The road trip from Perth to Darwin

Flying into Perth at 1am, it's always strange trying to orientate yourself in a town at night. Our hostel left very little to be desired; all the bathrooms were wrecked through varying amounts of bodily fluids and who knows what and I awoke at night to find my bed rocking thanks to the inhabitants on the bottom bunk. Leaving early in the morning to go and buy supplies, being the most unprepared person out of the group I had to buy hiking boots, a sleeping bag and some basic first aid bits. Once the man in the hiking shop had truly freaked me out that I was going to die in the bush, convinced me to buy a wooly hat and I had visions of Wolf Creek going through my head we went to collect the car and meet the other girls.

The Pinnacle Desert.

We decided we were going to head towards Cervantes and the Pinnacle Desert. Getting to our first camp site we realised that the tents supplied by Travellers Auto Barn, who we hired the car from, had no outer sheets. We managed to bodge together one tent from the two inners and emptied the car so we could sleep there. Five girls in one Ford Falcon estate is cramped enough, let alone when it's a bedroom as well. Thankfully our tent neighbours took pity on us and gave us their lovely 4 man tent the next day.
The Pinnacle Desert is all these rock structures that look like weird fingers pointing out of the sand, in fact the Aboriginal stories are that they are fingers of the dead trying to drag people down. No-one knows how they are formed; trees that have been fossilised by sand is the most popular answer at the moment.
Heading up to Kalbari National Park afterwards, camped and readied ourselves for the first day of proper hiking. Our first site was the Mushroom Rock loop walk which want right down to the sea, you could climb up the rocks and watch the sea crash about, brilliant. Also got to see the first wild red kangaroo. Then we moved onto the Nature's Window walk, 8km up and down 300m high gorge. It was beautiful, scrambling up the sides of gorges, swimming in the rivers, saw wallabies and kangaroos, trapdoor spiders and amazing sights. 

Nature's Window.

The lost path...

Deciding to head to Billabong for the night, we ran out of petrol half way and again found ourselves being saved by Australian's who take pity on us. Thankfully this guy had enough petrol to siphon us off some so we could get to Billabong for the night. Waking up early to discover we had been eaten by midges in the night, we headed to Shark Bay for some scuba diving and snorkelling. Shark Bay is lovely, the sea comes right up the the main road in the town and there's a lot of natural features, it's one of the few places that has wild dugongs so it was surprising to get there and find a lot had closed down and there was no scuba company there any more. It's a real shame and as a result we decided to go straight over to Canarvon and then on to Coral Bay. 

Coral Bay was packed full of hippies, divers and general travellers. We decided on a manta ray dive and snorkel over the Ningaloo Reef. It was amazing, we saw huge 5-7m manta rays feeding off the bottom doing enormous loop-de-loop's, also saw sea turtles, coral and we had a stalker fish who we named Bob. All manta rays have different markings on their underside, like a fingerprint, so each of the one's we saw we could then search for back on the ship's log. 

Leaving Coral Bay we moved onto Karijini National Park/Tom Price, en route blowing out a tyre that took a lot of muscle to change it. Karijini was the closest I'd come so far to the wild life, camping in the National Park I saw red back spiders, other spiders I couldn't name but ran away from, huge biting ants, all sorts of animals moving around in the night and termite mounds taller than me. Our first walk through the park was the Kalamina Gorge, we had to cling to the rock faces at parts but the contrast of the red rock and the turquoise water was stunning. We went swimming in the Fortescue Falls and Circular Falls to cool down, it's amazing to be able to swim under waterfalls and dry off in the sun. 

Towed...

Staying overnight in Port Hedland, we went onto Broome. In Broome our cars breaks failed thanks to a mixture of problems we later found out. Here is my one major traveller advice: do NOT hire a car from Travellers Auto Barn, they are awful and extremely unhelpful, particularly when your car is broken and you are stuck. Thanks to a lovely customer rights lawyer in Broome, Annetta, she managed to get our car back on the road for us and save our road trip. Broome itself is pretty, but very small. Spending more than the three days we were there and you've run out of things to do really. 

This was our final stretch to Darwin, our car was fixed and things were looking up after a stressful few days. 

Wangi Falls.

Moving on up to Katherine, we watched the last match of the State of Origin, QLD won 34-22 much to Amanda's annoyance and saw lots of snakes, wold hogs and cows on the roads as well as a toppled over road train which was pretty scary, luckily no-one was hurt. In Katherine we went to the hot springs for a morning swim which was lovely, even if the crocodile signs were a bit of-putting! Leaving Alix in Katherine with relatives we headed onto Litchfield National Park for our final hike and camp. Litchfield was possible the best one yet, we walked the Walker Creek path, saw the Wangi Falls and the rainforest walk, Tolmer Falls and Buley Rockholes and Florence Falls. Swimming at Florence Falls was breathtaking, a huge waterfall you could swim straight under and look up. 

