The Great Southwest: WA border to Perth

 

Halfway across the Nullabour Plain, one of the great frontiers of Australia, if not the world, we had arrived at the South Australia / Western Australia border. We had stopped at the aptly named Border Village to fill up with fuel and clean out the portaloo, when lo and behold a familiar voice shouts out "Michelle!". It was Rowan Prendagast, an old mate from the Army reserve, who was off on a similar trip with his wife Sarah and kids Alby and Molly. We hadn't seen each other in years, so it was great to catch up and talk about the big half lap. 

Prenda and Brock at Border Village

Whilst we were having a good ol' chat, we were blocking access to the dump point and were not crossing the great frontier, so we agreed that we should camp that night somewhere down the road to Perth. With the border crossing admin formalities complete - the soon to be defunct G2G pass and a quarantine check (basically you can't take any fresh food across, including honey, but excluding carrots ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) we drove past Eucla and down the escarpment. Just over the WA border, the 100m high cliffs we had being driving parallel to uplift somewhat and the road heads over the cliffs and down onto the coastal plain. 

We kept driving, as you do, until the road heads back up the escarpment at the Madura roadhouse, where we saw a truck hanging precariously over the edge of the cliff, the cab hanging freely, although counterweighted by the 2 trailers it was towing. There's basically 2 kilometres of dangerous road on the Eyre Highway in maybe 1600 and this bloke picked the 0.125% of the road to fall asleep or drop his coffee or whatever caused him to take a sharp left turn off the cliff. Luckily it would only be a short walk back to help, however I'm sure the recovery team would have been scratching their heads on how to retrieve the truck.

That was the most exciting thing to happen that day, The Skylab museum at Balladonia and the eagles at the Cocklebiddy roadhouses notwithstanding. 

Notable, but not interesting per se

Actually the Skylab thing is pretty interesting. In 1979 the US had space station Skylab was being bought back to earth in a somewhat less than controlled fashion,  when it missed the Indian Ocean and instead crashed near the Balladonia roadhouse (I'm not entirely certain how near "near" is in this case, out there anything within 100kms is probably "near"). They have a huge mock space station piece sticking out the roof of the Roadhouse and and very comprehensive museum including news reports and stories from the locals. It certainly caused a fuss and the US State Department was issued with a $400 fine by the Shire of Esperance for littering. 

Finally exiting the Nullabour, we camped that night we camped with Prenda and the family in the Fraser Range having a fire and another good old chat. 

From there we headed into the Goldfields, staying at Kalgoorlie for 3 nights and enjoying the sights of a town where they literally paved the roads with gold (waste pyrite from mining, which was thought to be worthless until some American showed up who knew the process for extracting the gold cheaply). 

Kalgoorlie is a funny place and deserves its own full length blog post, so I will mostly ignore it here. We visited the Super Pit and the Hannans North Tourist Mine, ate noodles at Xings Sushi and Noodle and more or less tried to clean the dust of the Nullabour out of our camper.

Kalgoorlie Super Pit

From there we turned south for the coast, heading down to Esperance, a beautifully located town with a sweeping harbour foreshore. It was Sara's Birthday on Easter Sunday there, so we spent the day exploring town, eating ice cream at McDonalds, going to the cinema (watching The Bad Guys - 4 out of 5 stars!)  and eating dinner at the best restaurant in town. 

The next day we were headed to Lucky Bay, a campsite in the Cape Le Grande National Park. Now this is a place to camp! 

Lucky Bay Beach

Lucky Bay is sited on a large protected bay, named by Matthew Flinders, I guess because he needed a good harbour in a storm and found this before his boat sank. We were lucky to stay there too, bookings in the school holidays were hard to come by, but Michelle was very organised, booking the site 6 hours after the reservations opened. There's solar powered showers, long drop toilets (a bit stinky if the wind came from the wrong direction) and access to one of the nation's great beaches. I don't know what it is about this part of WA, but all the beaches are gleaming white with amazing turquoise waters, abundant marine life and more incredible views than you can shake a stick at. We hiked over to the adjacent bays, climbed Frenchmans Peak, fished, snorkelled and fished some more. All in all we spent a very relaxing 4 days there. 

