Green Cafes, Red Lights, Yellow Stars

I ticked a new country off of my list this week. I finally, finally (even though it’s ridiculously close and I have no excuse) went to the Netherlands. Amsterdam to be specific. I drove over from France, cutting through Belgium before entering the Netherlands and, given all of the laws and restrictions I faced in Australia just passing from one state into another, I was shocked and a little elated to realise entering another European country was as simple as driving 10 metres down a road past a sign. Crazy huh. No barriers, no searches, no forms, no checks. I just waltzed through three countries in one day without even having my passport scanned. The government probably thinks I’m still in Spain for frog’s sake.

This little jaunt into Amsterdam was very well-timed as the city had come out of a huge lockdown just a few days before. Things were open but still fairly empty. I’d checked the weather pretty much every hour in the few days leading up to this trip and everyday it said cloudy and rainy. Not my ideal weather for a place that’s meant to be so picturesque but hey, I’ll take what I can get. Amsterdam in the rain is still better than being at home doing nothing in January. Apparently it rains in Amsterdam like 60% of the time anyhow so at least I’m getting a realistic experience.

The first thing to be aware of when taking a trip to Amsterdam is that there is a ton of tourist tax. When you book accommodation, ensure you check whether these taxes are included in the price or whether they get added on at the end. I think it’s about 3E per person, per night, plus an extra 7% of the booking, so the places that look the best value, can quickly become expensive if you’re not careful. Even in January, I found Amsterdam was not as cheap as I was expecting: you’re still looking at at least 20E per night for a dorm bed, before taxes and fees. The best rated hostel (according to the hostelworld app) is super central and around that price, but I noticed it was possible for a couple to book a queen sized bed in a 32 person dorm-room. There is no way in hell I’m staying in a hostel that puts couples in beds together in a dorm room. That’s just basically giving them permission to perform a live sex show for the other backpackers in the room. No freaking thank you.

I ended up staying in the De Pijp district of Amsterdam, which was a little further out, but also had options where the price for accommodation (plus taxes and fees) was a little lower than in the centre. I have to say, I actually think this is a great area. It’s super near the main museums and only about a 30 minute walk to the central train station, or literally next to the tram line if you’re not a fan of walking. It also felt really trendy, with tons of shops and restaurants around. I feel like it would be a cool area to live – especially since Amsterdam is a cycling city and that 30 minute walk is easily converted into a 10 minute cycle. There are plenty of accommodation options though so I’m sure you’ll find something that suits.

So, we’ve already covered that it rains a lot in Amsterdam, that it’s a city where the predominant form of transport is bicycles, and that they add a tourist tax to accommodation. The other main things you should know are the following:

1) It has a sh*t ton of canals

They call it ‘the Venice of the North’ but you can’t take that too seriously, because it’s the third city I’ve been in recently that has claimed that nickname. It does, however, have a significant amount. People say Birmingham has a lot of canals (they’ve also used the whole ‘Venice of the North’ thing there too, but Birmingham’s canals are hidden and subtle. They don’t segregate the city the way Amsterdam’s do. Let’s be clear that Amsterdam is not Venice – as we’ve already established, cycling seems to be the main mode of transport in the Dutch capital, whereas in Venice, it’s literally boat. It has to be. They have canals instead of roads. Amsterdam isn’t like that, but the canals are significant and beautiful.

One of the most popular tourist activities is to take a canal boat tour of the city. Because the weather is notoriously bad for a lot of the year, most of the boats offering these tours are covered. This maybe sucks on a warm sunny day but is absolutely perfect if it’s too wet to take a walking tour but you really want to learn more about the city. I booked onto one of these for 15E which was a last minute discounted rate. I was actually a bit mortified to learn there were no other bookings and the boat was completely empty except for our party. Still, private boat tour. The tours tend to be an audio tour where you just plug in and listen to the narrative. The tables had a map on them, but the route wasn’t marked on the map, which I think would have been a basic but very helpful initiative for the boat company to invest in, since it took a long time for me to match the audio narrative with where on earth I was. Since the boat was so empty, I have the feeling that the skipper was less invested than usual. In fact, he was on video chat for a lot of the tour and we were definitely on a bit of a joy ride behind central station. There was one part of the audio narrative where he was meant to point out the infamous Anne Frank Annexe through the window and he was just chatting away about pineapples to his sister. Or something. Still, I had a great private tour (and luckily I had already located the annexe). I learnt a ton about the history of the canals and city – for instance, that the city of Amsterdam is actually named after the dam that was built on the river Amstel, and that the Dutch have already dealt with the issues of rising sea levels in a canal-heavy city – and got to see some of the most beautiful buildings all whilst escaping the rain.

2) Prostitution is legal

You may have heard of the infamous ‘Red Light District’ but did you know there are actually three different ‘red light districts’ within Amsterdam? The most famous is the central DeWallen district located in the oldest part of the city, which has been around since the 14th century. Apparently the harbour used to be located around this area so it became a central location for sailors to come aboard and drink in taverns and pick up girls. These days, Prostitutes can sell their wares but not on the streets themselves, which is why so many of the buildings are lit from the outside with the famous red lights, which highlight the workers within the windows. As well as purchasing these kinds of services, the red light district is famous for sex shows, museums and sex shops, as well as other risqué establishments. It’s worth noting that this area is known for being one of the most beautiful within the city, and is well worth a look, even if you have no intention in indulging in some of the arguably more sordid aspects of the district.

I visited in the daylight and was surprised to see girls in the window, even at 10 o’clock in the morning. I only realised they were there when my friend told me to be really careful taking pictures as, if any of the workers think they might be in the image, they can get very upset and even aggressive. Luckily I was aiming at the canal, and not the buildings, but it’s definitely something to be aware of if you want to avoid an awkward encounter here. The street was beautiful though. I’d have liked to have seen the area in the dark, just to get a feel for the atmosphere. I suspect it’s more tourists than actual proprietors who occupy the streets here (although there’s no rule saying that they must be mutually exclusive) but it felt a bit weird to see the girls in the harsh light of day, especially to occasionally see a man exit an establishment in full daylight. That may be more down to my British sensibilities than anything though, after all, the law here embraces that this is a natural part of human nature so who am I to assume that a cover of darkness is more suitable here. Still, it’s really not for everyone. If you visit, just be careful of pickpockets. Apparently it’s actually quite a safe area due to the established presence of police and hired bodyguards, but pickpocketing is still rife and not everyone is sober.

3) Cannabis is legal

Perhaps more famously than the laws surrounding prostitution, are the laws surrounded marijuana and other recreational drugs. You’ve likely heard about Dutch Coffeeshops and the fact that it is perfectly legal to buy and use cannabis in these establishments. This is true – there are some small technical elements to be aware of, but from what I understand you can buy up to 5 grams at a time, visit the same coffee shop up to twice a day and use cannabis you’ve bought elsewhere in any of the licenced shops. There are some rules about how much you can possess at any one time but it’s easy enough to find the rules if you look for them.

Note that there are coffee houses and cafes, as well as coffeeshops. If you’re new to the Netherlands, it might seem confusing but you’ll learn to identify weed cafes pretty easily. For one, all of the licenced establishments will have a sticker on the window – a rectangle that is cut diagonally across and is white on one side and green on the other, with the words ‘Coffee shop’ written on it. It’s placed somewhere obvious like the front window or door. For two, even though the coffee shops are not legally allowed to advertise that they sell cannabis, they get around this in other ways, such as the blatant naming of the coffee house (‘Smokeys’ ‘The greenhouse’ etc etc) or with cannabis leaf or Jamaican flag paraphernalia. Honestly, it’s not subtle. When in doubt, just sniff. The smell is pretty pungent. Also, if you are in a weed cafe, from what I’ve seen, there’ll usually be security on the door and a small counter where you can order before you actually get anywhere near the seating area. It surprised me a little to hear this, as I assumed you’d sit and could peruse a menu in a dark room (Okay, I based all of my prior knowledge of this on the scene in the movie Eurotrip which isn’t even set in a weed cafe. You know the one) but no, you have to order first and then head on upstairs to find a seat and order drinks. By all accounts, the staff are usually very knowledgeable though and happy to help. The thing you need to remember here though is that it is legal and profitable and they have a reputation to uphold. You’re not buying from a street dealer you’ll never see again but from somewhere that is subject to google reviews. What you purchase here is going to be much stronger than the joint you passed around a room between you and your 14 closest friends when you were 16 and thought you were a rebel. They can grow it, they can quality control it, they don’t have to sell it down back alleys and they cut out a lot of hassle and cost without all of that sneaking. Seriously, be careful with it. It seems like it would just be embarrassing to pass out in a corner.

Remember, just because you buy weed at the counter downstairs does not necessarily entitle you to take a table for several hours. Buy a drink. Some places also serve food. You usually cannot buy alcohol as the Dutch do not believe in mixing marijuana with alcohol. Do your research: some places are dark and sketchier than others, whereas some are modern and cool and feel like a 5 start restaurant. There are a lot of blogs on Google with suggestions of where to go so it’s easy to find somewhere. Coffeeshop Amsterdam is central and feels just like a normal coffeeshop apart from the counter downstairs. They have a huge selection and also sell some pre-rolled joints in case you’re not comfortable rolling your own. If you are, they have papers, filters and even some herbal leaves to mix in instead of tobacco. Note that it’s not cool to simply light up a cigarette and some coffeeshops don’t allow you to smoke joints with tobacco in at all. Just, please god, remember to bring a lighter. Nothing highlights you as a novice more than having to go back downstairs and ask for one at the counter, although I guess it would make a nice souvenir.

For those who prefer not to smoke at all, Boerejongens has several locations around the city and is well-known for it’s artisanal ‘Spacetry’ – i.e., cannabis in cake form. Forget about the classic brownie, these guys have you covered with all manner of culinary-cannabis delights from holiday themed edibles to lemon cakes to lava cakes to their red velvet cake – these sweet treats would not look out of place at a royal tea party. But be very careful with edibles. The packaging will say how much weed is in each one so don’t just eat an entire cake because that’s the measure they’re sold in. If you’re used to weed about 10mg is meant to be about right, but if you’re smaller of stature or just haven’t really had edibles before, go less. It takes 2 hours to kick in so start with a quarter of the cake and see how you are. Seriously, remember what I said earlier – this is not the space cake that the stingy students in the flat next door made when you were 19.

