one leg each

Meet Bruce

Arriving on the east coast of Australia from WA was like arriving on a different continent. We were greeted out of the airport by a hot and humid morning, the mist floating mysteriously on the top of the very green rainforested mountains. I didn’t even know they did green in Australia!

Arriving at the hostel in Cairns was like a jolt back down to earth. We felt it immediately, without the car our wings had been clipped, and the only sight-seeing we would be doing was the prescribed trip that Greyhound bus schedules are made of. I had already had one long and arduous relationship with the Bruce Highway several years earlier and was keen to limit the use of that particular piece of tarmac on this visit. This trip was about getting off the beaten track man! and that demanded a car, nay it demanded a Campervan. We get that and freedom and the open road are ours!

That was when we met Bruce. We weren’t too sure about him at first. He was bright Orange after all! Hardly cool, plus he was more Campercar than campervan, but he was on budget and came with a DVD player, so we would just have to make our peace with the rest!

 Meet Bruce 

Not all relationships are love at first sight, and it wasn’t until day three that our little ménage a trois really clicked into place. We’d been driving through the Atherton Tablelands during the day stopping off at waterfalls, lakes and places to eat cheese. By nightfall, we found ourselves at Mission Beach and were able to park up our van under a palm tree and make ourselves at home for the night, just in time for a sunset vino. This was holiday brochure material right here!

 
bed on the beach 

 

before the mozzies arrive... 

It was here that we discovered what every other traveller appeared to be programmed with upon landing: The free camp spot homing device. As the driving distances are so vast between each town in Oz, the roads are littered with free rest areas which come equipped with toilets, drinking water, picnic tables and BBQ’s – which begs the question: “Why pay to camp somewhere when all this is on offer for free?” “A shower” is the answer to that question! But there’s nothing quite like an early morning beach shower, shamefacedly “G’day-ing” the dog walkers as you lather up in earnest!

rub a dub dub 

The search for the backpackers holy grail (free camp spot) took us to some of the most scenic and most random places I have ever stayed in my life from the millionaires row view of Arlie beach in the morning, to the Queensland tropical rainforest at the platypus bush camp…

 
"Good Morning!" Bruce comes up trumps with the early morning views 

To the less glamorous destinations of a childrens’ play area; (where we were prayed on drunks looking for some sport after a night on the tiles – or maybe they were vigilantes trying to rid their little country town of the new village peados in their bright orange van!) a race-course and my personal favourite, next to a “Garage World” opposite an industrial estate.

 
Our peado hang-out 

But luckily, we never reached the lows of one poor fellow who I found one morning under the picnic table of our truckers lay-by, rolled up in a carpet with a Woolworths cool bag for a pillow.

So along with tapping into our inner Tudor, (Queen Elizabeth the First had one bath a month, whether she liked it or not) there were other privations to get used to –  making a Maccas happy meal last three hours whilst abusing the free internet at McDonalds; (no town is too small or insignificant for Ronald to set up camp) starting and ending the day with the sun, (you can’t drive at night in Oz, unless you want some ‘roo carnage on your hands) which is fine, until your DVD player runs out of battery and you are lying in a make-shift bed in the back of a car, in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do and it’s 7.52! Ok, so it’s not exactly Bear Gryls, but we all have to start somewhere! But for all that, I’ve never had so much fun in my life! If you would have told me last year I would have been this stuff, I would have shuddered in horror and not have believed it. So Bruce, we salute you. You have been a real eye-opener! 

I am Tyler Durden

Byron Bay, a lovely sunny afternoon around 2pm...

So we're walking back to Bruce (our slightly embarrassing but highly practical campercar) and what do you know, but one of our side windows has been smashed! We obviously look straight inside but nothing appears to have been taken, but a more thorough search reveals that 2 of my bags are missing... oh dear.

Bruce, ahem.. you gotta love him

I suppose it could have been worse, but these hateful little creatures still managed to steal my passport, i-touch, brand new headphone & sunglasses - whats more my contact lenses and anti malaria tablets too - so a mixed bag of swag for the little cretins!

