told you it was a small one coming next

Well...slightly smaller anyway

So Darwin…what can I say about Darwin? First thing is don’t come to Darwin in the wet season it really isn’t a good idea. I have been here for a week and in that week I have only had two days where I have been able to go outside without getting soaking wet, all the other days there has been monsoon rain all day and when I say monsoon rain I really mean it! And it lasts all bloody day! However when it isn’t raining there are some good things to see, the Waterfront is a good place with a few bars and a swimming area, I didn’t even realise that there was the Mall Street until 4 days in where there are some good cafes and restaurants. The rain caused me to miss out on the national parks such as Kakado and Lichfield which was a bit of a shame as I had heard so much about the both of them, so I think if I can I will try and get back here in the dry season. So that’s the boring information bit but what have I actually been doing during my week in Darwin?? Well the first few days I spent in the library as I found out that they have free Wi-Fi which is the word that every backpacker wants to hear, especially because in the hostel it was $2 for half an hour!!! And in the evenings we just chilled out at the hostels bar as there was always some sort of theme going on for the night. On Tuesday night they had a beach party theme so we had a BBQ and competition and a raffle which I won even though I only had the one ticket! Woop, I won a free ticket for 2 adults to get into crocodylus cove, which is a crocodile park, I was happy with that win as I was wondering how I was going to be able to afford to go otherwise. But to be honest I was a little disappointed when I did go there, unless you were to pay more money to do other things there wasn’t really much to do, there were some good things, like you could feed the baby crocs and you got to hold a baby croc, I wanted a photo of it but that cost too much money. If you have the money you could go in the cage of death which is where you get to swim face to face with the big crocodiles (well you’re in a cage but still looked pretty cool) the other cool thing about there is that the crocodile out of Crocodile Dundee now lives there so I saw a famous croc!! Well what’s next…St Patricks Day!!! That was a brilliant day I think it is fair to say that it almost rivals the time I was in Ireland. When I first got to the hostel pub I was on my own this was at about 10.30 in the morning and then when the bar opened and the BBQ breakfast was nearly ready I say another guy on his own so I decided to go bug him. Unfortunately for him he was then stuck with me for the rest of the day! By 12 there was a good group of us happily drinking away, already on our 3^rd or 4^th drink of the day! Then the staff got the face paints out…this proved to be a bad mistake…everyone was getting painted, apart from some of the Irish they didn’t really appreciate it, Haha oh well it’s all good fun.  Think we ended the day at about 1 in the morning so that was a good 14 hours drinking session. Then we started again the next day…well it’s the best way to keep the hangover at bay! Apart from meeting some awesome people in Darwin I haven’t really had a chance to do much else because of the weather which is a bit of a shame but least I can say I say the crocodiles! Now it is just waiting a couple of days before the train adventures.