Florence Falls.

Getting up early the next day we saw the sun rise over the Magnetic Termite Mounds, looking like huge tombstones all lined up North to South. It was a lovely start to the last real day of our road trip. 

Reaching Darwin in about an hour, camped and headed to Mindil Beach to watch a tinnie boat race and do some shopping round the markets. Meeting up with Alix again we had dinner, watched the sun set on the beach and headed back to camp for Lucie to pack for her flight in the evening. With Lucie leaving in the evening, Victoria the following day and Alix the day after it was back to Amanda and I within two days, it was sad but nice to get some time together before we all left off. I was headed back to Melbourne via some friends in Wollongong and Amanda was going down to Alice Springs and over to Cairns. 

It was an amazing trip, more than I can fill in on here and would recommend it to anyone as a way to see a country outside of the tourist spots. If you're going to do it anywhere you might as well chose Australia, it's so different and varied you can see a completely different place every day. 

I'm off...

I was planning to be off on a jet plane, or at least a Tiger Airways plane to Sydney in order to meet my friend and start working our way up the coast. Thanks to a mixture of fog and volcano ash it was cancelled and I spent a rather strange 12 hours on a coach in a "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" type scramble for a ticket. Now, I know people like and even love Sydney, but personally it's always been Melbourne for me. I just prefer the atmosphere there, particularly after finding myself in Sydney at 7am on a bank holiday morning in dire need for a coffee and warmth. Avoiding the man being arrested by police I found my way into the train station, sat down and prepared to wait for my friend and the world to wake up.
We decided to make our first leg up the coast to Newcastle. The Country Link XPT train is not only cheaper than a Greyhound coach, but far comfier and quieter, all good things in my book! Our hostel in Newcastle was a standard YHA that was apparently an old Gentlemen's Club and as a result was full of leather chairs, fireplaces and rugs. Pretty swanky for a hostel and a nice way to start our journey. We walked along the coast and pier, where I got swept over by a rogue wave that soaked me and ruined my boots. For a first day it was filled with both success and damp laughter.

Newcastle Beach- choppy!

Deciding to move onto Coffs Harbour after a day in Newcastle, we had high hopes for horse riding, white water rafting and kayaking. However, thanks to a huge amount of rain everything was flooded and once we got to Coffs we could not get out. The town itself is small and divided into two, one small part down by the coast and the other inland with the majority of shops and restaurants. We did manage to go canoeing one day which resulted in a lot of splashing, near capsizing and getting rained on as well as watching the second State of Origin match which NSW won, annoyingly. After three days we did get to move on, by which time we had both run out of things to do in Coffs when everything was closed.

Coffs Harbour on a rare unrainy day.

Byron Bay was next on our hit list. Getting the train up we reached the bay early evening and prepared to hit the town. Within minutes of entering the first club there was a man proudly naked and that spelled the tone for the rest of the night. Byron Bay was a strange mix of beauty, hippies, drunks and older residents. Oddly it seems to work well with the majority of the town revolving around the beach which is truly amazing. The rainforest goes right down to the sand and the water is beautiful. We had the chance to go kayaking where we were lucky to see dolphins and manta rays coming to the surface to feed. Byron Bay is also the most easterly point of Australia and one morning we made the painfully early start to watch the sunrise which was worth it in the end, particularly after a mid morning snooze on the beach.

Moving on from Byron to Surfers Paradise was a shock neither of us was expecting. Knowing Surfers was going to be built up we didn't expect what we found. Huge high rises and shopping malls, coming from lots of smaller towns with quirky buildings Surfers was not particularly nice and it only took us an hour to go back to the office and book our coach out of there the next day. However, we had reached Queensland which needed a little celebration so we treated ourselves to an early night! Greyhound coaches leave a lot to be desired, luckily we were only on it for a few hours. One thing this trip has proved to me is that I can fall asleep on pretty much any kind of transport now.
Having heard about the floods in Brisbane I didn't know what to expect, but there were hardly any signs in the city that it had happened. We went about an hour north to Noosa and Eumundi for the day and there were some signs up there of flooding. The markets at Eumundi are beautiful and huge; the food is varied and smells amazing. It's very hard not to want to buy everything, although there are lots of free samples! Another day, just for Amanda, we headed to Steve Irwin's zoo. It was a strange experience. The entire zoo is almost a shrine to Irwin while they are desperately trying to move the empire over to the daughter. It's a very bizarre experience when you can have pictures with his cardboard cut out or transfer his face onto the background of your photograph. The zoo itself was not as big as I was expecting, we saw the croc show and other bits. One thing they do well is having the animals out amongst the crowds, wombats on leads, koalas clinging to trainers and even tigers, all ready for petting and snapshots. Brisbane itself is a good city and there's a lot around it to keep you going. Sadly we'd run out of time and had to get our flight over to Perth to start the road trip.

Noosa- beautiful.