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Okay, now that we got the obvious stuff out of the way, let’s talk about the other cool things to do in Amsterdam in the winter. There are, of course, many many museums exhibiting different things around the city. One of the most popular is the Rijksmuseum filled with lots of art and history and can easily occupy the better part of a day whilst visiting Amsterdam but there are also many less traditional options: there’s the Van Gogh Museum, the Maritime Museum, not to mention the museum of Fluorescent Art, the Sex Museum, Erotic Museum, Torture Museum and Tulip Museum. As you’ve probably picked up from previous posts, I am not a museum person. I like them occasionally but they’re not my priority in a new city. Since I was only in Amsterdam for about 60 hours, I only went to one museum and that was the Anne Frank House. Normally you have to book your tickets literally an entire month in advance but due to the recent lockdown and the fact that it was January, there was a lot of availability and I was able to buy my ticket last minute.

I have read Anne Frank’s diary, but it was a long time ago and I don’t really remember much. It’s certainly not necessary to have read it before visiting the annexe where she and her family lived, hidden from the Nazi’s for several years during World War II – in fact they even sell copies in the gift shop in case you’re inspired to read it after your visit. It’s an audio tour, with an exhibition at the end, and you can take the tour in nine different languages. You begin in the factory which was still operational during Anne’s time in hiding, and which was directly below the annexe, meaning that the occupants had to whisper, tiptoe around, and not even use running water during working hours. The tour then takes you through the secret door and around the several rooms of the annexe, before you visit a small exhibition below, have the opportunity to watch two short videos and eventually exit through the giftshop. As I said when visiting war museums in Vietnam and Cambodia, I think there’s something very personal about the experience, and you’re much better off simply going there yourself than reading about my thoughts. As such, I’ll tell you that it was very poignant and emotional, and definitely worth visiting, but the rest you can decide on for yourself.

One thing that struck me, and I’m trying to find a sensitive way to say this as I’m aware it can come across as crass if I don’t get it right: it made me incredibly grateful that my generations’ great ‘world-changing-event’ is covid-19 (Note I drafted this post in early February – seems ironic now) . It has been tragic and horrific for many people, I know, and changed the way we live in the world in ways that are still being measured, but at least it was, at most, a result of human stupidity rather than human hate. I hope we never have to witness something like that.

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Usually I’d have a whole section on food when visiting a new country, but I’m not 100% sure what Dutch food is. I suspect (and from seeing Amsterdam I think I’m right) that Dutch food is like English food in that, there are of course, some traditional things you can have these days, but we don’t spend all of our time eating meat pies and potatoes and whatever other british stereotypes there are. They exist, but so do all of the international cuisines that have taken up a place and become popular in our cities. Amsterdam definitely had a really eclectic food vibe and although I tried appeltaart (maybe slightly too sweet for me) at the well-known Cafe Winkel 43 and had some poffertjes with icing sugar and butter (utterly delicious and I highly recommend) during my time in the city, my favourite place to eat in Amsterdam was, by far, Food Hallen, a huge open-plan building filled with food-truck-style stalls and various types of seating. It has a huge range of different cuisines and you can order from your table using the barcode, and staff will bring your food over to you. It’s also a great opportunity to drink some local beer. I drank a lot of Heineken whilst munching on a delicious Vietnamese style noodle bowl in this establishment but note that there is also the Heineken Brewery offering tours here in Amsterdam. They were closed when I was there so I didn’t go but it looked fun.

Cheese, Snow and Escargot

An overview of my stay in a chalet in the French Alps, eating cheese and wine and certainly not doing any kind of skiiing, and then a short overnight stop in the historic city of Lyon.

As I mentioned in my last post, after Barcelona I headed north to Paris, where I walzed into a country where UK citizens were not (technically) allowed to be, without so much as a passport or vaccination check. This post is not actually about Paris though, it’s about the little mini trip I took from Paris a few days after my arrival.

I made travel-friends from all over the world whilst lasting out the pandemic Down Under, and one of them happens to own (or at least their family happens to own) a chalet in the mountains. Since I’ve not seen real winter in years I readily accepted their invitation to visit for a few days to play in the snow. I didn’t really know much about ‘chalets’ – turns out it’s a fancy word for an apartment that’s quite… woody. I’m not sure how else to put it – they just seem to favour wood as their choice of decor. What’s even more exciting, however, is that it’s in the Alps. The Alps!!! This is probably unexciting and even expected for some of you more cultured readers but genuinely, I just assumed it would be in some other snowy region of France. I’ve heard about the Alps a ton, so finding myself there unexpectedly was sort of akin to running into a celebrity at the supermarket for me.

So, after a very long journey from Paris, which included a winding bus ride through the mountains with a very unhappy busdriver (we might have showed up just as the bus wanted to leave without cash to buy tickets because I may have accidentally showered with my watch on and thought we had 10 minutes more than we did) we arrived in the little village of Le Grand-Bornand, within the French Alps. As the bus climbed the mountain we saw more and more sprinklings of snow until, by the time we arrived in the village there were parts alongside the roads where the snow was genuinely piled 3 feet high. I’ve never seen snow like that before. My first instinct was to lay in it, but then I noticed how many of the small (and not so small) children waiting for their bus were using it as a toilet, so I reconsidered my plans. Probably for the best given that I wasn’t wearing waterproofs at the time and it was actually freezing outside.

We had a 5 minute trudge up a little hill with our bags, before arriving at one of those picturesque, multistoried, balconies-everywhere, wooden buildings straight off of a Christmas card: these are the ‘chalets’ apparently. Now, I went skiing in Bulgaria when I was about 20 because skiiing seemed to be a thing that everyone was doing and Bulgaria was incredibly inexpensive (I’ve never been the type of person who could casually afford a fancy skiiing holiday in France) but I don’t think I stayed in a chalet. I can’t actually remember the accomodation at all but I don’t think it was anything like this – instinctively I imagine it was a very basic hotel room in a brick building… . My only other experience of #chaletlife is from the British romcom Chalet Girl in which Felicity Jones stars as a working class ex-scateboarding prodigy who, in a desperate attempt to earn money, finds herself chalet-hosting for Ed Westwick and his ridiculously rich family. Their chalet was basically a wooden mansion within the (Austrian) mountains. Today’s chalet, however, was a much more plausible mix between the two: it was a one-bedroomed apartment, decorately very cutely, within the giant multistoried, heavily-balconied structure that housed about 18 different apartments. The view from the balcony was incredible though: snow covered rooftops cluttered together around a little church square against the backdrop of dramatic mountains and snow-dusted pines and a clear blue sky. Very Christmas card-esque. If only I’d been here a few weeks earlier and witnessed the valley entrenched with festive lights.

Anyhow, because it was quite last minute and we were only staying for a few full days, I didn’t go skiing. I hadn’t mentally had time to prepare for the expense, nor to renegotiate some of my freelancing deadlines, so sadly there are no anecdotes of snow-ploughing into a barriage of unexpecting toddlers, nor videos of me spending, genuinely 5 whole minutes writhing around in the snow, trying to flipover on a snowboard and finally be upstanding (these do exist from my Bulgaria trip though). I think I would have loved to have tried it, even just for one or two days. It was still absolutely lovely to be there though, even without the skiing. I basically spent 4 days eating cheese in a variety of liquid forms and drinking Cote de Rhone wine in different locations. You actually kind of do need the snow sports just to balance out all of the food. I had to eat a lot of vegetables upon returning to Paris just to feel like I could move again.

So, there I am, dancing around a mountain, drunk on wine and high on cheese and bread and all manner of charcuterie, without a care in the world. It’s my first real winter in 3 years (the coldest I’ve been was in Tasmania last March which was still about 14 degrees at it’s coldest) and I’m surrounded by snow. It’s the powdery kind, however, so my efforts at making a snowman go wholely unrewarded, but I did make a rather fetching snow angel. I also took 5 minutes and several strong arms to help me climb out of my snow angel, since it was in about 2 feet worth of snow.

On one of the days we bought a lift pass and went into the mountains, just to have hot wine and cheese (of course) and creme brulee at one of the restaurants up there. It’s become my habit to practice tipsy French. There’s a very delicate line I’ve realised though – a little tipsy on up to two glasses of wine and I will yammer on in (presumably) very gramatically incorrect French about the Taylor Swift/Kanye West drama until the cows come home. Add in a third, or a glass of Ricard or beer or something, and I can no longer remember vocabulary or understand the accent, (or incidentally, walk straight). I’m not sure if this little jaunt to the mountains has made my language skills better or worse to be completely honest.

I tried Genepi one of the days, which is a spirit they sell everywhere up here, which I believe is made from a plant that can only be grown in cold moutain weather. It’s their local speciality and it is one of the most utterly disgusting things that has ever gone into my mouth, and I’ve tried catfood (and cat, for that matter). It’s strong, yes, fine, that’s expected, but it’s also ridiculously sweet and that’s the part I cannot handle. Urgh, I’d rather knock back tesco-value vodka, honestly. I sort of realise this post isn’t super helpful for anyone who wants to go to Le Grand-Bornand and ski so sorry about that but at least you have been warned about Genepi now.

Even without skiing and with free accomodation, it was a ridiculously expensive few days. Most meals at any of the local restaurants are about 20E per head, not including drinks or anything, and even if you make a cheese and charcuterie board to have on your balcony with supermarket wine, it can still get very expensive. Oh my god, it’s only sold by the quarter wheel but whatever you do, please try the tomme de savoie. It’s so creamy and good. They make a tomme de savoie fondue at the Hôtel La Pointe Percée restaurant which is utterly incredible too – make sure you reserve though. Even with covid it seems you need to!

After three full days lording about my snow kingdom and humming ‘Let it go’ to myself, we took the winding bus journey back down to Annecy, the town at the bottom of the mountain with an utterly stunning lake, and then drove a few hours across to Lyon. It’s nearby and apparently very pretty, and my travel-buddy has family there so it made sense to see it and stay overnight before I head back to Paris the following day. Lyon is much bigger than I expected it to be, from the descriptions of it being cute and old. It turns out there is a cute old section but a much newer, larger city has built up around it. We sort of headed towards the old part which I think is the 5th arrondissement, across the Saone river. We climbed a painful amount of steps to the La Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière, which you can see from the river far below, and just looks beautiful. There’s a really lovely view of the city from there too. On the way we ran across the Théâtre Gallo Romain de Lyon, which I was not expecting. It was like a miniature version of the Colloseum but in France. Pretty cool but very random. Both were free to enter. That whole area was actually really beautiful, with winding cobblestone streets and old-fashioned lanterns hanging from the walls.