There are of course those who'll mock and tell you that you shouldn't bring anything valuable with you when travelling for this very reason - bollocks! I'm not about to endure a combined travel time of 3000 hours without some form of distraction.

Just to make things worse we met a suitably annoying 'free spirit' bloke who's philosophy was that if it happened to him "Well they probably needed it more than me". I'm not blind to the social economic problems of the world and what drives people to petty crime, but that was MY F$&KING I-POD, GET YOUR OWN!

This event did mean I was immediately stripped of 2 of the 3 bags I was carrying, which lets face it was probably too many... did I really need all his stuff anyway?

Did I secretly want this?

Will I later realise that I smashed our window and stole my own things??

Do I secretly want to be Brad Pitt and have naked punch ups in pub basements???

Tyler 

Will this set me free from the shackles of commercialism, finally being able to embrace the free spirit traveler vibe, slip on some Thai fisherman pants and stop washing????

Annoying backpackers 

Nah I think I just want my i-touch back.

The Wild Wild West

When I think about WA, a hot and isolated place with a raw, rugged beauty springs to mind. So I was ready for the blazing sun minus the ozone layer, the huge expanses of red, rocky barren earth and the small unassuming outpost towns that seemed from a forgotten age and had a ghost-like quality but what I wasn’t counting on, especially in the south, was the chilly nights (enough to warrant a fire in summer!) and gale force winds. Not to mention a sea temp that was reminiscent of the North Sea…in winter – and we wonder why they call us the Wingeing Poms! So we were about to discover that WA wasn’t all beach bums and bikinis, it was a pretty unique environment and not a particularly hospitable one but that’s not to say we didn’t like what we found, we absolutely loved it. It was just a question of toughening up!

One of the first things that struck us on our WA tour, as we travelled south through Margaret River and down to Denmark, was that it was like entering a living, breathing natural history museum. The passage of time was etched right there into the trees and coastline – all you had to do was take a look. In a “grass is always greener kind of way”, I know the Aussies like coming to Europe to experience our ‘history’ – Architecture, Art, the Ye Olde Taverns…. but to us, Australia’s natural heritage seemed way more impressive simply because these natural wonders had survived this climate and harsh conditions and were still going! Take the Karri trees for example, these trees, indigenous only to South Western Australia, are 400 years old. Some of them have even been half burned down in bush fires and they just keep on growing right round the dead timber like some amazing unstoppable force of nature. The Aussie equivalent being a trip round the Tower of London and meeting Anne Boleyn on the way round, still alive just with her head a jaunty angle!

Gloucester Tree 

 

  The view from the top of The Gloucester Tree 

But it’s not only the Karri trees that favour WA as their exclusive home. We soon realised that a lot of the fauna, flora and landscapes that we were about to discover were unique to this specific environment and that this was a truly special place.

“Geology Rocks!” at least, that’s what Ross from Friends thinks. I never quite got where he was coming from until we made our way south towards The Gap and The Natural Bridge. Quite unassuming names for a coastline which was carved out of granite during one of the earths major evolutionary stages, when Gondwana (the ancient supercontinent of Asia, Australia and Antartica) was wrenched apart, separating Australia from Antartica forever, 450 million years ago.  

We just stood in absolute awe, taking it all in, or at least trying to take it all in. To be honest, it was a bit mind boggling, especially when we found out that identical markings from the split are also still in tact, thousands of miles away, on the sister piece of granite, in Antartica.

 
 Natural Bridge (As the earth continues to evolve, The Natural Bridge will crumble and fall)

Fall into The Gap 

Next we headed North, past Perth, and onto Cervantes, a town best viewed from a speeding car. Luckily for Cervantes, they play host to The Pinnacles, which were worth applying the brakes for.We entered The Pinnacles at sunset, but felt like we had been transported to the moon, such was the other-worldly effect of the limestone pillars scattered across the dessert floor.The Pinnacles were formed several thousand years ago when shelly sand dunes were cemented together by percolating rainfall, which is a slightly less romantic description for the effect that these captivating shapes had at sunset. So I’ll let the pictures do the talking….

