29 Mar
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Days adrift.  Click here to see our best and worst experiences so far.
4995
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35
Bus, train and taxi rides.  Click here to see all posts relating to transport. (56 posts)
185
Miles walked.  Click here to see all posts relating to walking and trekking. (43 posts)
581
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15
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1157
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13288
Rainy days.  Click here to find posts relating to the weather. (50 posts)
63
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1
Otters spotted.  Click here to go to our website about otters: amblonyx.com
45
 
...two travellers in search of the world's wildlife

26 February 2011

Helluva difference

21st February 2011

You couldn’t find a bigger difference, driving on Bali one day and then Western Australia the next. Gone are the narrow winding roads, hundreds of vehicles, overloaded motorbikes, rustic villages, potholes, verdant jungles and average speed of 25mph. Say hello to endless and immaculate straight highways with the occasional huge road-train passing and often a half hour between vehicles, an enormity of empty desert scrub on all sides, and an average 110mph kept up for hour after hour.

Road trains are particularly enormous lorries, with three trailers strung together behind them. Every few hundred kilometres there is a road station; a petrol station with a shop and cafe. Now and again the skeleton of an unlucky kangaroo on the wide dirt verge. That’s pretty much it.

If you’re ever heading from Geraldton up to Shark Bay, don’t bother with a stop in Kalbarri NP. The “coastal gorges” are particularly unspectacular and the River Severn at Ironbridge makes a more impressive gorge than the Murchison “river gorge”. I will at least say it is the most authentically chocolate-coloured river I’ve ever seen.

Oh, and we’ve seen our first Australian mammal, the wallaroo. It looks like a kangaroo, but is much smaller and closer in size to a wallaby. So really it has an astonishingly sensible name.

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