That evening we went for dinner and drinks in the main city with my friend’s brother and his girlfriend, where I tried snails for the first time (they were drenched in garlic butter so honestly were okay – they kind of reminded me of mushrooms) and sampled a ton of other local foods recommended by my hosts. I realised I cannot understand French at all although they could understand me, which I guess is reassuring. For breakfast, they tracked down some pink praline brioche, which is a very cute and very Lyon thing to have. It was also delicious.

After another wander around the city, we stopped for lunch in a nearby foodcourt style eatery named Food Traboule which can only be described as a very hipster building with small rooms leading into each other, each sporting another restaurant. You can sit wherever you want (although they might ask you to move if your party is bigger than the table you’ve chosen) and order from any of the restaurants. It’s kind of weird because the menu is online and the building is quite snakey rather than open plan, but you have to go to each restaurant to order and then later, to collect your food. I think online ordering would make so much more sense for this layout of building but the food was really good and the mini midi menu (each store offers one 10E meal each day but you have to manually go round and check what it is) makes it really good value. I had spicy noodle soup (of course) because I just really needed some vegetables and to not eat bread or cheese for at least one meal after my cheese filled week.

A Break in Barcelona

My first trip out of the UK since returning from Australia. A very short winter jaunt around Barcelona, gazing in wonder at the astonishing feats of architecture by Barcelona’s premier architect, Gaudi, pretending to be a tortured artist drinking absinthe and Sangria, and stuffing myself with all of the tapas I can find.

I lasted just over two months. In all honesty, I think it would have been a lot less if I’d have been fully vaccinated already, but that’s how long it took me to get through the 10 days of isolation, the first jab, the 8 weeks before my second jab and the two weeks after that for the jab to fully take effect. On day 15 after my second vaccine I was aleady in Barcelona.

I knew I was ready to leave Australia but I’m not sure I was ready to go back to real life. The thought of restarting my life and my career feels weirdly claustrophobic. But visiting those other big places on my original itinerary is still not really an option because of the pandemic still raging. There’s not really an ideal option but I still have some funds left, I’m still freelancing and I still don’t feel ready to settle into real life. So, I decided to escape to Europe. Somehow figuring out my life feels less stressful further away.

France was actually my first choice but they had shut their borders to people travelling from the UK. Spain hadn’t though, and France hadn’t shut their borders to people travelling from Spain… you see the logic here? Turns out it’s completely completely legal for a UK person to travel to Spain and then to France. I was worried there’d be all sorts of things in place to stop people from doing this but, after calling the French ministry 5 times and confirming this was, indeed, perfectly legal, I wandered from Barcelona into France without anyone checking more than my boarding pass. It was morbidly hilarious and I drew a few funny looks as I cackled to myself strolling, unihibited through the completely unmanned immigration desks when I touched down in Paris.

Anyway, this post is not actually about Paris, it’s about the little trip I took to Barcelona as part of my highly-skilled-ninja-plan to enter France. Since I was worried the rules would change or that I’d somehow still get into trouble, I planned to stay in Barcelona only two nights. I stayed at St Christopher’s Hostel, which is a huge hostel just off Plaça de Catalunya (Catalonia Square) whose primary benefit is it’s excellent location and cheap price. It’s a party hostel but I was hoping, with it being winter, that it wouldn’t be too crazy. The shuttle bus is definitely the best way to get to and from the airport to the central areas- it’s 5.90E one way and you can buy tickets onboard and it will take you straight to Plaça de Catalunya. I actually ended up taking the train at a recommendation from a friend and had a really hard time – the train is designed for locals, not tourists, and whilst it’s completely doable, it’s far far easier, cheaper (if you need to swap trains) and faster to just get the bus.

Upon (eventually) arriving at my hostel, I checked in and put my stuff in my room. Even at 5pm there was someone in there snoring insanely loudly. I was really hoping the fact that they were asleep then meant that they might be up (and therefore quieter) all night. I then took myself down to the hostel bar, got a beer and started planning my adventures. I’ve actually been to Barcelona before, about 11 years ago, on a little trip with some girls from my uni, which is why this 40ish hour trip wasn’t upsettingly short. Luckily I’ve seen the main things before so didn’t mind missing some of them this time around. My friend, that I was meeting there, however, had not, so I had planned a pretty intense day for us the following day.

That evening I went to a tapas cafe nearby that a guy from my hostel recommended to me. It was very casual and, even though it was in the main square it had lots of locals in there. We ordered sangria (I know, but we ARE tourists) and some other bits including fried calamari, iberico ham and potatoes with chorizo-style sausage. The jug of sangria, especially after the beers, meant that I ended up much tipsier than I meant to be. Oops. Another thing that I didn’t expect to be so hard was my language. I actually used to speak a lot of Spanish but because I’ve been learning French these past few months, it turns out my brain couldn’t handle both at all. All the Spanish vocabulary I used to know had retreated from my brain to make room for it’s northern counterparts and I just couldn’t even get through a simple sentence without accidentally swapping to French. Geezus. I felt a lot more helpless than I have in a while actually.

The alcohol meant that I passed out pretty quickly in my bed that night, only to be woken at 4am by that aforementioned demon-snoring. I woke with the alcohol still pounding around my brain unable to get back to sleep. At 6:30 I gave up, and figured a hot shower might do me better than lying in bed for another half hour would. I had considered going to see sunrise somewhere but the hangover said no. Anyhow, 7:30, showered, dressed and ready to go, we were going to get churros from one of the places I’d heard were amazing, but they were all closed until 9:30, and waiting would have messed with the rest of our plan. Instead, we headed towards La Sagrada Familia – and walking there felt nicer on my head than getting the metro, so 45 minutes or so later we arrived, took some photos out front whilst it was empty, and then went for churros con chocolate at the nearby Xurreria Sagrada Família. Not the best I’ve ever had (that’s what you get for going to the touristy one) but still way better and cheaper than the ones I had in Australia.

After our quick breakfast we went into la Sagrada Familia. I’d been here years ago but I couldn’t really tell which bits had been built since then. If you’ve never heard of this basilica by the way, I’ll tell you a little now, as it’s absolutely incredible and is the number one thing, in my opinion, that you need to see if you come to Barcelona. It started construction in 1882 and still, in 2022, is it not yet finished. The design is so grand and elaborate and there were a few setbacks that meant that it’s just taken forever. The architect hired to design the church was Antoni Gaudi, a (now) famous architect known for his really surrealist utilisation of shape and colour. Think Tim Burton movies on acid and you can kind of picture the really unique aesthetic. And it is unique – I’ve been to churches and cathedrals and pagodas and temples all over the world and honestly think this might be the most visually stunning religious building I’ve ever been in. It’s not your average European church anyway, and I highly, highly recommend you check out la Sagrada Familia, as well as some of Gaudi’s other projects if you’re ever around this area. You can download the official app beforehand to get the free audio-tour, but I was happy just to walk around it this time. I think we were there for about an hour and a half.

Next it was back to the Plaça de Catalunya to do a free walking tour that started at 11. If you only have one day and want a feel for a city, a walking tour is definitely the way to go. They’re ‘tip-what-you-think-it’s-worth’ so if you don’t love it, you don’t have to pay a ton. You do hand them the money, however, and that makes it a bit awkward if you didn’t really love the tour. This one was good, however, although with a very different emphasis to the last one I was on here, which pointed out the hidden Picasso’s dotted around the city and told the story of the famous artists who’ve passed through. The 2022 tour around the gothic quarter had a much bigger emphasis on the history and culture of the city and of Catalunya. Maybe a little too much history for my liking but it was informative and interesting all the same.

After our tour, which lasted about 2 hours, we headed to La Boqueria, Barcelona’s famous market place, on La Rambla and explored the market, before grabbing some lunch at a nearby stall. We had to have a little sit down after that as we were exhausted and needed to grab a quick test to travel test for my flight the next day. After a 30 minute break in the hostel (where we asked and were allowed to change rooms) and then going to a nearby testing centre recommended by the reception team, we had a stroll all the way to the end of La Rambla, the main tourist boulevard, just to experience it. By now it was about 5pm and (yes, I know this is an intense day) we got the metro all the way up to Parc Güell, another landmark associated with Gaudi. I figured it would be a nice place to go for sunset. Better (and cheaper) at sunrise but this is just how our day worked out. If you go before or after closing time I believe that entrance is free, but sunset is (annoyingly) just before closing so you have to pay to get to see the park in the daylight unless you enter before it opens. By the time we got there (the shuttle bus from the train station to the park isn’t running right now) the sun was defintiely starting to set but we got to see the beautiful view from the monumental zone before having a lazy stroll back to the trainstation. If you came in any season that wasn’t winter, it would be nice to spend much longer here but I had a single day and was cold so an hour was enough for me this time.

After getting the metro back to town we went to Bar Marsella, one of the oldest absinthe bars in Barcelona, for a little taste of the green fairy. This is actually something I learnt from my first walking tour and still remembered – apprently some of the more tortured artists who passed through the city had an absinthe habit (obviously it was a lot stronger then) and it’s kind of a cool thing you can do, to visit the same bars and drink absinthe with the slotted spoon and sugar cube thing. It’s really not expensive either, although, bloody hell, it takes forever for that sugar cube to melt! The bartender free-poured our drink (no idea how much was in there, maybe 1-2 measures worth) and it definitely had a kick but it was a lot easier to drink with sugar and water added.

Finally, we went for some tapas. We were recommended Quimet y Quimet but when we got there we realised how small and intimate it was, and how weird it would be to not order wine (I’m still somewhat hungover at this point) and how much we really didn’t want that kind of experience right now. Instead, we headed back to a tapas bar we’d passed on the way that looked more casual. It was perfect and had absolutely amazing food and atmosphere after our incredibly long day of sight-seeing! All in all, it was an excellent day in Barcelona.

The Reality of Returning

The complications in trying to get back to the UK after years of travel abroad, and how it feels to be back at last.

I am full of plans to go home. I’m ready. There’s some anxiety at the thought of actually purchasing the ticket but none whatsoever at the thought of boarding the plane. It’s time. It is not, however, easy.