From Cape Le Grande we had another epic driving day, travelling 600km to Denmark. The grasslands and farms of Esperance slowly gave way to woodlands, which ended up in actual forests with perennial rivers, a first for some time, maybe since we'd left the Barossa Valley. Due to a crash on the highway we skipped Albany, instead driving through the Stirling Ranges to Denmark via Mt Barker. Denmark seemed like a different country, almost like be transported back to Anglesea or Aireys Inlet, with lush green forests, towering trees and green grass. 

We explored the surrounds for a few days, with a brief interruption of the first serious mechanical issue of our trip - the door fell off. 

   

Good Morning to everyone except the Jayco engineer who designed the door on the Swan Outback.

— Brock Mills (@stringy_05) April 23, 2022

Somehow the load on the door had overcome the approximately 8mm2 of 0.5mm plastic and the hinges had pulled through. I spent the Saturday morning fixing it, my approach being somewhat cavalier after searching "Jayco Albany" on Google Maps, ringing Caravanland, and finding out they had the part I needed for $30.  "No worries I break this bit then"  I thought to myself and proceeded to remove it, only breaking it 3/4 in half. Little did I realise I had spoken to Caravanland in Perth, on the Albany Highway, so I would not be nicking down there later that morning, given it was a 5 hour drive. Despite this, I had enough of a door frame to work with, so it was up to the hardware store for some parts and silicon and it was all back on by 1pm. It fell off again the next day, so I fixed it properly that time but things are always easier the second time around! 

We headed down to Albany, spent some time at the excellent National ANZAC Centre, shopping at the first Aldi we had seen since day 2 and visiting the lookouts and blowholes at the wild southern coast. 

We had dinner at Wilson's Brewery, maker of my new favourite beer, Rough Seas Pale Ale, and generally had a great day. The next day we had an ice cream in town and drove out to Greens Pool and Elephant Rocks. As the weather was warm and sunny for the first time in a few days, we were not prepared for swimming, which was a shame as Green Pool is this fantastic protected pool with many fish that are easily viewed with a snorkel. It was so enticing we drove the 40 min round trip back to the camper to get bathers and snorkels and spent a lovely afternoon swimming with the fish. 

Next stop was Margaret River - only a lazy 340km or so from Denmark. We drove there through the magnificent Karri and Jarrah forests, visiting the tree top walk at the Valley of the Giants and climbing part way up the Gloucester Tree in Pemberton. Hamish says he would have gone all the way to the top, however I didn't fancy trying to coax a child down at the same time as dealing with my own precarious descent. 

We got into Margaret River in the early evening just as the rain started to set in, something that would be a feature of the next few days. We were staying out of town at the Big Valley Campsite, which is a caravan park on a working farm. The big drawcard is getting to play with a few of the 300 or so Guinea Pigs that are resident on the farm, which the kids thought was the bees knees. There was also feeding the sheep in the afternoon, which was also great fun.

We did all the things you are meant to do in Margaret River, except go to a winery or get out of the car in the actual town of Margaret River. We went to look at Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse, however it is in the process of being renovated, so it was entirely wrapped in scaffolding and some sort of hessian. 

We went to Hamelin Bay to see the Stingrays and did actually see one, although it was so windy we couldn't sit around there for long. We had coffee and cake in Augusta, and afterwards bought secondhand books at the Lions Bookshop while avoiding the rain. We went to the Mammoth Cave, where we raced a bus load of old people through the cave. We went to the Indijup Natural Spa and had lunch at the Margaret River Brewery and the kids played wth the guinea pigs and fed the sheep again. We went to the Busselton Jetty, but frankly couldn't be convinced to walk all the way out to the end, so instead the kids played at the pirate ship playground and Michelle and I had a coffee. All in all we had a lovely time, if a bit soggy, and were suitably refreshed and ready to head into the first big city we'd seen since leaving home - Perth!

We were pretty excited about Perth. We were staying in an Airbnb, so the prospect of a real bed and a dishwasher was enticing. My Uncle Rod, his wife Alana and his sons (ie, my cousins) Scott and Cameron all live in Perth with their wives Lauren and Nicole, the family rounded out by Scott and Lauren's children Jackson and Sienna, who are a similar age to our kids. Rod's 70th birthday was imminent and Scott and Lauren were hosting a party at their house in East Fremantle on the Saturday night. My parents were also attending, along with my aunt Genief. Mum and Dad and Gen were all staying with us on the Friday and Saturday nights so we had a great opportunity to catch up with family we don't see very often and family that we see all the time, but have missed since we left home.