 

  The Pinnacles

After The Pinnacles, we had a haul ass drive up to Kalbarri. You know how it is, you get in the zone and the miles start flying past and your surroundings become a bit of a blur. This is exactly the state I was in when Rob shouted: “Oh my God, look at that!” To my right, was a bright pink lake. The Lonely Planet had really dropped the ball in neglecting to mention this! It was one of the most startlingly beautiful spectacles I had ever seen and we couldn’t take our eyes off it. Luckily a wildly careering Jackaroo doesn’t have too many obstacles on a deserted outback road.

The Pink Lake

The unofficial quest to find the oldest living organism in WA culminated in a visit to Hamelin Pools, just outside Denham. A half hour round trip on foot in the blazing sun, (imagine being in a sauna with a hair dryer on) which left me bright purple in the face a good hour afterwards, delivered the Stramatolites - The first life form on earth, without which oxygen breathing mammals (ie us!) would not even exist. Surely this could not be trumped!

The Stramatolites

It was a little bit like: “Is anyone else just seeing a load of rocks in the sea?” But despite my purple face and near exhaustion, I managed to find some appreciation for these ‘living fossils’ - a girl doesn’t get to see a breathing rock every day of the week after all, especially one which experts thought were extinct until the late 1950’s and which dated back 3500 million years.

And so it was time to hang up the Akubra, and shed our cowboy boots for another day. Our tour of the Wild West was complete and there was a steak with my name on it waiting in the air conditioned heaven of chez Bradbury. So long WA, it’s been a pleasure. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No country for young men

Arriving in Australia was a shock to the system such are the immediate differences with Asia (and perhaps the festive booze on the plane could have had something to do with it…)

Kids on the flight were concerned about the new look Santa

Festive high jinks 

Welcome to Australia...

-You can drink the water straight out of the tap!

-You don’t feel like you’re getting ripped off by the locals!

-Look a hot shower!

-My God, something that resembles a solid deposit in the toilet!

Taking our guided tour through Perth felt like a visit to a 1940 hollywood movie set, everything is so clean and smart - you can almost smell the paint drying on the brand new gleaming houses. Gone was the dirt and grime of cities like Saigon or Bangkok, Perth was buffed to a high shine!

 
 Perth on typically sparkling form

The difference that that really hurt us was is the cost - it took precisely 2 hours to realise that our superficial money saving in Asia would be hopelessly swallowed up by the harsh reality of travelling in Australia - seriously when did the Aussies grow the balls to charge over £6 for a pint!? Do these upstarts realise where we were from!??

Perth is the most isolated city in the world (something the locals seem secretly proud of) and it sprawls along the coast for miles - everyone craving the cooling effect of the ocean and the famed Fremantle Doctor. This is the name given to the afternoon sea breeze that brings the temperature to a more sociable level of 35 – without it it’s highly unlikely Perth would have such a population. So maybe it’s no surprise that the breeze is spoken about so much by the locals, seriously people LOVE to talk about the weather here, especially the wind, it seems that English traditions extend way beyond just cricket and drinking.

Our WA adventure began in earnest when we left the protective womb of The Bradbury’s air conditioned pad and hit the road, the plan was to head south to the famed surf breaks and wineries of Margaret River, before calling in at the south coast town of Denmark and finally trekking north along the Brand Highway up the Coral Coast to Exmouth.

This was as good as it got for me... 

With our new found realisation that our Great British Pound was in fact feeble, any ideas of living the high life were quickly replaced with camping, a diet of beans and drinking as much cheap red wine as we could get our hands on! This change in tact was refreshing though, we were on our own for once.

WA is billed as being The Real Australia and the landscape certainly lived up to my expectation with a beautiful blue ocean pounding against some truly rugged coast line, bizarre rock formations and the ever present red earth giving ‘life’ to scrubs and maingy plants – you really do have to wonder how people have survived here for so long, it’s a harsh environment that could easily punish the naive.

