Western Australia

Life since Perth has been busy busy busy with some pretty unforgettable adventures. I’ve moved into a 1999 Toyota Landcruiser Prado (aka any backpackers dream ride) with my friend Maddy for this leg, which has allowed us to take on some more 4wd terrain. I’m currently located in Broome, having taken about two weeks mostly along the coast to get here. I’ll give y’all a quick summary of what I’ve been up to, and in a few weeks when I start a job I’ll try to delve further into a couple stories. Who knows!

The section from Perth to Geraldton-mount was fun and just the beginning. We had hoped to do some shnorkeling, but a recent storm had dragged mounds of seaweed to shore. We made good fun sandboarding on some massive dunes and going to Pinnacle Desert to see some wild rocks. Maddy and I did a snorkel tour to swim with sea lions (only later did we learn a woman was “mauled” by a tiger shark on the tour a few days earlier…yikes).

The next section from around Kalbarri -> Exmouth is undoubtedly my favorite region of Australia so far. Kalbarri National Park is full of hikes with the classic Australian red and sand colored rocks. Then we headed to Shark Bay and Francois Peron National Park just near where the Europeans first made landfall in Australia. This park was incredible too with 4wd through sand at times a foot deep, snorkeling with incredible fish and stingrays, and bright red cliffs leading down into turquoise water. This is the point in the journey I will say it started getting quite hot as we continued North in the start of autumn.

Coral Bay was a movie. Paid a lot of money for a tour to swim with everything I could ever ask for. Turtles, reef sharks, anemone, crayfish, reef mantas, oceanic manta, stingray, and of course the star of the day - the whale shark. I actually can’t delve into how sick this experience was right now, but Ningaloo reef was surely an underdog pick to be one of my favorite places I’ve ever been.

We eventually made it to Exmouth, where we had some chaotic nights running around the small beach town with the people we had met while traveling up the coast. Perth to Exmouth is the classic Western Australia roadtrip, so it was a bit of a goodbye to many of the friends we had made on the way. We spent days at the beach, saw America (not kidding there’s a military base in Exmouth), and protected baby turtles as they made the treacherous journey from their nest to the ocean.

Since Exmouth, Maddy and I have made a few stops such as Karijini National Park. We’ve come to learn the hard way the importance of seasons in Australia. Above the Tropic of Capricorn, typical summer is known as the wet season. A lot of towns up here have about 1/3 the population they have in the dry season, and roads get in particular gnarly condition. So our trip to Broome was a bit quicker than anticipated as there was not much to do along the way.

We sit now in Broome between a cyclone to both the east and west trying to figure out our next plans. Given the full on nature of the past month and a half, however, I’ve appreciated taking a day or two to do little more than binge watch netflix.