Ah the west coast...

Last blow-out in Perth with my Danielle




Have been on the road for a week now, travelling north from Perth through the wilds of Western Australia. Life in these parts can be very rural and 'local'.


Well that's half the luggage in...


After a bit of a cock-up with the hire car and a swap of cars, we left late on Monday, July 16 and headed for nearby Quinn's Rock - about an hour and half north of Perth centre. We managed to put our tents up in the dark and get a half-decent, if very cold, night's sleep and work our gas stoves in the morning for a cuppa and pasta and sauce.

Then we headed up to Cervantes, a small town near the Pinnacles desert. Near the sea, it is a sandy landscape covered in phallic shaped pinnacles of varying sizes - all very eerie as the sun set.



The roads can be very straight, with bush extending as far as the eye can see in all directions, the odd car passing on the other side, many dead kangaroos on the hard shoulders, road trains and red sandy earth.

We spent the following day travelling to Horrocks Beach - a tiny town by the sea past the weird 'local town for local people' Geraldton. It seemed that way to us anyway.

We arrived as the sun was setting (below) and found a cabin on the campsite for the night. The next morning we walked along the deserted beach soaking up the sun.



After visting the pink salt lakes at Port Headland (something to do with beta carotene), we visited the weird and wonderful independent Hutt River Province.

The farmers here had a dispute with the aussie government back in the 1970s over wheat prices or something similar, and declared themselves independent.

Down a rough and dusty red road, the province is pretty tiny and the 'capital' consists of a toilet block, a few rough and ready homes, a tea room, gift shop/museum, a chapel and a post office complete with their own stamps, visa passport stamps, national anthem and money. Very very weird, not least because it was not at all tongue-in-cheek. Princess Shirley (below), who showed us around, was not laughing at all.




Then we headed for Kalbarri - a pretty town next to a national park full of impressive gorges and rock formations. We spent a couple of nights here chilling out and investigating the gorges and spending evenings with a couple of Brit lads and a Swedish girl we had befriended. One of the lads broke my camera at the Hutt River Province by dropping it in sand...



It was then a haul up the coast to Denham at Shark Bay. The bay area is a conservation zone and is rich in marine wildlife and geology etc. We stopped off at the Stromalites, weird 'living' rocks made by bacteria that apparently hold the key to evolution, and Shell Beach - a huge crescent of tiny shell dunes.

Denham itself is a small, fairly decent town but the major attraction here is Money Mia - a place wild dolphins have come to the beach everyday for decades. So we popped over there to see which of the regulars turned up for a fish or two and saw two females and a baby. Very cute.

On a walk around the headland afterwards we saw red kangaroos too - a bit of a wildlife bonza.

After Denham, we made a long trip up to Coral Bay - the start of the Ningaloo reef. We spent a few nights here. The weather is now hot enough to sunbathe and we;ve ditched the mulit-layering needed to camp at night and scarves and hats have been consigned to the bottom of the rucksacks.

Coral Bay saw us snorkelling off the aptly named Paradise Beach - an unspoilt stretch where the reef lies just metres from the shore.

Now we are at Exmouth and are to dive with whale sharks tomorrow and hopefully see some manta rays, dugongs, sharks etc. It's not a bad life...