Kalbarri National Park  

This beauty seems to come at a cost, with dangers lurking around every corner, the island being patrolled by killer sharks in the ocean, crocodiles in the north and venomous snakes and spiders in the bush. Despite this the locals seem to shrug it all off and there is a general acceptance that ‘She’ll be right’ even if it is a Tiger shark swimming past you when you fish… “oh it’s ok, the sharks are well fed in these parts.” The only danger Aussies do seem afraid of is the sun, oh how we mocked when we arrived from Asia with golden tans and observed the pale locals move from shade to aircon and back to shade – we now know why.

The weather as you head north in Summer is brutal - 40 degree in the shade, a serious lack of water and people on the road does make you wonder how you’d feel breaking down or blowing a tyre on one of the deserted ‘highways’ - Real Aussies seem to like their roads like they like their men, straight and silent. The people you do meet are everything stereotypes are made for, narly old men who have zero use for shoes, friendly but slightly scary large women, gap tooth feral hicks, there certainly seems to be a lack of metrosexuals here – it’s all too obvious why Ches and Jake are more at home in London!

This country demands respect, but what is refreshing is that your experience of it isn’t guarded by a nanny state – the dangers (Whether it crossing a fast flowing creek, a 10k trek in the bush or 4x4 trip in the outback) are there for all to see but it’s up to you to if you want to take them – just don’t come crying to us when you hurt yourself you big Sheila.

The Troll Cup spurring Faye on...

A trip into Francios Peron Nation Park seemed like the perfect place to test ourselves against the harshest of climates and prove that pommes do more than whinge. This national park was only accessible by 4x4 with the sufficient ground clearance and with their tyres lowered to 15psi. It wasn’t a tourist hotspot so we were told to bring at least 20L of water because any ‘issues’ might take a while to resolve.

We set off into the park, not passing a car in either direction with the sun a cool 39 degrees outside and immediately I wondered if this was a good idea. Driving on the soft red sand was hard, the car squirmed about and struggled to find grip, sliding left and right, eventually slowing down and getting bogged in a hole. Shit. Only 10mins in and the car was stuck. Outside was scorching, the sand seemingly burning right through my thongs, as I tried in vain to dig the car out of the newly created hole… the back wheels just dug in further.

Thankfully within 10mins (It felt longer) a car full of Aussies came to our rescue, wandered over (naturally sans shoes) and kindly pointed out that the 4 wheel drive wasn’t engaged on our front wheels! While looking at me with a mixture of embarrassment and concern they set us on our way, even going so far as advise us on where it gets really bad up ahead… they’re all so bloody nice.

 
Skipjack point, Francios Peron Nation Park

Touring the park became a massive challenge but so much fun, sliding around on the sand seemed to be easier the faster you went, or that’s what I reckon anyway. All this heat was taking its toll and we were desperate for a swim, but having already spotted an assortment of sharks, Manta Rays and Sting Rays from the headland we proceeded with caution even though we were in a safe swim area. I starred into the water for a good 5 mins while standing in the shallows, just to, you know, double check… and there it was, a shadow lurking only 2m away – I stepped back as the shark swam along the shore and around the reef… maybe swimming at Shark Bay wasn’t such a clever idea.

Awesome Manta Rays 

The drive out of the park was riotous, we didn’t see another car for 6 hours so no chance of any more local help - this aint a place to get stuck in. Finally out on a proper road I now know it takes more than walking around in bare feet to be called a Real Australian. 

West-side Dining, Australia

Before our culinary horizons were limited to beans on the camping stove, we did have a few chances in WA to get stuck into some proper Aussie grub, including some bush tucker. Enough to know anyway that the standard, especially in the cities, is very high (so are the prices, hence the beans!) and that this is a country of foodies!

 Food quality and creativity are top notch which has spawned a style of cooking coined as Mod Oz, taking the cream of local produce, seafood for example, and spinning a slick new twist on an Asian or traditional classic.