We arrived in Perth on the Thursday, getting settled enough to head out for dinner with Scott, Rod, Alana, Cameron, Nicole, Jackson and Sienna at a local Italian restaurant in Bicton. Friday was spent getting X-rays (Michelle's foot, which she had hurt in Mt Gambier and was still not right), buying spares for the camper and visiting the tourist sites in Fremantle. I picked up Mum and Dad from the airport in the evening and we all had pizza for dinner. 

On Saturday we went out for brunch by the river in East Fremantle, visiting Scott and Lauren's magnificent house and driving down memory lane with Dad as we visited the areas where he and Mum lived in the early 1970's. The 70th Birthday party was an absolute corker, a catered affair in Scott's backyard with some superb food from Perth restaurants, the Brisket Pastrami and Corn Bread being 2 highlights for mine. We had a great time, however we didn't have time to sit still. The next day we were back on the road to the 3rd phase of our trip - the road from Perth to the Kimberley.

Camping on the Farm, by Josephine

 Day 1 we set up in the rain. It was HAILING! But at least we got to throw the boomerang.The next day we got to cuddle with the guinea pigs!  Later in the afternoon we got to feed the sheep.  

And we got to cuddle the guinea pigs again. My favourite guinea pig was big and grey. 

We went to the stingrays and it was very windy. The drone nearly flew away, but we spotted a ray on the drone camera!

The next day we cuddled the guinea pigs again then went to the natural spa, but it was too rough and windy to enjoy. Also I fell over on some sharp rocks and grazed my legs and my ankle. We tried to go to the Cheeky Monkey Brewery but it was only serving pizza. We were hungry and I had to hop the whole way for no reason! Instead we went to a different brewery for lunch, then went back to the farm and cuddled the guinea pigs again. Then we went and fed the sheep.

  We had a great time at the farm.

Hamish's Fishing Guide

Hey, I want to tell you about the fishing my family’s done on our trip. Everybody has caught a fish, and everybody enjoys fishing, even though sometimes it does take a long time and you may lose a rig, it’s still fun. 

Now this trip is us kids first time doing proper fishing. JoJo and Sara caught their first fish in Streaky Bay while we were camping at Perlubie Beach, whereas I caught my first in the Coorong while we were camping at Long Point. So far we have caught three eating fish, all leatherjackets, two of them had problems. One fish swallowed the hook, that was the one mum caught and the one dad caught had some sort of parasite crawling into its guts but the one I caught was perfectly fine, Sara and I refused to eat the fish with the parasite. My family’s caught heaps of small fish so far.

 In the Coorong most of the fish we caught were Australian salmon, then at Perlubie it was sand whiting and now in Lucky Bay its sand and King George whiting, with some random ones as well. Mum really wants us to catch an eating sized whiting because at the fish shop in Streaky Bay whiting was 60 dollars a kilo for fillets!

When you’re fishing you need a rig so that’s what I’m going to talk about now. So far we’ve lost a couple of hooks and sinkers, not too bad! I can’t make a rig because I can’t tie knots and mum’s just better at doing it (with the help of the fishing book). 

 Every successful person has a reason behind their success. The reason behind our two eating fish caught is a fishing book, it’s called the “Australian Fish ID Pocket Guide”. It’s got heaps of the popular fish species, it tells you how to tie knot’s and techniques to use for different fishing situations. The book has helped a lot but sometimes it doesn’t tell you what you want, like yesterday mum caught this yellow scaly fish and I caught a light green one but they were not in the book.

 Now this concludes Hamish’s fishing post because we are going out fishing! 

 • BTW me (Hamish) wrote this by myself byeeeeeeeeeee

S2 Ep 1 - South Australia in Fast Mode

 Saturday 2 April and we were off. Years in the planning, months in the organising and now days into packing and final preparations, we were ready to go.

Our first destination was Mount Gambier on the Limestone Coast of South East South Australia. We left Melbourne at 10:15am after cleaning the house and then cleaning it again, and finally (with a little more cleaning) we were off. We had to leave the house nice for the family and friends that are house sitting for us while we were away!

We drove to Mt Gambier via Hamilton, with our first fuel stop on the highway in Geelong, paying $2.07 a litre for diesel. Ouch, thanks Vlad. The fuel cost calculation changes brought on by Putin's war in the Ukraine had, while not exactly blown a huge hole in the budget, it definitely scorched the armour a bit. Nothing to be done for it now other than wince each time we filled up! Onward we set off for SA via Mortlake, where we had lunch from the bakery and ate in the park. We arrived in Mt Gambier around 4pm, set up at the caravan park and we were finally on holiday! 