There is, of course, the obvious issue of covid and the multiple hoops to be hopped through in order to leave and enter a country these days. It’s actually quite tricky to find all the details. I’ve been scouring the UK gov website and the singapore airlines FAQs to try and figure out exactly what to expect and what is, in turn, expected of me. It took Australia a while to roll out the vaccine and now it is finally possible to get it, I don’t want to wait a month for an appointment. I just want to go home. So, here I am, in a green zone yet completely unvaccinated just in time for the UK to change it’s entry requirements.

I book my ticket and it feels fine. No sense of finality or loss. Just that morning’s admin. Because it’s an indirect flight, I have to fulfil the requirements to enter Singapore, as well as the requirements to enter my final destination country and these are, by no means, the same. If you’re booking a flight it’s worth checking the details from both the airline and the information on the goverment website of your final destination. Luckily I had the foresight to make a single booking, with both flights with the same airline and the same ticket. The airline are kind enough to ensure you know the information for all the countries you pass through in advance.

So, to leave Australia I had to take a covid test. Not just any covid-test at any old walk-in, mind you, this was a $100+ test specifically for travel that you need to time perfectly because different destination countries ask for a different amount of time between the test and entrance to said country. FUN. Then of course, to enter the UK I had to have a day 2 and a day 8 test pre-booked and delivered to my final destination, as you need to supply the booking number on your immigration form. There’s another $200 basically. If I was coming from a red-zone I’d have had to pay for hotel quarantine too, but luckily I made sure to only fly greenzones so I can quarantine at my parents house when I get back to the UK.

Aside from all the covid hoops you need to jump through, there are other things that you don’t even think about. For instance, I’ve been gone just over two and a half years. I changed bank accounts just before I left and luckily I set the address as my parents’ house. It turns out that two and a half years is the time a bank card lasts, before every single different bank decides to send you a new card and cancel your old one. My travel credit card only lasted a year so that was already gone (by that point I’d opened an Australian account so it was fine), and my UK debit card and mastercard were both expired by the time I landed. Good thing my mom came to pick me up from the airport as I have literally no idea how I’d have gotten home otherwise!

Your Australian sim stops working the second you leave Australia too, so don’t expect phone signal unless you’ve somehow kept your UK sim for all that time you were away. This means that logistics have to be planned so far in advance. My mom and I had pre-agreed to pay for short-term airport parking (rather than me taking my unvaccinated self on a shuttle bus and trying to find the long-stay carpark without a phone or any capacity to talk to strangers after 28 hours flying). We guessed at how long it would take me to get through immigration (they didn’t check a single thing and I walked right through the electronic passport scanner) and agreed she’d arrive about an hour after I landed and hopefully wouldn’t have to wait longer than an hour. All of this with no further communication after I left Singapore. Through some miracle, my flight both landed late and immigration was non-existent, so I got there about the expected time, but this is something to be aware of if you’re making that long journey home.

Another thing worth mentioning although really unimportant in the grand scheme of things. 8 hours in the most incredible airport in the world absolutely suck when everything in said airport is shut due to covid. It was really depressing actually and made going home feel that much more weird and final. There was a duty free shop and a crappy food kiosk (no satay in sight sadly), so I spent those leftover Singaporean and Brunei dollars on toblerone and gin, as any self-respecting Brit would. The moral of this story is, should you find yourself with a layover in an airport, take a book.

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After you manage to enter your country the real issues begin. Turns out student loans will have sent you 1000 letters asking why you stopped paying them and to please account for yourself over those past years. You have to register with a GP, find a dentist, get a haircut, book a vaccine, activate your bank cards, think about a phone contract. God, I just deleted most social media apps from my phone and have been hiding in my childhood room for three weeks. Technically I was allowed out 10 days ago, where I went to a walk-in vaccination and then went back to hiding again.

You forget, the constant pressure that being part of a ‘normal life’ has. I honestly didn’t remember until about 2 days in when the things that didn’t affect me from the other side of the world suddenly crash down onto you. It’s not that any of them are particularly stressful in themselves, but more that I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten the constant expectation for you to be somewhere or doing something or have something or be functioning in some way. I can’t believe people live like this, with this pressure all of the time. Geezus.

I think coming back would have been different in non-covid times. I’d likely have crashed some big gathering and suprised people, reacclimatising myself all at once – I’d have seen on their faces how happy they were that I was back. I probably wouldn’t have been away for so long either. I’ve come back to a time when people, even your closest friends, leave you on read for days and days without answer – I’ve started doing it too so as not to come across as too keen. They all went through something I can never relate to, and vice versa – but it’s weird how being finally so close to them all again makes me realise how far apart we’ve grown. I knew it would take work to slide back into people’s closest circles but I didn’t realise how few people would even still remember that we were once really close and be willing to get that back. I spent years constantly around people who I could never get closer to than a week’s worth of friendship, missing my old friends and aware of how valuable that kind of intimacy is. I guess they all spent years in lockdown, getting used to life more separate than ever before and now it’s weird to let people in. I notice – and it’s not just me, my other travel friends have confirmed this – that no one offers to visit you. You’re expected to visit them. I don’t mind so much – I’m not really in a position to host but it’s just an interesting thing to be aware of. The only person who has offered to come and see me is someone I met travelling. Go figure. Maybe it’s because they’re used to us moving around.

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It took me 5 days to make my childhood room functional when I first returned. That kept me busy, unpacking my boxes from my old life and going through my things. Removing elements of who I was to make room for who I am. I’ve been slowly catching up on my admin and have only had one very timid reunion with someone from my old life. As such, I don’t feel like I’m fully ‘back’ yet. I’m in limbo – I feel like I exist outside of space and time, here in my old room, watching netflix and making up for 2 years worth of terrible tea (sorry Australia but who are we fooling?!) and I’m cosy. If a tree falls in the wood and there’s no one there to witness it, does it really even exist? It feels like nothing here is real. I feel like I could leave again and no one would notice, because I’m not really back yet. It’s so nice to have a break from everything but I think I’ll forever feel separate from everyone until I fully integrate.

The weirdest part is how familiar it is, being here. I grew up here and so it doesn’t feel strange to be in this house (rather than a hostel). I get confused by the weather sometimes and how dark it always is, as well as the fact that I’m suddenly on the same timezone as people, but it’s more like I watched a movie about Austalia, rather than I was there. That’s why I kept this blog going for so many years. Even though I talk complete nonsense and overshare more than is probably necessary – I never really did it for you reader, whoever you still are (Hey V – I know you’re still there!) but, rather, I did it so that this whole experience won’t just feel like a story I heard once. It’ll be part of my life and I’ll have these accounts to give the memories texture and detail, and whatever I lost in being away for so long … at least I’ll have something to show for it.

The End of Australia

A short overview of my time here and my favourite (and least favourite) elements of living here.

When I started this trip, the plan was to travel around the world. I had no intention of trying to see everything, of course, but I’d selected a few countries that were logistically reachable spattered across three continents and I was finally, finally, outrageously, wildly, insanely, amazingly, miraculously brave enough to just drop everything and try. I’d been slowly feeding an internal fear for the last few years, that I would never just do it and it would be the biggest regret of my entire life and so when I went, it’s hard to explain, but I felt like I could finally breathe.

I would find myself walking down a street in a city I couldn’t pronounce the name of, surrounded by street signs I couldn’t read and without knowing a soul for literally hundreds of thousands of miles and I would feel this wild, joyeous relief that I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life afraid that I would never do it. I had done it. I was doing it. And I have never ever been so happy.

I’m a bit uptight in real life. It’s an anxiety thing to be honest, my entire body gets flooded with adrenaline when I feel like I’m losing control (of a situation, of the days’ plans, of a conversation – there’s not really any logic to it). For years I thought I was actually just a mental person, but I’ve learnt that I just have that fight or flight panic running through me daily, and it makes me a bit on edge. *shrug* It’s not as bad as being an actual psychopath, so I’ll take it. The thing about solo travel though, is all of that went away. All of it. I had no responsibilites to anyone or anything and it turns out I’m really great fun when I can just let go. I can’t tell you how much that simple realisation helped me: I actually quite like myself. I even found it really easy and fulfilling, later on in the trip, to travel with other people without feeling trapped or like I was being shuffled along without any say in the matter. 2019 was, without a doubt, the best year of my life so far.

I can’t say that this wild feeling of joy lasted the whole two and a half years of my travels; in fact, maybe it started to fade after just 1 year, but I will never ever regret that I did it. Of course, it didn’t quite go the way I’d hoped. I only managed two of my three continents before the covid-19 pandemic hit. By that point I’d already been living in Australia for 5 months and I’d taken a break from ‘travelling the world’ in order to try and earn some money. Enter everyday responsibilities. I’m sure there are some people that can have a pointless job that makes no different in the grand scheme of things and means nothing to them, and not get stressed about it.  I really really wish I was one of those people. I’m a try-hard. I can’t do something half-arsed so even if I hate it (I’m talking to you hospitality roles), I’ll still put a ton of pressure on myself to do a good job. It really seeps the joy out of everything. Especially when I could not care less about the job (and the job certainly could not care less about me, as is the case with most of the jobs I’ve done here in Australia).   So, there I was, doing crappy jobs for recruitment agencies and wondering, for the first time, whether I might have done a stupid thing by leaving a job that I loved back in the UK. There’s another thing travel has taught me, having a job you just fit is rare in our generation. I was already planning on moving again. I wasn’t making a ton of money and my stay in Australia was never meant to be for the full year of the working holiday VISA. I sort of expected to dip out after just a few months when I got itchy feet again. At this point, I had been planning to travel the East Coast and had even given notice and booked my flight to Sydney in order to start my trip. Then covid hit and everything changed.

I still went north, but into lockdown, where money was becoming a real issue when you have no way of being able to work for months. After everything opened up getting a job was a necessity, but they were very hard to get as a backpacker so I worked in my hostel for months, earning no money but experiencing, for the first time, how it feels to really not give a crap about your job (I still did it, but I tried not to worry about it). It was fun but I wasn’t really earning enough money to be able to shed all of my responsibilities again. I started to feel the weight of living with so many people, and the responsibility of living up to whatever social pressures exist in hostels when you are constantly on display. It was time to leave. I’d been in Australia for a year and had moved onto a bridging VISA having no idea how long it was likely to last – I left my hostel in order to see some more of Australia before I left. By this point I think I knew that I would never be able to visit that third continent on my list but I still looked into the covid situation every month, and still fantasised in my head about a version of my future where I somehow made it there.