Well, I always think, if you are going to try something new, might as well go to  the best place in town! And so off I headed with the girls to Cocos, a Perth institution, as well known for its stunning views over the Swan River and the city, as for its food.

Scallops were the order of the day – as big as 50p pieces, crispy on the outside and opaque and succulent on the inside dressed with a light shredded asian salad  and all washed down with a Mad Fish Semillion Blanc from Margaret River. The high life eh! Little did I know that this would be a last supper of sorts, but at least I went out in style!

 

 
The view of Perth from Cocos

 

But it hasn’t all been fine dining, we are in Australia after all, and if someone was willing to tie the kangaroo down (sport), then I was willing to eat it!

“Little Creatures” in Freo happily obliged and we were presented with our first kangaroo dinner! Skewered, marinated in rosemary and griddled on the barbie, they came with a spicy tomato salsa. It sounded interesting on paper, but I still wasn’t quite sure what was in store.

 Luckily, expectations were more than exceeded, the meat was tender and flavoursome and what’s more you can’t mention ‘roo without an Aussie launching into the amazing health giving properties of the meat so it’s a bonza feed all round! This meal doesn’t come guilt free however, Skippy is one cute marsupial after all, but “when in Rome,” as they say! 

 

The 'Roo

 

As a northern English lass I pride myself on being able to spot a good chip at twenty paces and in Perth my cup runneth over. Perth do the best chips ever – skins on, crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside and sprinkled generously with rock salt. Mwoah! (lip smacking sound!) We just spent our last night in Perth with a fish and chips supper and a bottle of wine, taking in an awesome pink sunset on Cottesloe beach. A perfect end to an absolutely amazing month in WA.

 

Sunset and chips at Cottesloe Beach, Perth

 

If I have been won over by the Aussie chip, the ‘pie for breakfast’ initiation was one tradition that I was most definitely resisting, that is until Rosie, our hostess with the mostess, showed me the error of my ways. Her Kiwi bacon and egg pie was a master-class in taking five simple ingredients and turning them into a new, but somehow already familiar, favourite. Definitely a recipe that will be reappearing in the Yorkshire Dales as part of the new world kitchen repertoire!

There is definitely something very welcoming and homely about pies, which is maybe why our next aimiable hosts “The Swinglers” took up the mantle on our arrival. What better way to greet your guests, than to arrive at your destination after a long days drive and have a roast lamb dinner and home-made apricot pie, made with fruit fresh from the tree outside, waiting for you? The perfect welcome to the people from “The Old Country”.

 

Swinglers kitchen in Denmark and Gordon the best tour guide ever

 

Oysters at Xanadu winery in Margaret River.

Oysters are a funny one. The general idea doesn’t appeal, but I approach trying new food like listening to a new album; you have to try it out a few times before you can really tell if you like it or not.

The oysters that I had a ‘Margies’ ticked all the boxes, pleasing to the eye as well as the taste buds. They came nestled on a bed of rock salt and topped with a subtle Bloody Mary relish. Such was their appeal, that instead of just launching them down, I gave each one several slow chews and savoured the taste of the ocean. A real eye opener of how an oyster can be.

 

New Years Eve Carpaccio of Beef Jamie Oliver Style

As you know, I like to congratulate myself for a job well done in the kitchen and the NYE carpaccio of beef is no exception! Of course, I didn’t work alone and my ‘little helper’ stepped up to the plate too!

We went for a British twist on the Aussie barbie tradition by seasoning a whole fillet of beef, searing it on the barbie and then slicing it finely carpaccio style and serving it with a horseradish dressing and rocket and roast tomato salad.

 This was a NYE and thank you dinner for our great Xmas hosts The Bradburys (yes, and a bon voyage for you too Jake!).

Great dinner, awesome company – perfect combination!

 

NYE carpaccio of beef - Jamie Oliver would be proud!

 

 

The NYE Brigade

 

That’s the aussie food run down so far. Hopefully our days on beans are limited and when we get to the east coast we can start getting stuck back into some proper tucker!