No trip to Mt Gambier would be complete without a visit to the Umpherston Sinkhole so we ate dinner and jumped in the car to check it out on as the sun came down. The next day was spent exploring the natural delights of the Limestone coast, flying the drone over the Blue Lake, visiting a cave at Tantanoola, buying a new SD card for said drone when I realised I hadn't actually put one in it and going back to the Umpherstone Sinkhole again, this time with the spotlight and heaps more torches. 

It was fun to notice the little differences between South Australia and Victoria. The first one is clearly the weird power poles, made out of an iron girder filled with Concrete, as if there aren't enough trees in SA to make a decent power pole. Then there's the fact that any road of importance in SA is either a Highway or a Terrace. Sure roads and streets exist, but it's Terrace this and Highway that for all the useful ones. 

The next thing is the mid 19th century chaos in naming things that resulted in South Australia needing to qualify place names with SE or NW to distinguish them from a different place in the same state that has the SAME NAME. I present you "Kingston SE", so named because there's another Kingston somewhere else in the state. WTH? I mean surely you would just ring up the smaller one and inform them "Sorry old boy, Adelaide is taken, you will need to name your town something else" but apparently not, just chuck a SE or NE or whatever and ruin data cleanliness attempts for generations of future South Australians.

Thankfully a potato cake is called a potato cake and the local beer is not only drinkable but the best domestic beer sold anywhere in the world (of course I'm talking about Coopers, not West End, that stuff is gross), so the culture shock is bearable.

After 2 days it was time to keep travelling, next stop the Coorong. We drove up the Princes Highway via Kingston SE (not to be confused with the other one!) 

Lunch was in Meningie, which has a monument to "The Birdman of the Coorong", a strange little midget who used to ride around on Ostrich holding up passers by for their valuables.

A monument to the Birdman of the Coorong

 

The Coorong, if you will permit me a short detour on geography, is a sort of very long estuary connected to the lakes at the mouth of the River Murray. It runs almost 130kms south from Lake Alexandrina, but is only around 1 km wide for its entire length. It's very salty, on average 3 times saltier than the ocean and is packed to the brim with birds, fish and Ned Kelly wannabes mounted on Ostriches. We camped at the Long Point campsite, which was very picturesque and had a dock that proved a fruitful fishing ground, with Hamish pulling in 6 Australian Salmon and Michelle almost landing a Perch that was actually eating size! 

We drove out to Narrung, which is situated on the mouth of Lake Albert where it joins Lake Alexandrina, home to Australia's only inland Lighthouse. 

Finally we tried to go and see one of the Goolwa Barrages on Lake Alexandrina. Constructed in the 1930s, the barrages are a series of barriers that keep the river high enough for gravity watering of crops in the lower reaches of the SA part of the river and to prevent salt water from flowing up the Murray when the river flow is low. They sound like quite the feat of engineering, however there was a locked gate when we drove up near them, so instead we had a picnic and then drove back to the camper as it started to rain gently. The rain didn't stop for a good 16 hours, which resulted in a very wet pack up and a change of plans; instead of free camping in the Southern Flinders Ranges near Port Pirie, we decided instead to head up to Port Augusta and stay in a caravan park so we could dry out and do some clothes washing.

 The next day we headed to the Eyre Pennisula. We were intending to camp at Moonlight Bay, which is near Tumby Bay. The Eyre Pennisula is an interesting place, the north end being in the arid scrublands around Port Augusta, getting progressively greener as it goes south and catches the weather off the Great Australian Bight. It's not exactly verdant fields of green - there's only a single perennial water course on the entire pennisula, the River Tod, which is really stretching the definition of a river vs a creek if you ask me - however it gets enough rain to grow lots and lots and lots of wheat. In the north there are huge farms with the kind of massive tractors a Ukrainian farmer might like to test out by towing an abandoned Russian T72 out of a bog and in the south wine growing, dairy and a great deal of fishing.

We stopped off for lunch in Cowell, which is home to a Great Pub on the main street and some excellent silo art depicting a local identity. We also viewed the silo art in Tumby Bay, this one depicting kids jumping off the towns rickety old pier. Moonlight Bay was a fantastic beach front free camp marred only by the 100km/h winds that sprang up in the afternoon and battered us until the morning. 