I’ve known for a while now that even if I could get there, it wouldn’t be the experience I was hoping for. I’ve been slowly coming around to the conclusion that, after all it took me to finally start this trip, I won’t get to finish it. Maybe what I’ve already done is enough, or maybe the old panic will come back – the panic that I’ll spend my old-age regretting that I didn’t see everything in my youth. I guess we’ll see. One thing I do know now is that my travels are over. I’m still on the other side of the world and, as much as I’ve tried to tell myself I’m still travelling, even forcing myself to continue writing blog posts that I know just aren’t very exciting, I realise now that I stopped travelling the second I got that first job in Melbourne 2 years ago, and I never started again. I tried so hard not to finish my trip that I never noticed it had finished without me and I guess that means I never really got to mourn, or celebrate it. Sure, I’ve been on trips in Australia – I think of them more as holidays between jobs and cities though. I haven’t had that carefree joy in two years.

I don’t want to carry on like this.

I do want to travel again, someday. But this isn’t that. This is just living – sure, there is better weather and less covid, but there are also sh*ttier jobs and, honestly, sh*ttier relationships. Backpacker friendships are so tenuous. A friend described it once as ‘people just using each other for whatever they want at the time’. It’s kind of accurate too. Sometimes it’s nice – for company, for friendship, for someone to eat dinner with and experience amazing things with, and sometimes the purpose is less upfront and has more sinister undertones – for entertainment, for an ego boost, for use of their possessions etc etc. *Shrug*. I kind of hate backpackers here (or the weird hybrid backpacker/expats we have now, as backpackers themsevles are usually much more friendly). I sort of think I liked myself a bit less when I felt more like one of them too. And we’re so judgey. And you’re always on display. Yeah, I need a break from that.

So for me, this is the end of my Australia blog-posts. I might have a few follow-up bits to say, but I think you’ve had the last narrative of any of my ‘travels’ here. It’s time to go, and I can’t go forward so I guess I’ll go back. Soon.

But just because this wasn’t part of the plan doesn’t mean it wasn’t an utterly amazing experience in itself, even if I was working crappy jobs and avoiding creepy backpackers for half of the time. Living by the sea in the sun was absolutely amazing. Amazing. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s the vitamin D or what but it’s been fantastic just having cheerful weather so much. I think I’m in for a very very nasty recollection when I finally get home… Just in time for winter.

Australia also has the best inexpensive sushi just dotted around everywhere. It’s so good and the UK’s efforts just cannot compete. I’ll miss kombucha a ton and may even have to consider home-brewing. I refuse to give up the ‘buch. There’re also lots of Asian communities here which means fantastic noodle soup, everywhere. Nothing like Asia’s of course, but I can still recommend a noodle soup place in almost every capital (Hobart is the one I’m struggling with). The beaches are beautiful, the cities are green. Casually seeing kangaroos everywhere is mental and my arachnophobia has reached new and exciting levels. It’s been amazing and far far less depressing that it would have been at home. Even though it’s not what I’d planned and even though I’ve often felt like my time here might have been better spent earning money in a more-fulfilling job in the UK, I know that being here over this pandemic has been better for my mental health, and my soul, than being anywhere else might have been. And even though I say I lost my wild joy when I got here, it certainly doesn’t mean that I didn’t experience slightly more contained, even desperate joy here most of the time. I just can’t believe that I accidentally ended up living in Australia for two years, I mean, who does that?!

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I always said Perth was my favourite city: it was the first place I arrived and the one that won me over to getting the working holiday VISA and living in Australia. I kept saying that over my first 18 months here, until the point where I returned to Perth for the first time since seeing the rest of the country and realised I no longer felt the same way. It’s hard to say which is best, in all honesty. I’ve lived in Perth, Melbourne, Airlie Beach, Sydney and now I live in Adelaide. I’ve been in a different headspace in every single one and every single one has worked for what I needed at the time. Every single one is also phenomenal in it’s own way and well worth a visit.

Australia as a whole is actually a bit mental if you think about it. Like, if you put all of the cool stuff in one place, it would sound like you were describing a fantasy world: there are places where the lakes are a bubblegum pink and where the oceans sparkle with blue phosporescent light. The earth is red and filled with huge monoliths erupting from the horizon and yet the sand is a blinding white, with an entire under-water world just off-shore that can be seen from space. The spiders are giant and deadly, the possums fly and the bears are constantly high. Mad right!? Gosh, Australia, it’s been a damn good experience.  If I didn’t have this blog I’m not sure I’d believe it had really happened.

Break-downs and Broome

The last few days of our West Coast Trip: seeing Broome and exploring and then finishing in Darwin where we experience some issues trying to sell our beloved camper-car.

So there I was, on the opposite end of the world, living out of my car on the wrong side of 30, and a little bit exhausted by the whole experience. One month of cooking in the dark and hunting for free showers is an adventure, two is enough to make you realise just how good you had it before you packed up and went off trying to visit the last destination you had on the very last version of your ‘must-see Australia’ list. But I did it. Every single state and territory as well as every single destination I’d ever heard good things about in between. I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t more of this country to discover, but at this point I’ve seen more than I could ever have expected to, even with my extended pandemic stay. As my Aussie pal Rachel would say: good for me, hey!

I think I would have really liked Broome had I ended up staying there for a while. If it had been one of the cities I settled in whilst I was still trying to ‘live’ here. It’s quaint, on the beach and high enough up that the weather is probably delicious 8 months out of the year (and maybe unbearable for 3, and just slightly too cold for 1 – the one I was in). It looks like it might be pretty, with the main street being filled with low buildings and quirky aboriginal style art and building sites. I’m pretending that last one isn’t there when I talk about it being pretty. Right now it’s literally just filled with dirt and fencing, but I think it’s nice most of the time.

There’s a night market here, that it took me a very long time to actually find (I know, I know, the second you Google it it explicitly says Town Beach District but I was tired and it was dark, okay!). When I did finally rock up I got a really good vibe from it though. It was small but there were some exciting food stalls (Oh my frog, try the beef rendang at the indonesian style stall – it was honestly as good as the one I had in indonesia!) and there was a stage with some performances, much like the night market in Krabi that absolutely won me over to any market experience. Of course, unlike Krabi, we’re still dealing with Australian prices so I cannot, for the life of me, remember what any of the stalls that weren’t selling food actually sold. Still, I’m sure it was nice to look around and resent the fact that I have to watch my pennies here in a way I didn’t need to in Asia. Oh Asia, I miss you.

The waterfront here is cute, and there are some beautiful sites around Broome, notably the red rocks at Gantheaume Point which I think would have been more impressive had I not seen Tasmania’s Bay of Fire’s recently. Still, this quirky red outcrop is still aesthetically pleasing and a little warmer than the bay, although it’s not really a place you can sit and relax for a while as there’s no where soft to sit and you’re constantly surrounded by tourists. In the end I think we only stayed a couple of nights though. This was due to a combination of being a bit fed up and miserable from not having real walls for over 6 weeks, it not being quite warm and sunny enough for me to cheer up despite not having real walls, and the absolutely gargantuam prices of Broome compared to everywhere else in Australia. I mean, bloody hell. I thought Melbourne was expensive but Broome absolutely takes the cake. Literally, it takes it away when you can’t cough up the cash. Exhibit A: one of my favourite discoveries about Australia is that they have Dominos pizza – that world renowned takeaway pizza shop – and they do a value range which allows you to buy several types of pizza in large size (which, let’s face it, is really medium but who’s counting!) for $5. FIVE DOLLARS. That’s so cheap. In the UK you can just about get one for ten pounds which works out at about 21 dollars. That is a huge price difference and one of the easiest and cheapest ways for backpackers, especially those who move around a lot and can’t keep buying ingredients, and especially, especially those that live in thier car and are very limited in their cooking, to actually eat hot, tasty food. Broome, however, charges $9 for the exact same pizza. Okay, I know it’s still cheaper than the UK but why on Earth are people in Broome paying that much for a pizza that is literally worth $5 everywhere else. Why!?

That was enough for me to be honest. Broome was cute but dominos was just the beginning of the excessive pricing in that place. I moved onto Darwin pretty quickly after that. Since we don’t have a 4WD and couldn’t see some of the more exciting things on the route, it was pretty much just a straight few days of driving (and praying that our car didn’t fall apart) to get there. Ah, lovely, beautiful, tropical, cheap and yes slightly trashy Darwin. I love you.

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Rather than staying in one of the very few safe and comfortable hostels in Darwin, we ended up staying in a private apartment (coincidentally above the dominos pizza there which, surprise surprise charges only $5 for it’s value range!) that’s owned by someone we know there. Our roommates were the manager of my old hostel and the most adorable, sunny little aboriginal man I’ve ever met, named Tony. I loved Tony, he didn’t talk much but always, always had a smile and a wave for you, and was the only other person (we learnt after he moved out) who bothered doing things like taking the rubbish out or changing the toilet roll. Finally, finally, I was in thirty degrees heat and had access to a shower and walls and, oh my! My mood improved exponentially. I was suddenly the jolliest little sunbaby you have ever seen, frolicking about eating icecream and playing on the waterfront every day. Clearly all I needed was some vitamin D (and walls). This visit was, admittedly, less alcohol fueled than the last time I was here, but, I finally got to visit Mindl Beach markets, which had just finished for the season the last time I was here! Yayyy! I actually really loved these markets- sorry Broome but Darwin is so much better! They’re much bigger, much more exotic and, if you go at around 8:20, all of the food vans sell everything really cheaply which is perfect if you’re cheapscate little backpackers who don’t mind eating late. Ah, I was so happy being back in Darwin.

This city, of course, provided it’s own adventure. Now we’d done the trip, we no longer needed our beautiful little car (she’s more beautiful to me since I stopped living in her) and could prepare to sell her. When we got her checked out in Port Hedland we’d been told we’d need to change the CV joints (or something that sounded like that, I barely understood the whole transaction) pretty soon and had been given a cost estimate for this. This was probably too big an issue to try and sell her with, so we forked out (less than we’d been quoted in Port Hedland) to get her fixed here. It took a few days and when we got her back the mechanic actually said how amazingly perfect her engine was. Okay, newly fixed and everything working meant prime time to sell her. We wrote up a very detailed ad, explaining the conversion, the camping equipment, the details of the car and all of the fixes we’d made to her, and put her on the market. Just in time too as we were getting pretty low on money at this point.