Happy Campers

Before this stint in WA, the thought of camping left me non-plussed. What was the attraction? Was it being close to nature? A prime-evil urge to live a simple life as our early ancestors once did; Or was it that people just liked living life in miniature? (little salt and pepper and a mini Tupperware of sugar) - your own microcosm in a tent; Or maybe it was the shared shower block and all that fresh air..! The main draw for us was purely financial, as it was considerably cheaper than all the other alternatives. Western Australia is the most expensive place I have ever been in living memory, especially after coming straight from Asia – we didn’t know how good we had it! Sure it’s an isolated place, but $50 Aus for fish and chips, when the fish has literally just jumped out the ocean onto your plate? Surely even Rick Stein would take issue with such extortion!

Anyway, we had a lucky break and the Oz Christmas fairy (no pun intended Andrew!) paid us a visit and granted all our camping desires, down to a old Nescafe jar, informatively labelled “laundry powder (not cocaine)”  Always best to make these things clear; avoid any silly accidents! All we had to do was rock up and pitch a tent. As you know, I am cut more from the city-dwelling cappuccino-drinking, sushi-eating mould, as opposed a rugged outdoorsy one, but also not afraid to knock something till I’ve tried it either. Previous camping excursions having only included the obligatory Glastonbury right of passage, where camping was more a by product of the festivities than any actual attempt to be at one with nature, so let’s call it a clean slate!

 
The Oz Christmas Fairy (Sorry Andrew!) 

And so off we went! After a false start at Contos Campsite in Margies where a drive-by reccy indicated dry scrubland spots, non-existant showers and an entry exam on the functions and capabilites of a swiss army knife, we settled on a campsite more suited to our novice camping capabilities and which left “the camp shower” experience (a large plastic bag that you left out in the sun to warm up and then hung from a tree to have a shower under) for another day. Days 1-3 we were enchanted by this quaint new experience and marvelled at our own self-sufficiency! Enjoying the simple riddle and team work involved in putting up a tent and the camerarderie of the campers kitchen. By day 4, I was bent double like an arthritic pensioner and ready to take a gun to the “morning wake-up call” perched outside our tent.

Our first base camp!  

After a little soujourn away from the rigours of the simple life (bliss!) at our retreat in Denmark, I was refreshed and ready for round 2.  

By this point we had cut our teeth and knew what to expect – I came armed with wine! Drinking is the past time of choice for campers and not just a friendly regulation beer whist prodding your snag on the barbie, this is drinking for pure escapism! The parents to escape from their kids as they whizz off round the campsite like an escaped helium balloon, whilst we found it aided our enjoyment of our travel-sized Guess Who? game. Plus drink enough red wine and you can hit the hay anywhere, even a parched bit of parasitic scrubland 500km’s, second left off the road to hell.

 
 Retro DIY entertainment at it's best!

By week 2, our camping detail was run like a military operation and our tent could be up and ship shape in ten minutes flat. For a mental image - think Forrest Gump in his army days, assembling a gun. Camping is all in the attention to detail and I remember the day we earned our true camping stripes (I should do, it was only last week!). We had just crossed over the Tropic of Capricorn into Coral Bay. How we cheered! Good-bye cold windy nights and freezing sea water, hello balmy evenings and a warm, tropical sea! Only to be sat huddled in our van, drinking wine a couple of hours later in the face of our “welcome to the tropics” thunderstorm. But we sat in that van like a couple of proud parents cheering on from the sidelines as our tent held firm against the battering of the storm, whilst bigger tents were literally ripped from their moorings. We had made it!

Week 3 – by this point we were dab hands, but I have to admit the whole camping thing was getting slightly tiresome. No more so than the rather limited diet of Heinz variety 57. A man can’t live on beans alone (especially when living in the close quarters of a tent. We all know the fetid repercussions of a fart trapped under a duvet, but you ain’t experienced anything till a week of beans takes it’s toll in a tent!)

 
Beans on the campfire! 