Enjoy! the next one is a small one honestly

Next stop was Broome we ended up staying here for 2 nights as well all needed a rest from driving and being in a car, so during the day we mainly just stayed at the hostel and chilled by the pool. We eventually decided to venture out and went to see the dinosaur footprints…if you asked me they looked a little fake but I don’t know. And then we just chilled whilst watching the sun go down and it gave Robin a bit of time to do some rock climbing! In the evening we attempted to go out, this proved to be a fail as Caroline had lost her passport and couldn’t get into the first club that we wanted to go in and then Anna and Leana got stopped by the police for drinking in the streets so they were banned from any bar or club for the rest of the night, so we went back to the hostel and had a few drinks there. I think I would have liked to stay another day or so in Broome as it looks like a lovely little town and there are lots of things to see, but we decided to move on after two nights. After saying goodbye to Jess we set off on the 10 hour drive to Halls Creek, I wasn’t too sure why we had decided to do such a long drive in one day when there were other places that we could have stopped but never mind, least there were others who could drive as well. The drive was pretty boring nothing that interesting to look at but once we got close to Halls Creak we stopped off at this river were there was hut that had markers on the wall to show the level of flooding in the past and last year the flood reached up to 4-5 meters!! Now that’s a lot of water. It was dark when we got into Halls Creek and none of us really liked the look of the place so we decided to try and find a camp site just outside of Halls Creek, we set off for this camp and all of a sudden the road turned into a gravel track, the kind that it isn’t great for a Mazda 121!! We had to go through flooded road, big ditches and with a full car there were a few times when poor Matt was scrapping across the floor! The camp was only meant to be 13km away but because of the speed we were going, we had been driving for 40 minutes just to hit a flooded area that neither car would have been able to get through so we had to head back! So after 10 hours of driving and then another hour and a half we still hadn’t got anywhere to sleep, the next free camp site was 100Km away, but we went to it, 12 hours of driving and we eventually got to camp at about 10.30 at night. All of us shattered and a slight rift between cars because of it! With everyone still tired in the morning there wasn’t much conversation going on and we hadn’t planned where we were next going to stop, my car thought we were stopping in Katherine as this is where Robin was going to be leaving us. This was another long drive which I wasn’t really looking forward to. However once we crossed the border into the Northern Territory (NT) the scenery dramatically changed there was hills and it was green and beautiful! So much better for driving. Only downside was that it was wetter and there was a lot of water on the road, being in the NT meant that we were now an hour and a half ahead of the West Coast which just felt strange to me because we had only crossed an invisible line. When we got to Katherine we couldn’t see the other car so we thought that they had gone a different route because they wanted to go see El Questro but my car wouldn’t have made it so we decided not to, when we got to Kelly’s house (one of Robin’s friends) we tried phoning them but got no answer, a couple of hours later they phoned us asking where we were because they had gone all the way to Darwin, thinking that’s what we had done. We spent the next couple of nights in luxury as Kelly was an excellent host and cooked us dinner both nights and cooked us breakfast on the Sunday morning. During the day we just relaxed and went to the museum…which was ok but wasn’t as informative as I thought it would have been, we then went to the hot springs but because of all the rain it was really muddy and was closed off, bit of a shame would have been cool to be able to go swimming in there, apart from the crocs! Could have been a bit of a problem. We didn’t really want to leave Katherine as it was just nice to be in a house and being able to relax, but we had to make the last 4 hour drive to Darwin. With Matt sounding really ill by now I was getting a little concerned that he wouldn’t make it but I had faith in him and he got us there, through the rain and the sound of something scrapping every time we went through a puddle (I did stop to see if I could find out what it was but nothing was loss so I am very confused about that one). Darwin isn’t like what I expected it to be, I was thinking just a big country style town, with lots of green and hills everywhere, but it’s not, it’s actually a small city which I found very strange, but at the same time very comforting as it made a change to feel like we were in civilisation again! But I’m here, Darwin finally over 5000Km from Perth, I made it. The two girls I had in my car had a couple of nights in Darwin but then I had to take them to the airport in monsoon rain! Never seen rain like it before was really horrible to drive in. Now I am on my own again, well kind of I still have the other car in Darwin but I am not staying in the same place as them. In a few days I will be getting on the train and heading towards Alice Springs, I am really looking forward to this. Can’t wait to get to Uluru.

So time to put the other half up...but dont worry this still isnt the end!

Ok i dont think this one is quite as long as the other but like the title says i havent finished writting yet!! 

I left Kalbarri and headed towards Monkey Mia, it was a rather easy drive, nothing too extreme. It felt like a long drive but then the sight of the sea finally appeared and it was one of the best views that I have seen for a while, bright turquoise sea and lovely looking beach, but it was still another hour or so until I reached the camp site. When I got to the camp site I realised it was a full on resort and it was stunning (the type of place that you would take your kids to and they could just be let loss while you relax on the beach or at the bar. So you can understand why I thought $15 a night was cheap as chips!!! $30 for two nights I was rather happy. After about 2 hours I went back to my car and a man runs over to me and says can you take me to the airport as I fell asleep and have a flight tour to go on in 30 minutes, the airport was only about 15 minutes away so I thought why not I don’t have anything else to do. So once I got him there he told me to meet him at the bar at 4 and he would buy us a bottle of bubbly…there was no way I was going to turn this offer down!! Haha. So true to his word we met at the bar at 4 had a bottle of bubbly then he cooked a BBQ for us both which was lovely considering I had been living off noodles and porridge! It’s like being back on Raleigh. Then next thing I know it is 10 in the evening and we have gotten through another 2 bottles. Good times. The only bad thing is, is that he then wouldn’t leave me alone, he was a nice enough guy but there is a point when you realise you should move on. Never mind he kept me entertained (and not in a rude way before any of you put up any jokes!!). The next day I watched the dolphin feeding and they came right up close to you, then I went on a 4 hour boat cruise to do some wildlife watching where we saw a manta ray, tiger shark, turtles, and some other cool things. I had the afternoon to myself but then when I went back to the car again I had a couple of girls come up to me and ask if they could get a lift out of monkey mia with me, when I leave. So I said sure, which then meant I had to tidy out my car as I made it a tip. Especially as I then had one of their friends come over to me and also ask me for a lift, I wasn’t too sure about having 3 people in my car because I wasn’t sure if we would all fit, but I said yes because he was hot!! Haha. In the evening I went back onto the boat to go on the sunset cruise which was fantastic, an hour and a half on the boat watching the sun go down, couldn’t get much better than that!! So the next morning we somehow managed to fit everything into the car, even though we had to put bags in the foot well…this was going to be a very uncomfortable trip I could tell. But anyway off we went heading out of monkey mia, first stop petrol station which we only just made it to, I had less petrol then I thought I did. When we left the petrol station Robin suddenly goes “where did I put my newspaper?” then we realised we left it on top of the car. Thankfully we had only gone just down the road and I turned round and there it was on the road still in tack. But wait…what is that coming from the other direction? Only a bloody road train, with a tot of his horn he drove past and newspapers went flying everywhere. Luckily the poster that he wanted from it was still intact and then the rest went in the bin.

