Coral Coast WA

15 July - 140 kms south of Exmouth

Flies. The scourge of the Australian outdoors. And none as persistent as the sticky little bush fly! Here at yet another WA Rest Stop, they are driving us mad. We even have our special hat-flynets, but they still manage to crawl up under the net and worm their way into your eyes, ears and nose! As the sun sets, we break with our tradition of sipping on a beer outside the van to catch the last light on the red plains and head indoors behind the fly screens.

North-West Cape where Exmouth sits, was probably better known nationally in the 1960s and 70s when the controversy over the giant joint US-Australian communications base was at its height. Thirteen giant towers stand at the top of the cape. Visible from 30 kms off, they were once an important link in the US Navy’s global communications network. Largely obsolete today, they now just serve the Australian Navy’s Indian Ocean communication needs. Cape Range National Park covers much of the cape and it’s this that draws the thousands of tourists that are packed into Exmouth and the few camping grounds inside the park this last week of the WA school holidays.

Coral reefs line the western shores of the cape. Nothing on the scale of the Great Barrier Reef, but far more accessible, with the reefs within swimming distance from many of the beaches. Beautiful clear tropical lagoons are dotted along the 70 odd kms of the Park’s coast line. On shore, the red cliffs and gorges of the Cape Range bring the desert and the sea together. The eastern side of the range is less crowded and accessible only by fairly rough dirt roads. Well worth the drive though! We made the slow climb up the eastern side late in the day and were treated to the colours and shadows of the last of the afternoon light. Not the Grand Canyon, but with the sea as a distant backdrop, mighty impressive none the less.

It might have been the teeming school holiday crowds, but the small beach resort of Coral Bay just south of Exmouth, was a bit too crowded for our liking and we’ve elected to spend another night on the road.


17 July - Quobba Station, 50 Km N of Carnarvon

WA really does stand for WINDY ALL the time. The further south we go, the windier it seems to get. It has blown a gale all day today. Our van is rocking in the strong off shore wind blowing over the desolate coastline just north of Carnarvon. Here, the Outback literally meets the sea. Parallel red dunes roll west from the desert, meeting the white sand dunes of the coast. Quobba Station is a sheep and beef property blessed with an 80 km shore front of rugged red cliffs, shell-littered, sandy beaches and some of the best blow holes around. The owners have branched out and created a caravan/cabin park here and a luxury “Eco-resort” 60 kms further north.

Facilities on Quobba are a bit basic, but the beach front location and the interesting station buildings make it well worth the 10 km of dirt road to get here. We had a wander around the old shearing sheds this morning. It was like walking back into the heady days when Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’. The words of “Click Go the Shears” ran through our heads. The original, belt-driven shearer’s stands were still in place, as were the sorting table and the giant wool press. The old shearers’ quarters are now rented out to travellers. Very basic! Just as they were in the 1950s. None of these buildings have been restored. They remain as they were when the last sheep went out the shoot.

We have been collecting shells along the way on this trip. The beach here has hundreds of clam shells - not the giant variety, but still a fairly large shell. The interesting thing about these shells is that the rocks of the red cliffs on the beach have these same shells imbedded in them. Lying on the beach are shells washed ashore today, now lying beside exactly the same variety of shells that were washed ashore on this same beach over a million years ago, now re-exposed as the sea erodes the rocks. We are reminded that Australia is indeed an ancient land!


18 July - Shark Bay

Just a few kilometres west of our beach camp site lies Dirk Hartog Island, named after the first European to arrive on Australian soil. It was 26 October 1616, 152 years before Cook landed on the east coast. Captain Hartog, a Dutchman, inscribed a pewter plate and nailed it to a post to record the event. 81 years later, his countryman William de Vlamingh revisited the site and replaced Hartog’s plate with another, taking the original back to Holland, where it is now on display in the Rijks Museum. Vlamingh’s plate is now in the WA Maritime museum in Fremantle.

One look at the coast line around here and it is clear why the Dutch quickly banged out an inscription and high tailed it back to the East Indies. Wind swept comes quickly to mind, followed immediately by desolate. We haven’t seen a tree higher that 1 metre for 500 kms! Feral goats seem to thrive but even the emus have to carry a packed lunch to survive. However, it must be noted that it has been overcast as well as windy all day today, so our perception has been blighted by the weather. On a better day, we might have regarded it as “the garden spot” of the whole of WA, as the Sundance Kid noted to Butch Cassidy.