There were a few people interested in our little car, so we took her on one last outing to Lichfield National Park the day before these people were due to see her. We’d struggle to get there by public transport so it seemed a good idea to take her out for one last visit to the swimming holes and waterfalls. We’d just finished playing at Florence Falls and were on our way to Wangi when I noticed there was smoke coming out from the hood of our car. Immediately, the steering wheel became heavy and the car turned itself off and we pulled over in time to realise there was literally no phone signal where we had stopped. Fun. After looking under the hood and seeing the insane amount of smoke coming from our ‘amazingly perfect’engine, we were understandably a bit worried.

Luckily, we flagged down the first car to pass us a few minutes later, which, very very coincidentally happened to be the Park Ranger’s Car. The guys were absolutely lovely and, after staring at our engine for a little while towed us to the nearest camp site. I was in the ranger car and chatting to the ranger as they towed us, who basically implied our car was completely f***** and that since they didn’t even make the parts for her anymore, our best option was to let her get stolen and to claim the insurance. I didn’t have the heart to tell him we didn’t actually have that kind of insurance on her. When we arrived at the campsite, they directed us to a payphone and told us we could stay there for free that night (if only we hadn’t removed most of the bedding and camping equipment from the car a few days before!!) and that the campsite owners would make sure we were fed if we were still there that evening. That was actually incredibly nice of them and I think how friendly and supportive they were is one of the things that really kept me from getting too stressed out. My poor travel buddy was very upset by the whole experience.

We went to the pay phone, realised we had no coins, went to the shop to make change for the phone, to which the shop man just handed us the shop phone, and we got on the line to RAA, who we had premium membership with (since the first time this car broke). Unfortunately, RAA were pretty slow and the shop was closing so I think the man regretted handing us his phone because they almost kicked us out before RAA took us off hold. Luckily it all worked out and RAA said they’d send someone out in two hours. So we just chilled for 2 hours. We, hilariously, couldn’t go to the watering hole as there had been a recent(ish) siting of a crocodile so it was all closed off. I had my book so I was fine but I think my poor travel buddy just got more and more stressed.

Eventually the RAA man arrived and looked at our car. He said that we’d somehow gotten a hole in our radiator so our engine had overheated and was likely absolutely destroyed. Yay. He loaded us up to tow us back to Darwin and we piled into the front seat. The RAA man was very talkative and with my poor travel buddy feeling so dispirited, I had to make several hours of conversation with this guy whilst really just wanting to hide in my own head. Living in hostels for years grants you some useful skills, at least. As we approached Adelaide River RAA called the man and apparently told him we had to be dropped there, and not at Darwin as we had previously agreed. Apparently, and this is the hilarious part, our premium policy did indeed include towing us back to Darwin as well as a whole load of other benefits but it turns out that we’re not entitled to them as we’re not actually permanent residents. Mother of F******-zenophobic policies. The policy is not in my name but I speak native English unlike my travel buddy. There’s also the added bonus of the fact that I am more… ‘assertive’ is what they call it when they talk about the skills you’ll gain when you go solo travelling. ‘Assertive’. Honestly, it’s just a euphemism for ‘confrontational’. Admittedly I am far, far more confrontational than I was before I went travelling and I’m not convinced it’s always a good thing. Here, however, I was more than happy to talk to the RAA about their, honestly, quite offensive policies.

If it had been made clear, up-front, when we bought the policy that residents would get extra benefits for the same price then this would not have been an issue. We’d likely still have taken the policy and would have accepted these extras as a locals bonus, rather than a way of enforcing negative prejudice against someone based on the fact that they were born in a different country. The fact that we were upsold the premium policy based on all of these bonuses we’d get, without anyone checking where we were from or what VISA status we held, is absolutely thier error and not ours. That’s misrepresentation and I’m honestly appalled by the attitude RAA had over the phone. They kept refusing to acknowledge their error, claiming that they’d emailed the terms and conditions (after we’d been verbally sold (and had paid for) the added bonuses over the phone!). In the end the woman on the phone said the most we could do was raise a formal complaint, which we did, and she said someone would get in touch about in in the next week. It’s been over a month at this point and I’ve never heard back. Absolutely screw you, RAA.

The thing that saved us, I’m convinced to this day, is the fact that I had been making casual conversation with our new towing friend. He was the one who came up with the idea of, rather than taking us to Adelaide River, to take us as far as our non-resident towing allowance got us, and then to call RAA again for a second tow the rest of the way, saying we’d broken down. F*** it, yeah, why not. So that’s what we decided to do. Of course, when we got to the drop-off point, the man didn’t stop, and we didn’t say anything until it was clear we weren’t stopping. ‘I don’t want to leave you there in the dark, so I guess I’m taking you home’ was all he said. For every xenophobic policy here in Australia there are just some straight up nice people, Thank you towing man (I do know his name but I don’t want to get him into trouble on the off-chance RAA ever read about how awful they are). .

*

Through some miracle, the Darwin mechanic we immediately went to see said the only issue was the radiator and the engine hadn’t actually been damaged. Replacing everything would have cost more than the car was worth, but we could simply try and repair the hole. It had a very small chance of working but would be much cheaper if it did. We cancelled all of the viewings of our car and paid about $50 to try and repair the hole. Through some miracle it worked. Even better, one of the viewings from yesterday was so invested in our lovely car and so worried that someone else would snap it up that she bought it, in newly perfect condition, the very next morning. Phew! I’m glad the Duchess has gone to someone who will value her, and I’m glad we sold her before anything else could go wrong. Overall we paid about $5000 for the car, the conversion and camping equipment, and then multiple repairs. We got $4000 back which, given we also got a 6 week camping trip across thousands of kilometres, I think is a great deal. The girl we sold our car to never got in touch so I can only assume that, unlike when we bought it, the Duchess did not break down within the first 24 hours.

The Wild Wild West

A quick overview of my route from Geraldton to Broome in my campercar and some thoughts about the duality of Australia. Diving in Exmouth and visiting beautiful beaches whilst feeling a bit homesick and acknowledging some of the not-so-great elements of being stranded here in Australia.

So, I’ve been getting remote work from my old company for a little while now. It’s great – it’s the only time in Australia I feel like I’ve gotten paid to do something I enjoy and feel challenged by (more about this later) – but it is somewhat hard to balance when you’re living in your car with no plug sockets or WiFi. Everytime we get to a large town with a McDonalds, we stop there and I connect to their WiFi and get some work done. I used to do this in hipster cafes before I realised that I was spending about the same as I was earning, just for somewhere not always that great to work. Anyhow, the gist is, we’re either seeing things or I’m working and it’s all happening so quickly that I never actually got a chance to plan this trip or get my head around what we’re seeing before we see it. In Asia this happened to me all the time (not the working part but the lack of plan) and it was amazing, but here, now, I find that I need something to look forward to to be truly excited.

I sort of had a vague inkling that there are some cool things on the West Coast, but I didn’t know what they are, or when we were likely to pass them or if my travel buddy even knew about them. I was worried we would miss things and that, combined with the lack of something to look forward to (not to mention the lack of showers or walls) meant that I found it hard to be excited by the West Coast. I’m not going to lie, between Perth and Broome I looked at flights home a lot. I just really miss my old life. Most people leave their regular lives to go travelling because they are unfulfilled in some way or unhappy. That wasn’t true for me. I loved my life. I was happy, I just ached to travel. Suddenly, on the other side of the world on an epic camping road-trip, I find myself aching for normalcy.

I was thinking we’d hit perfect beach weather by the time we reached Geraldton, and was massively disappointed. At this point I’m convinced that warm weather is what I need to lift my mood. I barely remember Geraldton to be honest – I think I worked in the McDonalds and played the reduced game in the supermarkets but I don’t think there was anything really special about it. We passed another pink lake soon after this that was really really cool. Up close it didn’t look super pink but it was huge and you could see how pink it was from the road. We spent ages trying to find that perfectly pink spot to eventually realise that the closer you get, the more the colour fades. Definitely worth checking out though. Even better if you have a drone. Next we got to Kalbarri, which turns out to be actually stunning. I had no idea (I hadn’t researched!) but it was a really beautiful beachside town next to the national park. The locals weren’t the friendliest and the public bbqs didn’t work, but we had a nice cold cider on an empty, not quite warm enough, beach.

• 

• 

After this we drove around the Shark Bay peninsular, stopping at Shell Beach. Not a particularly comfortable beach to spend the day at, the draw of this location is that the beach is entirely made up of tiny white shells. It sounds weird but it’s really pretty when you’re there and you can spend ages playing with the shells to get yourself that perfect instagram shot (or you can just play in the water instead which is equally as fun and has less of a weird smell!). We maybe spent about half an hour there before moving on to what was meant to be our overnight stop.

Next was up to Monkey Mia, which I knew was meant to be exciting, but didn’t really know why. I think it’s just for the Dolphins? We were planning on staying around there but didn’t realise you didn’t get access to the Dolphins as part of the camping fee and weren’t quite prepared to pay the extra (the camping was already infinitely more expensive than we’re used to – we’re used to free camping so don’t think I’m exaggerating when I refer to infinity). The woman at the desk was incredibly unhelpful and wouldn’t explain to me what the dolphin thing even was (I literally knew nothing) and so we didn’t bother going. From what I understood from the leaflet I took (she didn’t offer) you stand about 20 metres from dolphins which some staff and one lucky six year old get to feed. See – this is what I mean. A year ago this would have been an amazing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that #travelcassi would throw her (my) hard earned savings at, no questions asked, just to say she’d done it. The problem is, current-Cassi has done it. Current-Cassi has swam with about 20 of the things roaming all around her, with their otherworldly squawking and their penchant for making unsuspecting Brummie girls dizzy. I don’t want to pay $70 just to watch them be fed from 20 metres away, no matter how cool that might have seemed a year ago. Current-Cassi is increasingly less and less impressed.

So on we went to Exmouth, where I was excited to be. Again, I didn’t know much, but I knew, this place, this one must be warm enough by now. Nope. I mean, honestly, it was barely warm enough for me. 27 degrees and I was actually chilly. Why is it so bloody cold? I’m starting to believe no where is warm, that I could go to the fiery depths of Hell and still require a woolly hat just to visit the molten river of human souls. Come on Australia, this is very very likely my last big Hurrah here, remind me why lockdown here, penniless and alone was still infinitely preferable to lockdown in the UK! No? Okay. *sighs*.