Next stop Coral Bay. I originally wasn’t going to be stopping here I was going to be stopping in Carnavon instead. I’m glad we did stop here as it is a beautiful seaside town, tiny as anything but lovely none the less. It was at this camp site that we met up with another car with 5 people in it. Now I was travelling with a good mix of people, I was with French, German, Swedish and Danish! The next day we had a very short drive to Exmouth. When we first got there it looked rubbish there was nothing in the town and it wasn’t even very pretty. I had heard mixed reviews on the place before I got there and again this is somewhere that I wasn’t going to be going if I was by myself…however we kept driving and eventually drove into the national park where we had heard that there was some stunning beaches and we also found out that we could camp for just $7 each. Now I could see why people love Exmouth and why others don’t as I’m guessing not everyone makes the drive through to the national park. We spent the day on the beach and did some fishing which we later found out was illegal in the part that we were in, and we could have got fined $2000 each! Opps, but never mind we had caught them now, so we hid them and then when we got into camp we built a fire and cooked them…yes that’s right I ate fish and I enjoyed it! Freshly caught fish cooked on an open fire! And again bit later on we found out that because of the time of year it was an illegal fire!! So we only done a few things wrong that day. After an early start we had a long drive to get to Karratha, I was kind of annoyed by this as I really wanted to go to Dampier because of the Red Dog legend but I suppose it just gives me another reason to head back to Australia at some point! When we got to Karratha we went into the main town and first stop was McDonald’s as we knew they had free Wi-Fi and we all wanted one. After this we set up camp at a road house (which is just a petrol station which does meals and where truckers stop for the night). During the night I was suddenly awakened by the feeling that my tent was about to take off with me in it. So I stretched out to all four corners to hold it down. Shortly after, the wind stopped and some of the others got out their tent as a few of their things had blown away. In the morning a few of us were talking and we decided that it was a tornado that went through as during the day before we had seen a few out in the distance. We even had a truck driver come over to us and bring back our camp chairs that no one had realised had gone missing!! Can’t believe I was actually in a tornado…albeit a small one!

Well you might have thought i had gone silent but....have fun reading this novel!

Ok so i am not going to post the whole thing i have written on word as it is 3 A4 pages long so i will post half of it now and half of it in a couple of days! give you guys a chance to read it first! 

Bruce Rock…

You all know that I headed into Bruce Rock as I was in desperate need of money; well I think you all knew that! But basically Bruce Rock is a very small country town about 3 hours east of Perth.  When I arrived I didn’t really know what I was letting myself in for! I knew I would be working in a pub and I knew that the town was small etc. etc. I arrived just after 3 in the afternoon and I kid you not, it was like I had just turned up to some old western ghost town, there was not one person on the street and there was some strange creepy music playing out of loud speakers all along the road. The pub looked really impressive from the outside an old government built hotel. When I went inside it was just as I expected a country pub, not much to it but they didn’t need much in there! I was shown up to my room and shown around the place and then I had 3 hours to settle in before I was to start work! During these 3 hours I nearly turned round and went back home, I had gone from a crowded mansion to a small town. Didn’t know what to do with myself, but I stuck it out, and I’m so glad that I did. I had such a great time in the 3 weeks I was there, because you just get involved with everything and everyone as that is the only thing to do. Also being a small place and all everyone knows everyone and everything about everything! So you do something and the whole town knows before you even know you have done it, don’t think I could get used to that one. You would get the same old guys coming in at the same time every day and having the same thing to drink, but if you gave them a chance they are some of the most interesting people you will ever meet, they have stories to keep you bored for hours!! It’s not just the old guys that come in everyday and drink it is everyone, there is nothing else to do so you have to fill your spare time somehow, and I tell you what I think I drank more in 3 weeks then I have in the whole time I have been out in Australia, good times. Other than working and drinking what did I do... well I went quad biking in the middle of the night with some of the farm guys, I randomly went sheep collecting with a truck driver that turned up the night before, then realised it was Jacks farm so it was all good again. No one believed me that I was going to get up at 5 in the morning to go with this guy, so just to prove them wrong I did, and I am so happy that I did as I saw the most amazing sunrise ever, and I truly felt like I was in Australia. Just wish I had my camera with me at the time but least the image is in my head. I also went to a few house parties, and random little day trips to nearby towns with Shona. Oh and not forgetting Glen and Kens famous breakfast BBQ, I had to eat prawns again, but I did just to be polite, I actually think I am slowly coming round to them.