The Pilbara

9 July - Eighty Mile Beach

Derby and Broome lie at about the same latitude as Cairns. Northern Australia from Cairns north and west to Broome is often known as the Top End, or Tropical North - an area of fairly constant temperatures with seasons determined by rainfall. The Wet or the Dry. Well, that’s the theory. For the last week, the north west has had pelting rain, floods and road closures!

We were lucky in Broome. We managed to pick up a camping site at Cable Beach due to a cancellation. When we got there, we found out why. The poor sods who had our site in this totally booked-out town were camping in tents and were flooded out.

Broome is very touristy, a bit like Byron Bay with fewer hippies and more indigenous Australians. The town itself had little to offer us. A few pubs, over-priced pearl jewellery shops, plus the usual suspects of clothing and souvenir stores, are of little interest to us. Cable Beach, where we stayed, was the real attraction, with 22kms of white sandy beaches. The patrolled beach, close to the resorts, but a couple of hundred metres from our caravan park, was packed. Camel rides are the thing to do on Cable Beach. So we didn’t, just to be different! Forty or so camels plodding along the beach amongst the 4x4s and “Naturists” choosing to parade their wares, made for a very different beach scene.

The drive from Broome to our beach side caravan park at Eighty Mile Beach was far less interesting than the northern part of the Kimberleys. The flat plains seem to stretch for ever. At one point, we spotted a herd of wild camels strolling along, silhouetted against the steely grey sky. No flash saddles for these descendents of the ’Afghan Camel Trains’ that moved freight through remote Australia more than 100 years ago. Today, these feral herds are the world’s last remaining wild camels.

Eighty Mile Beach is about 350 kms from Broome and 250 kms from Port Hedland and there is nothing in between in either direction. So, to drive up 10 kms of dirt track from the remote highway junction to find hundreds of caravans and tents is a bit of a shock! This is a very popular fishing spot. We’ll try our luck tomorrow, but it’s very different beach fishing to what we are familiar with. The tides here can be as much as 8 metres between high and low, the beach is more than a kilometre wide at low tide and the water is very shallow at high tide.

The number of travellers like us on the road continues to amaze us. No matter where we go, roadhouses, beaches, bush camps, caravan parks or just on the open roads, thousands of nomads, backpackers and, at school holiday time, holidaying families, are hitting the road. We meet people who live in their vans or motor homes. They have no other home. Others regularly abandon their homes in ‘miserable’ cold places like Victoria for the winter and camp at one regular spot for six months every year. Many, like us, are just roaming about.


11 July - 90 kms south of Port Hedland

Ore trains over 7 kms long; tankers lining the horizon; red iron oxide dust covering everything. This is where it is all at. Port Hedland is one of Australia’s largest ports and, along with the coal ports of central Queensland, exports the enormous mineral wealth of the nation. Forty years ago there was nothing on the desolate Pilbara Coast. Today, the ore trains, dragged by eight locomotives, lumber in and out of town 24 hrs a day. Six mineral tankers are loading at the same time on the docks. Further out on the point, work continues around the clock to expand the loading facilities to eight tankers at a time. This is what kept Australia out of the recession over the past year or so.

Other than its significance as the port for the Pilbara mines, Port Hedland has nothing more to recommend it. Everything is red. The dust from the ore stockpiles covers the town. Every roof, every road, all the cars, every surface is red!

The industry supporting the mines and the port draws more than the normal Road Train traffic. Even though it’s Sunday, a truck roars past our camping area every few minutes.

West Kimberleys

3 July - Kimberleys, WA

We have seen a lot of jaw-dropping scenery in our travels. Probably the most impacting was our first sight of the Grand Canyon. The Kimberleys come very close! Rocky escarpments with red, gold and every colour in between, tower over rolling gold and light green valleys dotted with tangled, bulbous boab trees. Lake Argyle, just over the border from the Northern Territory is the largest fresh water lake in Australia. Man-made by damming the Ord River, the lake adds a brilliant blue to the spectrum of colours.

Kununurra and Wyndham are the two main towns of the northern part of the region. Neither have much going for them. Kununurra is by far the larger of the pair. It was created to service the Ord River Irrigation Scheme. Today, a service town is about all it is.

Wyndham today would hardly even be worth the drive, except for the fact that it is one of the ‘must visit’ places on most round Australia travellers’ itinerary, simply because it is WA’s most northern town. The town does have an interesting past, but it is mostly in ruins today. Wyndham Port is far more interesting from this perspective than the newer town a few kms inland. Four or five battered corrugated iron shops are all that is left of a once thriving multi-racial community. Chinese merchants, tailors and market gardeners supported the old port where they gathered after the gold petered out around the turn of the century. Afghan camel herders and local aborigines worked the gardens that fed the town and sailors from South-east Asia. Some of the Chinese families still live in the town, though all that remain of the Afghans is an isolated cemetery.