But as this was our first free camp with no facilities (ie not even a drop toilet), we got to finally break out some of the new gear we'd bought, namely the portaloo. There was much excitement amongst the family as Dad manfully put the camper up by himself as everyone else got involved in setting up and testing out the new facilities. Much commotion followed as the toilet tent was put up, the various chemicals added to the sump and then 3 very excited kids, who were all of a sudden busting to go, christened the loo. I did not try it out and preferred to exercise my right as a man to treat the world as my toilet.

The next day was a short driving day, only 30 kms or so to Port Lincoln for mornos at the bakery, some fuel and then off to Coffin Bay. Port Lincoln was lovely, with houses set up the hills overlooking the bay. Apparently Port Lincoln has more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country, so I guess  most places here have a million dollar view. One thing it certainly does have is a massive wheat processing plant, where they load the grain onto big ships.

Leaving Port Lincoln, we headed off to Yangie Bay, a small bay in the Coffin Bay National Park, to camp for 2 nights in a SA parks campsite.

Those that know Michelle well will be aware of her predilection for seafood in general and oysters in particular. Suffice to say, we were pretty excited to be headed to Coffin Bay, one of the great oyster producing areas of Australia. Coffin Bay is big and quite complicated with a number of smaller bays and islands, including the delightfully named Little Douglas. It's sheltered and pretty swampy, with many places sporting thick black mud that will swallow the thongs of those tempted into the still blue water. The bay is interesting, however the real action is on the ocean side of the peninsula with some truly massive dune systems leading down to long pristine beaches that are positively bristling with marine life.

We set our camp, having to break out the rock pegs to get the awning to stay up. The portaloo made another appearance, despite a serviceable drop toilet in the campground. Setting up also saw us meet our first mechanical problem, when one of the bed ends wouldn't pull out of the camper. After a bit of worrying an errant nut that had come loose was found to be the culprit and it was fixed quickly.

We then headed down to Almonta Beach for a swim which was great fun, if a bit cold. We did some sightseeing of the surrounds, which includes Point Avoid and Avoid Bay, named by Matthew Flinders in 1802 as a warning to future seafarers as the bay and is fronted by 40m high limestone cliffs and nasty reefs.

Almonta Beach

 

Point Avoid Cliffs

The next day we were going to head out on an adventure! A 4WD tour of the National Park was planned with promises to the kids of boarding on dunes and swimming at these amazing beaches. We headed off up the rough track, to be told by a sign that it's 4WD only and you should lower the tyre pressure. I set 4WD on the car and headed off into the never never. The track got very sandy very quickly and soon had me going firstly to 4WD High Range locking centre diff, then to 4WD low range with the locked centre diff. The kids thought the bumping around was great fun for the first 45 mins, however it started to get old even through we would drive over soft sand, up surmountable hills and then huge slabs of rock that formed the road. 

After an hour we had only gone about 15 kms, so we decided to cut our losses and go to a different set of dunes that were easier to get to. I did make one concession to the track for the return trip, dropping my tyre pressure to make the ride a little easier. Little did I know this would set in train the 2nd mechanical problem of the trip... 

Getting back to the easy road we headed up to Gunyah Beach, was has a 4km drive in over large soft sand dunes. The first half is fine, just a rocky track, but then you are confronted by a dune that's 3 or 4 metres high, very soft and, well, sandy. I charged up it and had just enough momentum to get over without spinning the wheels. We carried on, over another smaller hump and then down a long soft section which had Hamish asking me why I wasn't just driving in a straight line. "I can really only suggest to the car where to go here mate" was the best I could come up with. Facing another dodgy uphill, we met a family from Queensland that were also a bit iffy about driving on the sand, so I bravely followed them, thinking if they get stuck then I simply wont drive over that bit. 

We both stopped just before the last downhill section to the beach and had a good chat - Kieren and Hayley from the Gold Coast - they had 12 months travelling planned with their 2 daughters. The kids played on the sand dunes and eventually we drove down to the beach to meet another couple who were from Mornington, who it turns out were mutual friends of Sarah and Trav! A small world indeed. We went for a swim, had some lunch and then decided the beach was better where we had swum the day before, so we decided to head back to Almonta. I charged up the dunes with plenty of speed and had no trouble getting back onto the bitumen. 

