The great western aventure!

Hi again, we are back in the world of 21st communication and how much we have missed those little luxuries such as showers, mobile signal and people who aren't born from a drunken night of passion between a brother and sister...!

Picking up from our last blog then, we left south australia and headed out along the 90 mile straight road to western australia, literally not a bend on the road for an hour and a half... how exciting! After a couple of days driving across the Nullabor (Aboriginal for 'treeless') Plain we made it into Esperance which was bliss to see the sea again and even find a McDonalds! It was Roz's birthday so we had a bit of lunch and then headed out to Lucky Bay, which is Australia's most beautiful beach... Me knowing this already and it being Roz's birthday it was time for me to suck it up and ask the big question! I bought her a sketch book, put in a little poem I rustled up and hid the ring inside the book... And as I am sure you all know by now she said yes! Anyway, i won't bore you with too many details so safe to say, 2 very happy people left Esperance the next day and headed up into the forests of Denmark, where we did a tree top walk, and then bombed up to Perth to pick up our travelling buddies Darragh & Annika from the Airport.

After a night in Freemantle we all went down to Margaret River, which is one of Australia's best wine growing regions and indulged in a day of wine tasting, which involved riding around in the pouring rain from one cellar door to the next for the whole day, getting more and more drunk on free wine as the day went on! Awesome time, would highly recommend it to anyone because it's a free piss up!!

Because the weather was so shoddy, we headed back up the coast past Perth and into Kalabarri for an evening of fishing on the pier. Not much biting unfortunately, but i still out fished everyone else... even if my 6 fish would probably not be more than 12 inches if you lined them all up!!

Now one thing you should know about camping in australia, in fact probably anywhere is that the greedy bastards will charge you extra money if you have more than 2 people, which to me is a bit of a rip off, because you aren't taking up any more room if you are all in one tent. So with a bit of careful planning we put me and Darragh in the front of the car and piled all the pillows on top of the girls in the back.. then we would go in all mincing it up and just getting odd looks from the hillbillies in the receptions who just wanted us out of their way incase they caught the gayness!! but it meant we spent half the money we could have! Safe to say there will be a few phone calls going between the owners about a couple of pommie fags mincing it up around the camp sites of western australia!

Anyway moving on with the trip we stopped off in Monkey Mia where you can feed dolphins (we had a whale of a time... pun intended) then up to coral bay where the snokelling was superb, and off to exmouth where we got seriously pissed on Goon (cheap nasty wine), played beach boules with stones, and made a bow and arrow to shoot kangaroos with! Not that we caught anything, but hey it was fun! Then from there we had a couple of nothing stops in Karatha and Port Hedland, and then to the final destination on the west coast - Broome... which was worth the whole trip because it actually has stuff to do and really nice beaches! We jumped off rocks, we rode on camels along the beach at sunset, and then we cracked open the expensive bottles of wine we got from margaret river to drink with some fine cheeses and pate whilst watching the moon rise over the bay which was stunning! The way the moonlight reflects over the very, VERY low tide makes it look like 'a staircase to the moon' and while i can't really see the staircase, it was a very nice (and even slightly romantic) evening!

So with Broome well and truly done, and all the west coast boxes ticked, we set off for the east coast, calling in at lovely places such as Halls Creek, which is where Wolf Creek was set, good film, if a bit scary considering we were doing exactly what they were doing in the film in exactly the same car, Katherine which was actually quite nice, and Mount Isa which was a crappy mining city but also the biggest city in the world in square kilometers. We got into Port Douglas 5 days after leaving the east coast, and even squeezing in some hairy drives at dusk that were full of giant wild pigs, dingoes and big red kagaroos, all of which would have been the end of bessie the car, and possibly us! But we managed to get there, and only one small problem with the car as it seems to drink transmission fluid like it's going out of fashion, but whoever we sell the car too doesn't need to know that!! Now it's just a case of getting working and selling the car, but maybe a drink or twelve first...!