West to WA

29 June - Litchfield National Park

Great debate rages locally (and beyond) on the relative merits of the two major NT National Parks, Kakadu and Litchfield. In our books, it’s a ’no contest’. Kakadu wins hands down!

It is easy enough to understand why the locals prefer Litchfield. It’s an easy day trip from Darwin, with many accessible swimming holes and good sealed roads. Sure the falls are very nice and probably a cut above those in Kakadu, but the crowds! Hundreds swarmed over Florence Falls and Buley Rockpool swimming holes when we visited today. The car park was packed and the walking paths clogged with nattering children and slow pensioners.

Litchfield has none of the scenic splendour of Kakadu, no Aboriginal Art and no wetlands teeming with wildlife. I’ts not all bad though. The National Park camping area we are in at Wangi Falls is probably the best of its type we have seen. Hot showers, toilets and individual sites, all for $15 a night! Plus we gave ourselves a fair bit of exercise scrambling over some relatively rough trails, a bonus after a fair few days of driving.

30 June 78km West of Kathryn NT

The title of this blog is fairly indicative of some of the places we have been staying. A no name (that we know?) bush camp.

We were here just after 3:00pm. By no means the first arrivals. This place is topical of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of gatherings like this all over Australia tonight.

If we were travelling in Europe, looking for a ‘free camp’ in our motorhome, this is the very place we would avoid like the plague. Gatherings of caravans in open fields with fires going can mean only one thing there. Gypsies. Groups of nomads who have roamed Europe for centuries. We make no judgements on the reality of the reputation of Gypsies. We just know by our own experiences not to camp anywhere near them!

Camp ‘No Name’ in Australia is however somewhere where ‘travellers’ like us instantly feel safe. We know the drill. Toilets over there. Water tanks by the road - treat both with suspicion! Wandering chatty couples some of whom we have camped with further ‘up the track’. The obligatory European backpackers in a Wicked Van. Some guy strumming a guitar. Road Trains thundering past on the highway, still well within hearing distance. Sunset through the trees.

An Australian Gypsy Camp.

Kakadu to Darwin

28 June - Kakadu to Darwin

The Top End really does have just two seasons. The HOT and wet and the HOT and dry. Temperatures inside our van are as high as 40C during the day, dropping to the mid twenties at night. It is a fairly dry heat but still far from comfortable. We’ve camped in the bush a couple of nights in the national park. The heat is bearable by sunset, but the mossies are something else! Just on sunset and sunrise it is almost impossible to go outside the van. Swarms of mossies gather on the screens, lined up as if at a buffet!

That said, Kakadu is a spectacular wilderness. Rugged escarpments rise from primeval green swamps, alive with birds, fish and, of course, crocs! We took a cruise on Yellow Water, part of the South Alligator River and spotted hundreds of birds and a half a dozen crocs. They were estuarine or salt water crocodiles. These monsters grow to more than 6 metres and weigh more than 1000 kg. Almost hunted to the point of extinction up to 1970, they were fully protected in 1974. Since then, they have multiplied and extended their range.

Aboriginal art galleries abound in the northern parts of the park. Some of the work is reputed to be more than 5000 years old. Interesting as it is, the actual age seems somewhat questionable. Practice amongst traditional owners in this area is to either paint over previous pictures or add to or maintain them. Realistically, this may not be too different from European art restoration practices, but it makes it difficult to accept these as truly original ancient works.

Not having visited Darwin before, we have been more than a little taken aback by the city. No more the rough frontier town, a modern, well laid-out and busy city greeted us.

Cyclone Tracy in 1974 was the second destruction visited upon Darwin, but it probably has done more to build the modern city of today than the first, the Japanese air raids that began on 19 February, 1942.

In 1974, Darwin was a city of more than 44,000 people. After the cyclone, the population was reduced to just a little above 10,000. The city was almost totally destroyed by Tracy, but its spirit was quickly regenerated as the new city grew. Today, virtually everything is new and fairly well planned. Large expanses of green belt, public parks and reserves separate the new suburbs that have developed well beyond the boundaries of the old city. The city centre is vibrant. In addition to the usual array of chain stores, Darwin has capitalised on its climate with many street side restaurants and bars. A US warship was in port today, so the town was really ‘jumping’.