A lovely afternoon at the beach and then we headed back to the campsite. Dinner that night was going to be Oysters, Fish and Chips in the Coffin Bay town, so I thought I'd better re-inflate my tyres to road running pressure. I got out the trusty old air compressor and nothing. It cut out as soon as it went to inflate the tyre. I tried a couple more times, finally with the thing refusing to turn on at all. I didn't realise at the time, but I'd actually blown a fuse on the car. Tyres still at 25 psi, we drove into town where I pumped them back up at the service station. 

We finally got those oysters, Michelle, Hamish and I sharing 2 dozen (and some fresh local whiting as well). Yumm! 

The next destination was Perlubie Beach on Streaky Bay, but Before leaving Coffin Bay we had some administration to attend to: we had to dump the portaloo. I'm sure you've heard the phrase "dropping the kids off at the pool", which is of course referring to a bowel motion. Well this is the bit where you need to go and pick the kids up from the pool. It's smelly and unpleasant so I bravely left it to Michelle (with a peg on her nose) while I topped up the water tanks on the camper.

We lunched in Elliston and then drove into Streaky Bay for supplies, but everything was shut so we kept on rolling to Perlubie. Apparently previously little known, Perlubie is a gem where you can free camp on the beach at a lovely sheltered spot with a magnificent beach where you can fish, find razor clams in the seagrass and have a fire. Then someone Instagrammed it and published it on WikiCamps, so now it's more popular than Baby Shark. It's an amazing place to stay and even with 60 other caravans and campers it wasn't over crowded. 

We got set up, I put my feet up and thought "I'd better get a beer and send a photo to everyone who has to go to work tomorrow". I grabbed one from the fridge in the back of the car and thought, "Hmm this isn't exactly ice cold, I wonder what's going on with the fridge" when I saw the dreaded "E1" flashing where the current temperature readout should have been. 

I drank the beer before fixing the fuse

The fridge battery was flat and our fridge/freezer was on the way to being a dark, warm box that ruins food. We put all the perishable food into the camper fridge and set about diagnosing the problem. Pretty quickly we worked out the battery wasn't charging from the car and a short time later found and replaced the offending blown fuse. The air compressor did it! We sorted it all out, however it did take 16 hours of driving the Nullarbor plain to get the battery up to full charge again.

The next day was all about fishing. We would simply walk out from the camper into the water a few hundred metres, cast the line and reel in fish after fish. The kids caught a number of undersized whiting, and then Michelle managed to get a fish that swallowed the entire hook. This caused a great deal of commotion as the fish had pretty sharp, scary teeth and wasn't all that keen on coughing up the hook. Added to that no one knew what kind of fish it was, so we weren't sure if it was undersized and had to be thrown back into the water. Eventually we worked out it was a leatherjacket, so we could eat it, and it was decided that the fish was going to be our first self caught seafood dinner. It came up a treat, and went very well with the gummy shark fillets we had bought in Streaky Bay that afternoon to bolster the fish dinner. 

Fishing action in Perlubie

We needed a good night sleep, as the next day was one of the first real frontiers of our trip - the Nullarbor! Needless to say the Nullarbor is a very long drive. We headed off early, filling up with fuel at Ceduna ($1.85 / litre, cheapest yet), where Michelle's dad John informed us that in 1972 when he was last here the paved road finished and it was dirt up to the border. Well it seems in the meantime they paved it, however they still hadn't painted the lines so we had to guess where on the road we should drive. This wasn't a big issue as there wasn't much traffic going either way.

We stopped to look at the Windmill museum in Penong, which was highly interesting and had the largest windmill in the southern hemisphere (or something like that, can't really remember...). We continued along the never ending road, which had still had plenty of trees up past Yalata. We stopped for lunch, somewhere. Somewhere else we crested a hill and lo and behold it was the plain. No more trees, just saltbush as far as the eye could see. We stopped for a snack at the Nullarbor road house (didn't fill up, $2.80 / litre, ouch) then kept driving, with our destination being one of the many many free camping spots on the Bunda Cliffs, which are the 100m high limestone cliffs that line the edge of the Great Australian Bight. We missed the turn off for the wiki camp spot we had chosen, so we kept going to another one.

