23rd February 2011
So now we’re driving back down the 900km road to Perth, the same route we drove two days ago but in reverse. It must be said that our trip up the west coast of Australia feels a little anticlimactic.
This west coast is difficult to visit and enjoy. You can gawp for a while at the vast barren emptiness of the landscape, but the novelty fades quickly. Things to do are concentrated into a couple of spots – Shark’s Bay, which we reached, and the Ningaloo Reef which we didn’t. And even once there it’s not as though there’s much you can do independently. Getting out of the car at any time of day is like having your head thrust into an oven and on any walk of more than ten minutes you can almost feel your exposed skin getting crispy-fried under its coating of SPF 30+. Within a minute of leaving the car you also become surrounded with the flies. They land all over you, so you look like a big currant bun. Unlike more well-mannered English flies these Aussie buggers will cheerfully walk over your face, lips, eyelids, up your nostrils and into your ears. The whole of Western Australia is like Augrabies Falls.
Exploring is definitely for the masochist. Which leaves you with the option of paying for a boat cruise, or paying for a 4WD tour, or paying for a scenic flight, or paying for… you get the picture.
Hey, I’m bound to be disgruntled – we didn’t get to visit Ningaloo Reef, which was the whole purpose of including WA on our itinerary in the first place. But I’m just saying, you’ve got to think carefully about how to enjoy this part of the world, and hopefully avoid cyclone season too.
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