!942 has never been forgotten here, though. People are very aware of just how isolated they still are and how clearly this was demonstrated on 19 February 1942, when over 100 Japanese planes attacked the city. Ships crowded into the harbour were the main targets, along with the RAAF and US bases. At the time of the attack, only 10 US P40 fighters were in the city and they were there only by chance. All 10 were lost in the initial attack. While the city was not damaged anywhere near as badly as in the 1974 cyclone, the fear of further Japanese attacks saw the city virtually abandoned by civilians. Sixty-three further attacks did occur as the Japanese tried to destroy bases from which they could be attacked as they pushed south into New Guinea.

Katherine & Kakadu

After a couple of days at Katherine Gorge, paying outrageous camp fees for very ordinary facilities, we are back in the bush a km or so off the road into Kakadu, at a spot called Harriet Creek. As usual, there are other campers here, with their infernal generators drowning out the birds and the whisper of the soft bush breeze is just enough to get us comfortable in +30 C temperatures. Most of the other ‘wagons’ in this camp are circled with their doors opening into the centre. We have faced the other way with our door to the bush, so at least we get some sense of “wild” camping!

Much to our disappointment, the gorge was closed to canoes because of the danger of crocodiles. There was a late wet season this year so the water levels are still high enough to harbour salt water crocs. So with the canoe strapped tightly to the roof where it has been for some weeks now, we jumped on a river cruise with all the other tourists. The gorge was spectacular, with towering cliffs sheer to the water line. In the morning, we had walked to the top of the escarpment and looked down on the gorge. From that far away, it looked splendid in its isolation. Up close from the cruise boat, it was crawling with people. Hundreds of them! Not a lot of serenity here! There were, however, a few fresh water crocodiles sunning themselves on the water’s edge. They are supposed to be harmless, but at more than two metres in length, the ones we saw could give you a nasty mauling!


Katherine itself is a large town by Territory standards, more than 10,000 people. When we passed through town this morning, it must have been nudging 15,000 with all the caravans, campers and tour buses. So even with the buzz of the generators, our camp for tonight gives us a greater sense of the “Outback“ than we have experienced the last few days.


24 June - Kakadu National Park

Our poor little van had a serious ‘shake-down’ cruise today on the way into Gunlom Falls at the south end of the national park. Forty kilometres of bone-shaking corrugations in and another forty out really sorted out any loose screws. Except for the microwave that almost wriggled out of its slot and some wires that disconnected, all was ok in the end. Once the coating of bull dust was removed from every surface, we were back to normal.

Despite the horror road, the trip was well worthwhile. After what was described in the guide books as a ‘strenuous climb’, we made it to the beautiful upper pools of the falls. The falls themselves are nothing too spectacular, but the view from the cool, crystal clear pools was breathtaking.

Towards the Top End

20 June - Newcastle Waters to Mataranka

Our camping area by the highway last night was the most crowded we have experienced to date. We were just able to squeeze in between a van and a camper with inches to spare. Ridiculous when you consider how much space is available in the great nothingness that is the Northern Territory! Campers are generally good about keeping to the designated areas to bush camp, but if their numbers keep growing as they are, it won’t be too long before the mostly mild -mannered grey nomads break out and the hundreds of nice spots just off the highways all over remote and rural Australia are just taken over by frustrated campers.

Old Newcastle Waters is just off the highway, north of our camp site. It’s a rusting, corrugated iron ghost town today. The ruins of the old pub and shop are much as they were when the businesses closed up 30-40 years ago.

Further up the road, at Daly Waters, the pub still operates, drawing in the tourists. But, for us, the real thrill was the deserted WWII Airfield just outside town. We were able to drive up the deserted runway where Spitfires and B17 bombers landed in their hundreds, transiting to the front in the Pacific. Nothing has been done to the complex since its heyday. The original markings are still discernable on the runway, the bush has reclaimed some of the out buildings and pieces of wrecked planes struggle with vines and scrub. The main hanger is still intact, housing a few simple information boards about the strip’s wartime service. All this is much more interesting to explore, than the ‘restored history’ that most of these places eventually become.

Mataranka is our first caravan park since entering the NT. Time to do some washing and have a shower. While the washing was drying (which takes about 10 minutes in this sun and wind!) we headed off to the thermal springs for a swim. An oasis of cabbage tree palms greeted us, surrounding crystal clear pools of warm, 34C water. Fantastic!

Neither of us have read the book, but “We of the Never Never” was set in this area and the recreation of the original Elsey Station Homestead built for the movie is an excellent reminder of just how primitive life was in this part of the country up to the 1950s.