Windmill Museum in Penong

The wind was blowing a gale on the cliff top and it was too exposed to stay, so instead we took some photos with the drone, which was struggling to hover with the gale blowing behind it. Discretion being the better part of valour, I decided to put the drone away before it got caught in a gust and fell off the edge of the world, never to be seen again. We kept going to a camp site that was apparently less exposed, stopping about 10km from the WA border. We found a great site that, while still being pretty windy, didn't feel like we were doing a 100km/h down the highway and hanging our heads out of the car window. 

Bunda Cliffs, very windy

Camping at 10km Peg

For our final night in SA we lit a fire and enjoyed the isolation of the edge of the world. All was well, until the gale woke us up at 2 in the morning, but we didn't actually lose anything or have the camper blow away.

That brings us to the end of part 1 of our adventure. We'd done a lot of driving (around 2890km to that point), caught heaps of fish (even ate one), camped on the beach, gone 4 wheel driving on sand dunes, explored the Coorong, ate Coffin Bay oysters at the source and were still on speaking terms with each other. Great Days in SA indeed.

Excellent Adventure: Season 2 - Australia!

 To be honest, I was surprised this blog was still on the internet, what with the great deletions by Google and the like. Like a digital Indiana Jones, I blew the dust off the keyboard, grabbed the "New Post" button and ran from the falling boulders of the new layout designer.

But here we are, firing up the ol' travel blog because, for the first time in a very long time, we are going on an adventure. Not that the last 12 years between posts hasn't being adventurous - we've been very busy - but mostly with things like having 3 kids, buying and renovating a house, living life and dealing with a once in a century pandemic.

Anyway, let me recap how we got into an adventurous position. In 2018, after another expensive holiday staying in a house, we were driving back to Melbourne and Michelle got it into her head that holidays would be a lot more fun (and cheaper!) if we got a camper trailer. My family had one when I was a kid, so I was greatly experienced in the ways of the camper trailer, and we'd seen a number of them while camping at the prom and we were impressed with the Swan Outback. "Sure" I said. So after a number of trips out to Bayswater Jayco and quite a few spreadsheets analysing the 2nd hand camper trailer market, we put in an order for a new 2019 Jayco Swan Outback.

We put it through its paces at the Prom and South East Australia, with notable trips including driving over the Snowy Mountains and a hasty escape from Mallacoota as the fires bore down in December 2019. We also went through a couple of tow vehicles, with a Mitsubishi Outlander proving to not be up to the task so we upgraded to a Pajero Sport, a fine specimen of the Wagon SUV. 

There wasn't much camping when the Coronavirus hit in early 2020, but friends of ours used the first lockdown to plan a SA, WA and NT trip with a giant caravan, which they embarked upon in 2021. Inspired by their Instagram feed we bought a big map and started to plot our own trip.

Planning a transcontinental camping trip

Well strictly speaking you do, but I wouldn't do it without some preparations. As the Russian Army has discovered recently in Ukraine, simply driving into the unknown with plenty of optimism but without the correct equipment and approach can end in tears. 

There's a planning process that needs to be performed! Routes mapped out, activities researched, campers improved, kit bought and so on. There are 2 ways to do this:

1. Join facebook forums, read all the #vanlife posts on instagram, read books about the Kimberley, the NT, find all the obscure travelling websites, chat to a park ranger from the Coorong to find out the best campsites, have a friend who is a travel writer (Hi Cath!) and do a 5 hour Facetime call with maps, photos, info on the best gorges in WA and all manner other manner of priceless info that only comes from being on the ground.

Or  

2. Be married to Michelle. She's very, very good at this planning and has thought about every detail down to the details of the details. Which campsites require a portable toilet, researching and buying the best firepit. Working out the campsites where you can use the firepit. What's the best recovery gear? what's the best price for the best recovery gear? What 12v connectors might be useful? Here's the best 12v fan for a camper plus all the stuff you need to hang it outside on the annex. Amazingly useful stuff that needs to be known well before you hook up the trailer and drive off.

After all that, you now can prepare to Simply Drive around Australia. Here's how we are doing it:

Travelling clockwise, we are heading to SA to begin and from there west to WA. North along the west coast, up to Cape Range near Exmouth, in to Karajini then up to the Kimberley. From there we go to Darwin, Kakadu and work our way south to the Alice, Kings Canyon and Uluru, finally back to Melbourne, ideally in time for the kids to get to school in time for Term 3. 

What will we do, I hear you ask? Mostly drive around by the look of things, but there will be plenty of beaches, lagoons, estuaries, gorges, caves, forests, reefs, sharks, fish, squid, boat rides, flies and red dust in between.   

