Western Australia Road Trip – Perth
Welcome the first blog post of my Western Australia road trip series!
Sonia and I have spent the past few weeks traveling around WA and in lieu of being able to get online whilst on the road to chronicle our trip along the way, I will be doing so now and over the coming days.
We spent a total of 25 days on the road, starting off in Perth we headed up through the outback towards Karijini national park, then across to Exmouth on the north west cape, down to Coral Bay and the Ningaloo Reef, Kalbarri, Shark Bay and Monkey Mia, Cervantes and the Pinnacles before passing Perth again on the way to Margaret River.
We totalled almost 6000 kms by the time we handed our 4×4 camper van back over at the airport, so naturally we’ve been pretty much doing zip since we got back home to Sydney while we recover and try to recharge our batteries.
Our last two holidays/trips have involved a lot of traveling (this time 2 years ago we toured the East coast of Australia and this time last year we spent 3 weeks going around New Zealand in a similar fashion) but we hadn’t really begun to plan this years adventure until quite late on. We had pencilled in the dates for some kind of travel, but a combination of factors led to us deciding this west coast tour was what we wanted to do. Firstly, we had originally planned to go as far as monkey mia from Perth 2 years ago but decided at the last minute we would cut that part of our trip so we could put more energy into it later and make it its own thing. Secondly, while we were in the “hmmm shall we go on a trip at the end of the year?” stage of our planning, I heard a podcast on TWIP in which Beth and Chris Fenwick were being interviewed about their road trip along the famous Route 66 which, even though it is a completely different kind of road trip to what we ended up doing, they were so inspirational in their enthusiasm that I knew we had to make our one special. Thirdly, once we had decided on giving WA a shot, it wasn’t until Sonia began scouring tripadvisor and finding out all the things that we could do (and how far apart they were by road) that we realised how this was going to be more of an Adventure than a “holiday”.
So anyway, our first few days were spent in Fremantle, just south of Perth (I assume its a Perth suburb?) and Perth itself as we soaked up any last drop of civilisation we could before the long trip into the unknown. ”Photographer mode” hadn’t quite kicked in yet so we started off with the typical tourist shots of the CBD skyline from Kings Park.
I don’t know if it was that we didn’t really prepare for Perth as we had mentally treated it just as the gateway to the “main” bit of our trip, or if there really was not much to do – but we only spent 2 of our planned 3 nights there as we had already exhausted all the things we could think of to do! We spent the first afternoon just walking around Kings Park, relaxing, seeing some views across the city from up high before spending the evening back at our camper exhausted after a long day traveling.
Our second day was spent wandering around Fremantle, patronising the local coffee shops, cafe’s and markets. We had a quick chat with local photographer Julian Rhodes who was displaying his artwork at the outdoor market. He had a very nice collection of urban and rural landscapes and I would encourage anyone to check out his web site here
I’ll finish up this entry with a quick shot of Sonia sitting outside a Fremantle cafe – an ok shot, but symbolic as it was the very first photo I took on this adventure!
So, after spending the second night in Fremantle we woke up early to stock the jerry cans and headed out into the outback – coming soon!
