I’ve been putting off writing these blog posts for a while because it seems pretty daunting writing this whole 10-day trip down, but here I go. I’m going to try to break this up into multiple posts because there’s so much to write about!
Anyway, last week I got back from an awesome 10-day excursion in the outback of WA. When I mentioned in previous blog posts how isolated Perth is, it hadn’t quite hit me just how much. We drove about 4,000 km total, or 2,500 miles the whole trip up to Coral Bay and back, and barely saw a soul except for some roadhouses and random towns we stopped in along the way. It really was just endless expanses of wilderness. That being said, I was definitely thrown headfirst into a new experience. We slept in tents every night, were inundated with swarms (literally, SWARMS of thousands) of flies and crickets, and every other insect imaginable in the outback. It was great to be unplugged the whole trip…definitely the longest I’ve gone without the Internet. We spent a LOT of time on the bus each day travelling from place to place, especially on Day 1 and Day 2.
Day 1
On Friday, March 18th we left Murdoch and drove through Perth, going from city to deserted outback in a surprisingly short time. The scenery was incredible the whole trip. The first few days we took a scenic drive along the west coast. On day one, we made our way up through the town of Geraldton to our Northbrooke farm stay. We didn’t see anything too exciting because we were focused on making our way up north, but we did stop for lunch at a small park next to a gorgeous beach. How a beach this pretty could be so empty I have no idea, but that thought was repeated the whole trip.
We also saw a beautiful war memorial for the HMAS Sydney II ship that was sunk off the coast, overlooking a tiny coastal town. The Northbrooke farm stay was a really nice campsite, with a big mowed lawn for us to pitch our tents.
The beautiful war memorial, made out of silver gulls- when it was dedicated a huge flock of rare silver gulls flew over the ceremony.
Day 2
On the second day, we began another long day’s journey up to the Hamelin Pool campsite inside Shark Bay, which is a World Heritage Site in the Gascoyne region. It is 800 km north of Perth. The entire area’s population is less than 1,000 people, occupying less than 1% of the land. No wonder WA’s sometimes referred to as “the last frontier.”
I sat up front with the tour guide Ray, who was an awesome older guy from Belfast, Ireland, who's been in WA for 30 years and loves nature. He swerved out of the way of this Blue Tongued Shingleback Skink and pulled over so we could see it. The skink kept sticking its tongue out to scare us off, and did it to the bus too when we first pulled over! Brave little guy.
I took a lot of shots of the road. Here's just one of many:
Along the way we stopped at Nature’s Bridge off of Kalbarri National Park.
We also spent some time exploring Murchison River in Kalbarri National Park. Aside from the beautiful scenery, we also saw a wild goat and kangaroo hopping in the valley below.
We finally made it up to Hamelin Pool, where we stayed for 2 nights. The first night we got there I was not excited at all about the campsite- the small grassy area was a bit overgrown and it was getting dark when we got there, so it was quite a surprise to step on the grass and find a jumping mass of grasshoppers. I’ve literally never seen so many in my life…you would step down and about 20 would jump. It was like all of us were setting up our tents on a popcorn hotplate. They would just constantly jump and crash into you, and if you know how I am about bugs you can probably imagine me flailing and hopping around while trying to set up the tent with my friend Emily Tucker. To make matters worse, all of a sudden my friend Cori screamed and limped out of the campsite…bit by a spider. Nevertheless we threw shoes and socks on, set up our tent, and threw everything inside as fast as possible! After that it wasn't so bad and we all just hung out until we crashed for the night.
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