So there we go, the adventure awaits. Click like and subscribe! #instathingsidontunderstand! and check back in regularly and we will keep you updated with our trip. 

The Lost Post on Iceland

Lost. With the click of a button, my latest post vanished fading into nothingness like a spilt pina colada into the digital sands of the e world. It was mostly rubbish anyway. Lacking structure and clarity, a few sparse witticisms drowning in a sea of travelogue dithering. Really it was largely me carrying on about all things Iceland, which are my new favourite subjects, being specifically:

• geology;
• economics; and 
• gastronomy

Allow me to precis myself very succinctly: The geology of  Iceland is very interesting and makes for many beautiful waterfalls and snow capped glacial peaks. The food is very good and the people are proud, helpful and friendly.

I guess I can do better than that, here goes in bullet point form:

• Iceland is at 66 degrees north latitude, also the name of a popular and expensive clothing brand
• The mild climate is a result of the gulf stream currents and air flows which keep the country generally free of ice and snow even during the deep long winter, whereas Greenland, which extends much further south is not blessed with the winds and currents is a large ice covered rock.
• The island is shaped by the parting of the North American and European plates that drift apart at 2cms a year. This may not sound like a lot but it is. Trust me. 
• There are heaps of volcanoes, with my favourites being the 2 rather boisterous ones in the Westman Islands that created the island of Surtsey and replaced a nice meadow on the main island with a 700 foot high mountain in 1970 check it out here 
• There's another volcano which has a glacier, known to the Icelanders as Mýrdalsjökull and tourists as "the M one", on top of it and occasionally erupts, much to the surprise of the locals who apparently awake to find a raging torrent of ice, water and lava where their wool shed used to be. We went snowmobilling on it, because we live dangerously!

Shell living dangerously on the glacier. The glacier was perhaps less dangerous than the snow mobiling which gets exciting when the driver hits the power whilst lurching over bumps on the snow.

• The Northern Lights are amazing. We lay in the snow for hours to get these photos!

• Icelanders are very nice, highly educated people that are pretty much all amateur geologists, capable of accurately explaining plate tectonics while serving you food or explaining igneous rock formation processes whilst checking the dents and scratches on the hire car. And they all speak about 19 languages
• The only fossil fuels they use are pretty much fuel for cars, which is on the way out as they attempt to hydrogenise their cars. The rest of their power comes from geothermal and hydro sources, which is cheap, basically inexhaustible and has the added bonus of meaning there is virtually no air pollution at all. On a clear day you can see more than 100kms!
• The effluent from one of the geothermal power stations (hot water) is used to create the nation's number 1 tourist attraction: the Blue Lagoon. The mineral mud is famed for its curative abilities. If one was able to have a hot bath on the moon then I'd imagine this is what it would be like.

 

• The food was tremendous. We ate sushi, sashimi, monk fish, flounder, dried fish jerky, rot cured shark that tasted like eating a shot glass with pure alcohol in it, horse, minke whale, goose, lamb, duck, langoustines with fois gras and truffles, a ham sandwich, croissants, waffles, some chocolates, yoghurt and these strange lollys called opals which were a bit gross but addictive.
• Reykjavik is a nice city and is dead easy to walk around. This is plus since when the wind picks up a normal human can stand to be outside for approximately 23 seconds before freezing to death and being blown away.
• I imagine that Iceland is nicer now with the effective bankruptcy of their country at the hands of 3 banks. Before October 2008, the Pound to the Kroner was about 1 to 120. To put this into context a bottle of beer was usually about 900 kroner, which works out to the princely sum of £7.50 for a beer, or for those back home, $15 which I think is a lot. In the end we were getting 1 to 200 which was pretty good and put most things on a par with UK prices. By the sound of things the whole Icesave banking debacle has stoked some national pride and brought on a groundswell of political activity in a generally subservient population. Apparently it has also had the benefit of curtailing a rather arrogant streak in the locals, but we didnt see any of it and found everyone friendly and accommodating to a fault. 

That was more or less it, although I think it was less interesting on the first pass with the possible exception of the bit about the Westman Islands which I thought I'd written in a lively and entertaining manner. Getting back to the matter at hand, Iceland was a truly amazing country. The scenery, the people, the emptiness and the chance to eat basically any animal unfortunate enough to come within range of an Icelander make this one of the most enjoyable trips on a very long and illustrious list.

Iceland