Western Australia

General Sydney took a long time to arrive and then arrived all at once. The flight from Europe crosses so many time zones that the body gives up on keeping count, and the first thing registered after the airport transfer was the view from a balcony on the upper floor of an apartm …

General The second day in Sydney was given to the harbour and to the animals that live beside it. A short hop on the ferry from Circular Quay reaches Taronga Zoo, which occupies a hillside at Bradleys Head on the north shore, and the crossing alone is worth the fare: the boat pas …

General Rottnest Island lies eighteen kilometres off Fremantle in the Indian Ocean, and it takes about half an hour to reach by ferry. The crossing leaves the mouth of the Swan River and passes the port of Fremantle, where the container cranes, the old wharf sheds and the black h …

General The fourth day began in Perth and ended among sand dunes with no town for twenty kilometres in any direction. The highway north leaves the city between new apartment blocks and building sites, crosses the coastal plain where the suburbs thin out into paddocks, and then ru …

General The fifth day was a driving day with a reward at the end of it. The route north from the Pinnacles runs through country that gets drier and redder with every hour: red earth on both sides of the road, green scrub beyond, a dry creek bed full of eucalypts, and a rest stop …

General The sixth day stayed where it was, and that was the point of it. The camp on the red sand of the Peron Peninsula was left standing, the car stayed parked for most of the morning, and the day was spent in the water and on the tracks of the peninsula. Three small pale anima …

General The seventh day was a driving day with a list of small things to do at the end of it. The morning began with the rituals of a long road trip: tyre pressures checked and topped up with a compressor beside the road, a jerry can filled at a public tap, and the boot rearrange …

General The eighth day was spent in and around Carnarvon, and it began with the sound of galahs. The camp was on grass under tall trees in a caravan park beside the river, and the pink and grey cockatoos that had been bickering in the branches since dawn were still at it when the …

General The ninth day was the longest drive of the journey so far: from Carnarvon north across the Tropic of Capricorn to the little settlement of Coral Bay, a distance of around four hundred kilometres through country with almost nothing in it. The first stop was a rest area und …

General The tenth day was the long drive north from Coral Bay to the tip of the North West Cape, and it is the day the country changes character. The red plain of the Gascoyne gives way to a spinifex landscape with dark outcrops standing in it, the road signs change from kangaroo …

General The eleventh day was a beach day, which on the Ningaloo coast means a reef day. The morning began with the sun on the water and the sand already too hot to stand on, and the first hour was spent in the lagoon off Coral Bay with a mask and a snorkel, working along the edge …

General The twelfth day moved camp to the national park and spent the whole of it on the western side of the peninsula. The beaches under the cliffs of Cape Range are backed by red rock overhangs, and in the middle of the day the shade under one of them is the only comfortable pl …

General The thirteenth day began with a lift to the dunes and ended in the water. The dune field lies south of the settlement, a broad belt of sand that has been pushed inland by the wind off the beach and fixed in place only at its edges by scrub. Tyre tracks wind across the bar …

General The fifteenth day was a driving day of the kind that this part of the country specialises in: four hundred kilometres of red earth, roadhouses and signs that list the names of towns that are still hours away. The morning began on the coast and ended inland, and the countr …

General The sixteenth day was spent in the gorges of Karijini, and it is the day that most people who make this journey remember. The morning began in the campsite with the tent flaps open and the range standing along the horizon above the scrub, and it continued on a red dirt ro …

General The seventeenth day was a driving day between two mining towns, and it began with the sign that everyone stops for: a green board on a red gravel verge pointing to Tom Price and Paraburdoo. The road east from the gorges climbs onto the plateau, passes through country of g …

General The eighteenth day began with an industrial tour and ended on the road south. The morning was spent at the iron ore mine west of Newman, where the visitor is taken to a lookout above the pit and shown the scale of an operation that has been running for sixty years. Haul t …

General The nineteenth day brought the journey into the goldfields, and it began with a town that has kept its nineteenth century face. Leonora's main street is wide, lined with verandahed buildings of stone and corrugated iron, and quiet enough that a police car parked outside t …

General The twentieth day took in one of the strangest sights in the country and ended in a city built on gold. The morning began on the road south through Menzies, a gold town that has shrunk to a hotel, a shire office and a row of empty buildings, and it continued past a roadsi …

General The twenty first day brought the journey back to the coast and to the city where the state began. Perth in midsummer is hot, bright and full of water: the river runs through the middle of it, the beaches face west to the Indian Ocean, and the bushland that existed before …

Basically the quality of a car trip through WA can't be compared to anything I had before. They are all extremes, but even now not so extreme. That comes only after the fact how special that was. So let's start with the car at the beginning. Without car it goes nowhere. It goes w …

General The fourteenth day was Christmas Day, and it was spent at Coral Bay. The settlement does the festival in the manner of a small Australian town: the fire and rescue truck, decorated and driven slowly along the road past the tropical greenery, a Christmas tree in the shade …

Because of my more or less regular stays in Sydney we decided this year to spend our annual vacation in Australia. The plan was that M. would first come to Sydney and then we would fly to Western Australia, rent a car there and then buy some equipment from a friend and finally go …