The day came when I had to leave Bruce Rock as I was to start my road trip finally. I’m not going to lie I was a little sad to leave as I had been there just long enough to make some friends and get to know everyone, but at the same time I was ready to leave. With a good amount of money in my bank I started driving back to Perth, before I was even 2 hours out of Bruce Rock the road was being redone which meant that there was lots of loss stones all over the road. Most people would slow down as they go past and I didn’t even have a problem with any trucks that I went past, however there was two very annoying drivers that didn’t slow down, causing stones to be flicked up at my window… guess what happens next… yes that’s right $450 later I have a new front window. I am not a happy bunny as that now means that I have a very very tight budget for my road trip and have to be extremely careful what I spend my money on. These things happen though and you just have to get on with them and take it as it comes. Next day I make my way to Geralton (a lot later then I was planning because of the new window) it was an easy enough drive no problems and I got here at about 5.30. As soon as I got here I put my tent up wasn’t sure if it was going to stay up for the whole night as it was very windy and the pegs wouldn’t stay in the ground. This lead to a very disruptive sleep as I kept waking up to make sure the top cover was still there, it just about survived.

Well I spent the first part of the day in Geralton looking around to see what was there, I soon realised that Geralton is boring and it is just an oversized town which they call a city! So instead of wasting my time there I got back in my car and drove to Northampton, which is about 50Km away. On my way there I got stuck behind an oversized truck convoy. It was rather interesting actually as I brought my self a two way radio for the road trip so that I could listen in on truck drivers and if I ever got stuck with out signal on my phone then I could at least get hold of one of them, so I just sat behind them listening in on what they were saying, I nearly joined in but thought better of it this time, I will eventually talk to a truck driver! When I finally got to Northampton it reminded me so much of Bruce Rock, it made me get all nostalgic (even though I had been away from BK (short for Bruce Rock) for only 3 days by this point.) it is just a small town close to the see, nothing major there just a few local shops and a bar attached to a TAB. (for all of you that don’t know a TAB is a betting shop) So obviously with nothing else to do I went into the bar and had a nice cold cider, as the temperature outside was 36 degrees and when you have no air con in your car it feels a hell of a lot hotter than that! I got talking to the bar maid, who I think was from Estonia, and she mentioned that there was a lovely beach just down the road from the town, so after I finished my drink I took a little drive down to the beach and took some photos, was a lovely place.  But anyway enough of the boring facts… that was pretty much all I did that day. Next day I got an early start to go to Kalbarri. It was only an hour and a half drive but because I only had the one night there I thought I would get there as early as possible so that I could have the whole day there. I had heard that it was a lovely place and as soon as I got there I wished I had chosen to stay there a couple of nights. It is a town right on the seaside, the camp I stayed at was lovely and I just loved the place, it is surrounded by national park so everywhere you look there is a stunning view. I wanted to do something instead of just go to the beach and feel like I was wasting another day, so I went along to the tourist information and looked at all the tours etc. then I came across quad biking… after my 5 minute ride on the farm I thought I would give it a proper go! So I did, it was out in the outback (as such) and it was amazing, from start to finish. However I did nearly crash it big time, we went down this little hill and then we had to turn left at the end of it, but I turned too early and nearly went down this massive ditch, this wouldn’t have ended well if I hadn’t of stopped centimetres from the edge, but thankfully I did otherwise I would be forking out for the repairs which probably would have been all the money I have left so I would have had to come home!!! So glad I remembered where the break was just in time!