Western Australia in an RV, Aug 10-19

After Perth, we spent 10 days in an RV driving over 2000 miles in the outback along the western coast of Australia. We decided to try the west coast instead of the more commonly traveled east coast because we went to Sydney and the Great Barrier Reef on our honeymoon, so we thought we’d see something different. Our first mistake was not booking the RV for a one way drive and flying back from Broome. Western Australia is so big, we really did not realize how big until we were driving on its 2 lane highway for hours, trying to pass semi-trucks pulling 3 trailers. Let me begin with Western Australia’s size…

Australia is made up of 6 states and 2 territories and is about as big as the continental US. Western Australia is one state and it is as big as if you drew a line down the US, including MT, WY, CO, NM, and that western part of TX and taking everything west of that. Then Perth would be like “Los Angeles”. The crazy part is that there is all that land, like 11 western US states and only 3 million people live there, with over a million of those people in Perth. I thought the south island of NZ was unpopulated, well Western Australia is even less so. Basically, we drove from LA to Portland and back in 10 days instead of driving one way from LA to Seattle. But as I said it was much harder going than popping onto one of our highways in the US and doing 70 mph. The entire way was 2 lane highway, we had to pass very long semi’s and we could only drive during the day because there are tons of dead kangaroos on the side of the road (we probably saw a few hundred!) as reminders of what could happen and there are also open grazing areas, so cattle, sheep and/goats wander onto the highway as well. It was sort of slow going anyhow, since we were driving this massive 6-berth RV.



Here is Jacob’s journal entry about the RV:
So far I like the RV more than a hotel room. First, drives are less uncomfortable. Also, we don’t need to move around from hotel to hotel. Last of all, we can cook our own meals.
It’s less boring on drives for a few reasons. For example, we can watch TV on long drives. Next we can stand up and stretch now and then. Finally we can take a short nap whenever we want.
Next, it’s great that we don’t have to move from place to place. We don’t have to waste time packing up. Also we don’t take as many long drives. The camper really makes sleeping easier.
Finally we get to cook our own meals. It’s not as expensive, leaving more money for other things. Lastly, the food is just as good as at a restaurant.

I’m not sure renting the RV was necessarily “not as expensive”. It’s true we didn’t eat out much, but the rental cost was significant $2200/10 days and we paid around $40/night for a powered RV spot in a lot of places. We did stay a few nights “out in the bush”, that is, camping areas with no amenities (no toilets) that didn’t cost anything. We also had to stay in RV parks without power now and then, since they didn’t have a powered site available. So contrary to my unrealistic expectation that being in an RV would be luxurious and like being in a house, it was much more like glorified camping. The nights that we didn’t have power were pretty cold. It is winter here, so even though we were on the coast, which was temperate, the nights were probably in the low 50’s. When we could plug in, we had a heater running in the RV. But I’ll say more about the RV later.

We saw some neat things on the west coast. We went to the Pinnacles which reminded us of Goblin State Park in Utah. The stone formations were smaller than at Goblin SP but there were a lot more of them. We did a nice 3km loop hike there and played hide-and-go-seek along the way. It was the perfect place for that game.




Next we went to Kalbarri National Park which is on the coast. We saw humpback whales far off on the horizon and we hiked down to the river that runs through the park. It’s known for its red rock gorges. On our hike out we came across a bunch of kangaroos which was fun to see.



After that we went to Denham/Monkey Mia where this family of dolphins comes every morning to the resort beach to be fed. You can get quite close to them as you can see from the pictures. There were pelicans there too, fighting to get the fish that was being fed to the dolphins. There are rangers there and they keep track of how much fish they feed each dolphin. They only feed them 25% of what they need per day, so they still go out and fish properly. The dolphins have been going there since the 1960’s and now the daughters and granddaughters of the original first 3-4 dolphins are coming back to get free fish and have their picture taken by the mob of tourists. The big thrill here was that Jacob, Charlie, and Elise got selected from the audience to feed the dolphins, so they got to do that which they thought was pretty neat.





Near Denham we saw a very unique beach called Shell Beach. The whole beach was made up of tiny shells. They made them into bricks and built buildings out of them. It was pretty amazing to walk on. We’d never seen anything like it.








After that, we went to Exmouth/Coral Bay which was where Paul had the best dive of his life. I’ll let him write a bit about what it was he saw. He’s probably been on about 25 dives, in places like the Great Barrier Reef, Ambergris Caye in Belize, Maui in Hawaii, the Red Sea in Egypt Sinai peninsula and in the Mediterranean Sea in Bodrum, Turkey and he said that Exmouth’s Navy Pier was a 10 out of 10. Not a lot of press for the west coast of Australia compared to the GBR, but the snorkeling and diving was superb. We liked it because you could snorkel off the beach instead of at the GBR you have to take a boat out to the reef to snorkel and dive. We saw a pretty big octopus (6-8 feet stretched out) in Cape Range National Park which is near Exmouth




and a big sting ray (3-4 feet wing tip to wing tip) in Coral Bay just by snorkeling off the beach. The water was cold, but it was worth getting in. We got video of both of those. I’ll try to post them maybe if I can find a decent connection, the video files are so big.



At the very end of our trip, we stopped in Port Denison so the boys could hand fish off a pier for a couple hours as a break from driving. Jacob, Henry and I caught some small fish and Jacob caught a spider crab!




I'll post a little bit more about the RV next. We're in Japan right now, staying with my cousin in Hiroshima, so I hope I can get caught up here. More soon.