries-old Red Tingle trees with a brilliantly constructed 40-metre high walkway winding its way through them.
The 40m high treetop walk at the Valley of the Giants
We also climbed the Gloucester Tree (a 60m Red Tingle tree) for incredible views of the surrounding forest. Full respect goes out to ‘Vertigo Boy’ Jez who got all the way to the top and who seems to be overcoming his fear of heights. After the church spire we climbed in Ecuador, nothing seems quite as scary these days!
The new gearbox soon turned up and was quickly fitted by Stan the mechanic, enabling us to get back on the road to Adelaide, via the notoriously boring Nullarbor Plain (Nullarbor translates in Latin as ‘No trees’). The ‘highlight’ of the drive is a 90-mile stretch of road that is absolutely dead straight - not a bend or curve in sight. So if that’s the high-point of the drive, you can imagine how exciting the other 1500 miles were. Urgh!
You can see the rest of our Western Australia photos (and there are lots - we have been here for 6 weeks after all!) on our photo site.
Final footnote - in a move that will impress those of you who know that I’m prone to the occasional bout of clumsiness, I managed to drop my camera into a storm drain about a week ago, prematurely ending its life. I was gutted about it for days, though at least the flash cards survived their dunking even if the camera didn’t. This was shortly followed by spilling not one but two glasses of wine on Jez’s camera during the wine tour, nearly putting an end to that one too. So I’m taking a break from photos for a while - if only because Jez daren’t let me near his camera til I’ve stopped trashing them…