I knew I needed a little break in a nice place and we’d committed to paying for a campground for a few nights, which is lucky because, as far as I can tell, Exmouth is mostly just campgrounds. There is honestly like nothing else in the town (city? – see I can’t even be bothered to research properly before writing these posts now).  But of course, I knew we were next to Ningaloo Reef which is the West’s answer to the Great Barrier Reef and that some of the best divesites in Australia were here.  Granted, if I’d have known this a week or so before I could have booked my spot for one of those sites, but still, we were in a diving place again and there were still some not quite world-renowned sites to see!

Because my current travel buddy isn’t a diver, we booked a day-tour that had good snorkelling and diving. We were actually in Exmouth during the infamous whale shark season but again, we didn’t know in advance so couldn’t book and I wasn’t really willing to spend $400 to see them again. Instead, we spent about $250 to see Mantas again and do some dives. This was okay. If you’ve never seen mantas then … actually no, spend that $250 on flights to Bali and see them there. Seriously. There was one in the water, low enough down for the crappy visibility to be an issue and you weren’t allowed to dive under the water to get closer. In Indonesia there were 5 or 6 and they were super playful and friendly and the visibility was incredible. Here, I think I was one of the only people who even got to see it clearly and that’s because I’m a strong enough swimmer to keep up with the photographer as she tracked the manta’s whereabouts and didn’t look up enough to see that no one else was following. Oops. We didn’t buy photos – they were expensive and filled with strangers.

The diving was okay. Not my best experience but definitely not my worst either. It was honestly nice to be under the water again, even if it was 6 times the cost of diving in Asia and the reef was in much better condition than the sites I’ve seen on it’s eastern counterpart. I got to see a few turtles and sharks but none of the macro life I’ve started to favour. My travel buddy was snorkelling and got to see their first green turtle though, which is a plus!

*

I know I’ve just skipped through a weeks’ worth of west coast travel in a few bitter paragraphs but honestly, I just couldn’t get excited about it. I don’t like being in Australia at the moment and the more of it I see, the more I realise how jarring some elements of this country are.

For example, the perimeter is dotted with shiny, cities, covered in blue. Blue skies reflecting off of the windows of the high-rise buildings, blue water decorating the built-up coastlines, blue paving stones to cover up the red dirt beneath and blue eyes of the people who inhabit many of these places. So much neat, shiny, modern blue that it’s easy to forget that the majority of Australia is a red, earthy wilderness filled with umber tones and brown eyes. Platitudes wrapped around every tourist attraction acknowledge the original landowners like a bandage, covering up a festering, red wound. I won’t pretend to know much about the history or the political climate or what could have or should have been done differently. It’s certainly not my place to pretend I could have done better than people who have spent their whole lives trying to figure out how to make the best future of a bad history. What I can comment on is how disconcerting it is to witness this chiaroscuro country, patchworked together with cultural centres and museums, balancing on a liminal tip between two opposites, somehow making it work. Here in the Western outback, it’s hard to believe I’m even in the same country as I was six months ago on Sydney’s Waterfront.

Australia has been a great place to live during this pandemic but I’m not going to pretend it has been perfect. In fact, one thing going to the west has really highlighted is the general xenophobic-feel of Australia. I’m not talking about individuals, although I’m not excluding them either, but as a culture, Australia does not seem to like outsiders. It’s a well-known thing that backpackers here do a lot of farm work and that work is often compared to ‘slave labour’. This is an obvious exaggeration but don’t let the hyperbolic nature of this stereotype downplay the fact that most of the time, conditions aren’t great. It’s cheap, often unpleasant labour with very few working rights. There’s a reason Australia makes it’s backpacker population do farm work to earn a second and third VISA and that’s that no one with residency is willing to put themselves through that. I don’t know, maybe they respect us less because we, as a backpacking culture, are so desperate to extend our VISAs that we will do that. Maybe they think it’s okay to talk down to us because we’re already used to being treated badly in our working life here and are willing to take it. Or maybe they honestly just think we’re less than them because it seems like their country is worth doing this to stay in and ours is not. I don’t know what it is, but there’s definitely a sense in which being a backpacker makes you ‘less than’ sometimes. Okay, I do partly know what it is: backpackers has a terrible name here and I won’t pretend I don’t see why. It’s just a massive shame.

Even with all of my experience and insane references (thank you, old managers!) the only jobs Australian’s will put me forward for are those that involve getting coffee for the people who would have been my assistants back in my UK career. Recruiters have even outright said, ‘no matter how skilled you are, if they can fill the position with a local, they will’. I’ve had people on domestic flights slap at my legs and talk to me like I’m a disobedient child because I uncrossed my legs on the seat behind theirs and they took one look at me and decided I was deliberately kicking them. Yes, I look less well put together than I did in the UK – it comes from not doing your hair or wearing make-up and living out of a backpack for two and a half years – but I’m honestly shocked by the way I get talked to here because I look young and have a different accent. Maybe they treat young Australians the same way, but I doubt it to be honest. Maybe though. All I know is, other backpackers look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them I would never try and get residency here. It hasn’t been awful, by any means, but I like being challenged workwise and I like being treated with respect. So here I am, working for a UK company any spare chance I get, even at the expense of not knowing what to see in the places I pass through, because I just can’t bear to have to do another crappy backpacker job.

I wouldn’t go on this weird rant – in fact I kept deleting it and then copying it back in but one of the reasons I’ve left it is because as much as I want to document all the cool stuff I did, it’s also really important for me to remember how I actually felt doing it. Also, this post would be really boring otherwise because I was so unenthusiastic that I left it so long to write that I cannot for the life of me remember anything except the bare bones of the journey and the fact that I was homesick and fed-up of camping towards the end. I wasn’t, like, actively sad at this point, I was just kind of exhausted. I have been away from home for two and a half years and I was living in a car so I think it’s okay to be a bit unimpressed. That said, let’s hurry on to the end of this trip as I cheer up soon!

*

After Exmouth we tried to see the Staircase to the Moon at Karatha, because the dates worked out – the weather, on the other hand, did not, and the sky was too cloudy to see anything. Next we swang through Karijini National Park, which has one of the most entertaining hikes I’ve ever seen in my life. Seriously, expect to balance on tiny rock ledges and wade through water on this one. Luckily it’s actually really short. The weather wasn’t great and the car was making a weird sound so we moved onto Port Headland pretty fast to get checked out by a mechanic after this. Since our car wasn’t quite in pieces just yet it was a straight through days to Broome from there. Woop Woop! Adelaide to Broome in a campercar = done. One of the Great Australian Experiences. I guess #travelcassi still does some cool stuff, even if she’s grumpy and jaded about them now.

Repeating the Past around Perth

People always say you can’t go back to a place that you loved because it’ll never be the same the second time around. Well, I’ve been to Perth, the capital of Western Australia, a second and even third time and yes, it’s never the same. There are different people, a different season, different places to see – but I’ve still loved it. This fourth time was similar to the previous two, in that it was different once more, but so I am. I never realised the constant between all of those visits to Perth, and indeed to every other new place that I’ve loved on this trip, was me. I was the reason I was so happy in each new place. I was filled with excitement and energy and the desire to find every experience amazing. Coming back to Perth, exactly two years after the first time, desperately hoping to rekindle that same old infatuation, I realised it was not the city that had stopped caring – it was me. I had changed. And I’m not the only one. With the entire planet in a state of metamorphosis, even here in Australia, where life has not really been affected by this pandemic in comparison to many other places, we too have changed.

Here’s something you might not have considered: despite what some of the more xenophobic and angry locals say, there are no backpackers left in Australia. Of course, this is partly due to Covid-19 which sent a lot of us home by that first country-wide lockdown. The rest of them, however, like me, changed into something else. Sure, backpacks still exist and hostels still have people coming in and out but many of those people travelling through the country are Australian. The ‘backpackers’ aren’t the ones wearing the backpacks anymore. 2 years ago, going to a new city meant moving into a new hostel and instantly making friends with other backpackers so you can do the exciting tourist things together. Not the case now. Why? Everyone has been here for two years. Everyone has friends, in every single state in the country. Everyone has jobs, and homes and even if they do still live in a hostel, they are not on the prowl for friends anymore. They may be friendly enough, but it’s not the same. No one cares about tourist things anymore – we either have no money left to see them, no energy left to be excited about them, or, crucially, we are no longer really tourists. I thought it was just me, but I think a lot of the stranded foreign nationals are complacent, if not totally despondent, with Australia. It’s not Australia’s fault. We’ve just been here so long that we’ve assimilated into expats, or we’re still travelling but without the same excitement for new places, things and people. The face of backpacking here has changed. There is just nothing, and no one new. We’re all jaded.

*

There I was, in the homesick slump I’d been in since my birthday, hoping Perth could revive that same joy in me as I’d felt last time, and it just wasn’t there. It was lovely seeing Perth again, and I’ll always have a soft spot for it, but I’d seen the rest of Australia now, and started to notice some of the more negative comparisons that hadn’t occurred to me before. The West is just not really backpacker friendly – you can do it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s expensive, difficult without your camper-car (or equivalent) and honestly, a bit hostile in places.

While I was in Perth I revisited some of my old favourite places: Kings Park, Elizabeth Quay and even went back to my old hostel to see the two familiar faces remaining. When I used to live here I went to Herrison Island to visit the kangaroos whenever I wanted some downtime, but I’ve seen so many kangaroos at this point that it was hard to get up the motivation to go this time. I did, after talking myself into it, see some old backpacker friends from the East Coast (everyone is in the West right now) and I think it was good for my soul and my increasingly negative (and potentially unfair) views about other backpackers, even if the hangover the next day was a pain. I was staying in a cheap hostel so that cheered me up a little as I had a real bed and a shower and didn’t have to cook in the dark but the city wasn’t as warm or friendly as I remember and that probably didn’t help win back my love. It was nice seeing it again and I know I still have the capacity to love it but there was no point trying in my current state.

One Australian animal I did go out of my way to see again was the Koala. Right before I left Perth last time, me and Benji went to Cohuna wildlife park, one of the only places in Australia were you can not only see, but also hold a koala. My current travel buddy hadn’t yet seen a koala at all and I hadn’t managed to get a good photo the last time I was there and would have liked to have another go at it. We had the car this time, thank frog, so didn’t have to make the complicated commute on public transport than Benji and I had a few years before. The park was more expensive than I remembered to be honest: $30 to hold the koala plus another $15 for general entry into the park and $5 for a bag of feed (plain popcorn). Well we came all that way so we did it, and got to hold the lovely little koalas and chase the unimpressed llamas and imitate the ostriches once again. My photos still weren’t great but this time I’m willing to admit that this has more to do with my face than other people’s photography skills. There’s one or two nice once I can commemorate the adventure with though.