We braved the campers kitchen with, in retrospect, the slightly ambitious notion of recreating some vitenamese pancakes, a favourite from our travels in Asia …..just at the same time as the “Western Xposure” tour bus decided to make an industrial vat of spag bol. Oh Brother. Huge boiling pots being wielded left, right and centre, whilst the appointed chefs batted off sticky beak spectators who were cluttering up the kitchen, jostling for the inclusion of their own particular family recipe. Stress! Needless to say, it was back to the comfort of the baked bean tin the following night.

And so, the final frontier of Karijini national park awaited us, and we set off into the outback wondering if we were up for this final hardcore challenge. It could get up to 50 degrees in there and the facilities were going to be basic. Was the camping shower about to have it’s day in the sun? More importantly, we were travelling 700ks into the outback and had to have our fingers crossed that our calculations on petrol would see us right – petrol gauge being of the non-functioning variety! All things considered, this was a bit of a biggie!

These things usually pan out just fine but it was with sinking hearts when we finally saw what awaited us. The campsite looked like someone had tried to raze it to the ground and only half succeeded as there was black, charred stumps littering the bright red rocky ground which itself was completely impervious to the half-hearted jabbings of a tent peg, oh and a thunderstorm of biblical proportions was on it’s way. A mini-break in Wolfe Creek seemed like a good idea after a couple of hours “being at one with nature” in this place.

Once we ascertained that iron ore and tent pegs weren’t easy bed fellows, we decided our only option was to weigh the tent down with rocks and hope it didn’t rain. To make matters worse we were a man down at this point – pet lip and sulking in the car being the preferred course of action for some – but Leuitenant Smallwood carried the day! Ripping rocks from the ground and braving the full scale mozzy attack to set up base camp! Hurrah!

 
 Red earth, ominous sky - could this be hell on earth?

So WA adventure over, we made it back to Perth safe and sound and with it I gleaned a bit of an insight into this mystifying holiday choice. All in all, camping is a bit of a leveller. You get away from it all, back to nature or whatever, have a couple of shit nights sleep on a half pumped up lilo and suddenly that shit-hole in Bangkok, where you actually had a mattress to sleep on, doesn’t seem so bad after all! The best thing about camping is…getting back to civilisation - a warm shower, porter-house steak dinner (Oh yes Rosie, you read our minds!) and the best nights sleep ever!

Ozspotting

Choose Oz. Choose having xmas dinner with a Mauri Tribe leader. Choose cooking a bbq breakfast for 80 people. Choose catching your first wave… eating sand and wiping out. Choose beach-ing it on xmas day. Choose driving a speedboat back from Rottnest Island. Choose opening presents on xmas morning from your family 5000 miles away. Choose having one too many on the flight to Perth. Choose being given a car, surfboard and loads of camping gear for your trip round WA. Choose making some awesome mates. Choose eating kangaroo, bumnuts and cackleberries. Choose a 34 degree xmas day. Choose the best nights sleep ever above a surf board workshop. Choose eating hand caught abalone from shark infested waters. No worries. Good on yer!. Shithouse! Dunny. Yibbeda. Oh Yeah? Choose swimming in a 50m commonwealth pool in glorious sunlight. Chose wearing a cowboy hat and belting out “Tiny Dancer” on the back of a speedboat. Choose getting your laptop fixed by a public servant free of charge. Chose drinking Margaret River Mad Fish dry. Choose the best hospitality this side of the equator, that side of the equator, any side of the equator. Choose the best fish and Chips in the world. Choose the land down under. Choose Oz.

A massive thanks to our cast of convicts:

T.J & Rosemary Bradbury

Jakeo & Steveo Bradbury

Andrew Poor & Brook Sly

Cath and the Belini Mafiosi

Sal Gordon and Chris in Denmark

Wall & Flavia, Greg Jules and Zac, Mat and Kate

And various extras…

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 Drinking before 9am

Hard Yacker on xmas morning

Bad Santas

Beach on xmas day - look no snow!!

 Opening presents on xmas morning!! Thanks everyone!

 Dance-off Rotto Style!