• 

Next we moved onto Fremantle, the beautiful little sister of Perth. I’ve spent a lot of time there in the past but never stayed there. I was so infatuated by Perth that I was never tempted to make the move but now I can see myself loving life here. For a backpacker it’s a really great small city. The shops are so quirky and the weekend market is always fun to wander around. It’s the kind of place you’d need to be steadily working or rich to really make the most of the experience but some of the instagram influencers I met in Byron Bay would have loved snapping some of the cute bars and restaurants in the centre. There were a few things I wanted to revisit in this little place: the markets and the Brewery being some of main ones, but the thing I’ve wanted to do again since the last time I was here was take another daytrip to Rottnest Island.

Rottnest is a beautiful island easily accesible from Freo by a short (but expensive) ferry ride. Hostels often have discounts and if you’re with the RAC you get a decent discount (annoyingly I’m with RAA) but with bike hire for the day it’s about $90 return per person. The island is small by Australian standards, but definitely too large to do in one day on foot and hiring a bike to explore is a pretty popular option. The weather wasn’t as nice this second time around, even though it was exactly the same time of year (to the week!) that I went to the first time, two years ago. Still, it was warm enough and although snorkelling and lying on the beach are definitely options on the island on warmer days, the main attraction is the abundance of friendly quokkas that inhabit the island and the chance to snap an esteemed #quokkaselfie. The quokkas on the island are wild, but used to humans (probably from being fed by them before the rules forbidding this were put in place) and will often come to say hello if you’re in the area. They have little mouths that constantly look like they’re smiling and it’s a Rottnest right of passage to capture a selfie featuring a grinning quokka. Unfortunately, it’s much harder than it looks and requires a selfie stick (they don’t like phones in their faces) and perfect timing, especially if using a phone camera with a very slight delay on it.

My travel buddy and I spent at least half of our time on that island, lying on the ground, trying to capture the perfect shot, and then had to spend the other half cycling far faster than was comfortable to get to see the rest of the island. I’d cycled the slightly shorter route the first time around and was determined to see the whole island this time, come hell or high water. We managed, out of breath and with an ache that can only come from cycling 18km on a hard seat in the space of a few hours, but with our prized photograph, to arrive at the bike return place just in time! Other cool stops on the island are some very cute beaches, a light house and another pink lake, which looks less pink than some of the others I’ve seen recently but is still a pretty cool huge saltflat either way. I’d advise getting some lunch to takeaway in the main town area when you first get in. There’s a bakery and a Subway sandwiches for those on a budget (i.e., me). I love Subway sandwiches – they’re the one constant in every single country I’ve been to. They’re my companions on overnight bus journeys and when I just cannot be bothered to integrate in hostel kitchens. Funnily enough I tried the bakery that day – it was okay but I wish I’d gotten Subway.

*

After leaving Perth, sooner than I expected to want to go to be honest, we repeated some of the stops I’d made on a daytrip, two years ago. This keeps happening to me: I think everything is once in a lifetime so I find a, sometimes uncomfortable and expensive way of doing it just to be certain I get to do it. And then two years later, future me just waltzes in and makes it look easy. Well lah-tee-dah future me.

First we went to Yanchep National Park, which I knew about but hadn’t seen previously. It has some wild koalas there which we wanted to see, and a few nice walks, and I do mean walks rather than hikes. It also has a suprisingly great town for those of you who may find yourselves living in a car (i.e., me again). Seriously, it has shopping centres with tons of reduced food (honestly my new favourite game whilst camping without a fridge) free showers and beautiful sunsets. There are also lots of public barbecues and picnic areas and public bathrooms. There isn’t any camping in the town but there may or may not be enough quiet streets to renegade camp if your vehicle is subtle enough, which you definitely should not do because it’s highly illegal and morally abhorrant.

Next we went to the Lancelin Sandunes, which I went to last time on a daytrip. You can rent a sandboard for $10 from the general store in the nearby town (book in person, you’ll pay more online and they have loads), and after roaming around sand and uneven rocks in your very low, 2WD vehicle looking for the not very clearly marked parking for the dunes, you can surf down the dunes. The first time I went it was pretty fast and really fun, although this time the sand was just far too fluffy and we were sliding down the hill comically slow. Still, it was entertaining but not really worth the clumsy climb back to the top.

• 

• 

We finished our day in the Pinnacles National Park, another familiar place for me, and explored the otherworldly limestone structures whilst the sun set around us. We had dinner there and then went to find a camp for the night. The next day we’d be starting our Perth to Broome trip in earnest, moving into warmer weather and into my last unexplored region of this country. I was really hoping this, if nothing else, would give me back my excitement.

Come Rain or Wine

A continuation of our south coast roadtrip: a few rainy days in Esperance and some National Parks along the south coast and then through the Margaret River region with it’s famous wineries.

On the third day we left the desert after breakfast and, after refilling our fuel in Norseman, the official final roadhouse of the Nullarbor, we found a free hot shower on the way down to Esperance. My God it was nice to be clean again. I scrubbed so hard my sponge broke (granted this may be due to the fact that it was one of those cheap raveled net sponges rather than my extreme cleanliness in fairness) and can now be seen in public once more.

Esperance is small and surprisingly neat. I don’t mean in terms of rubbish, although there is very little rubbish anywhere, but in terms of the town itself. I’ve never seen the movie, ‘The Stepford Wives’ but I sort of feel they’d be quite happy somewhere like Esperance.  It’s just very … orderly. I don’t think I saw paid parking anywhere: there’s ton of parking spaces but they’re rarely used as each house has about six (no, literally) parking spaces on the driveway to each double garage. This means that basically, at night, if you’re in a public car parking space, you don’t belong in the town. Even the hotels have parking spaces per room in a lot of cases. They also don’t offer free, or even cheap camping within the town, which means you’d better be prepared to fork out for a campground to stay there or drive some distance in each day.

It also just felt quite empty. There were other people, just … not that many. I can’t explain it – it was pretty but it had a slightly surreal vibe. There’s a cute mini old-fashioned town there next to the museum with these quaint tiny shops dotted around. Apparently they have a market there every second Sunday but I can’t vouch for it as my visit fell within the liminal fortnight. There’s a nice Esplanade with parking, public toilets, picnic areas and barbecues all along it, which is extremely helpful if you live in a vehicle (but don’t stay overnight – apparently they’ll fine you on the spot). There’s also a long jetty with a little platform underneath at the very end. It’d be quite a nice place to bring a drink and watch the sunset. Whilst we were there a small girl and her family (and dog!) came down as she tried to dunk her goggled head under the water to see the fish, whilst keeping the rest of her above the water. It involved some amusing acrobatics on the unstable ladder and resulted in her concluding that it wasn’t really working and that she couldn’t see any fish. FYI, in case you feel tempted to try this.

Esperance also boasts it’s own version of Stone Henge which was apparently erected as a copy of the UK version. We passed it on the road a few times but didn’t get out to see it. Even from passenger seat it just looked too neat. It’s on the way to the jewel of this part of Australia and the real reason that people stop in Esperance: Cape le Grand National Park. Famed for it’s stunning beaches and campgrounds that sell out six months in advance, every story I posted about Esperance on social media was responded to with a comment about the National Park. Luckily, it’s small enough to see in only one day, especially a cold day where you have no inclination to hang out on one of the beautiful beaches. There are a few hikes you can do between beaches but they’re not really return hikes and it’s difficult without someone to come and pick you up. The only plausible walk we could do was Frenchman’s Peak, a grade 5 hike that apparently takes around 3 hours return. We did it in less than an hour and a half, to be greeted by a lovely 360* view of the park from the summit. It was easy enough with good shoes but there were times that I honestly thought I might be swept up by the wind and blown down the side of the cliff, so be careful on a windy day.

The other infamous site in Cape le Grand is Lucky Bay with it’s friendly kangaroos that roam the beach around dawn and dusk. Honestly, with no available camping nearby (unless you book month and months in advance) we wouldn’t have been able to catch the kangaroos at dawn. We were there at about 4pm, quite close to dusk but it was a bit too cold to hang around with no kangaroos in sight so we didn’t bother waiting. I’ve seen enough friendly kangaroos whilst living here so we’d only have been staying for the Instagram anyhow. Finally, throughout the park there are a few beautiful beaches with (almost) the same pure white sand boasted by The Whitsundays in Queensland, but with a kind of remote, rugged wilderness to them.

The last thing to see around Esperance is the Great Ocean Drive (not to be confused with Victoria’s Great Ocean Road) which takes you on an hour long loop around the south coast and then back up to Esperance to see some honestly beautiful beaches and lookouts. The circuit culminates at Pink Lake to the north of Esperance. In spite of it’s name, the lake is no longer pink but has some interesting information on the science of pink lakes up there and is still worth a visit for what I imagine would be a pretty view on a drier day.

By this point we’d been in Esperance far too long and the weather had gotten bad. I’d say it’s definitely worth a visit in the summer but it’s main selling point is those beautiful beaches which are far less seductive when you’re soaking wet. I was grateful to move on in all honesty. As I said, I think Esperance and the park would be magnificent in the summer, especially the Ocean Drive, but there was something really weird about it this Autumn that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Honestly, maybe I was just fed up of living in a car at this point. I know with the continuing rain over the next few days that definitely became my mood.

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We’d talked about going to the Fitzgerald River National Park and drove to Kundip rest area, just north of Hopetoun for a very uncomfortable night. The rain didn’t stop so going to the bathroom and even cooking dinner were all but impossible without soaking ourselves and the car. I know, I know, I’ve made camping sound so glamourous up until this point with all my anecdotes of flies and the dust of the desert, but here’s the real issue: weather. To access your food, you need to get out of the car and get wet. To access water you need to get out of the car and get wet. To go to the bathroom you need to get out of the car and get wet. To climb into bed you need to get out of the car and get wet. And if you’re especially lucky you’ll have a small leak or a ton of condensation keeping you wet throughout the night. Fun fun fun.

The next morning, after stopping for hot chocolate in Ravensthorpe we went to the visitor centre to ask about the National Park. We were hoping there’d be some nice forest walks that wouldn’t be too exposed to the weather. We were, however, advised that the roads would be all but impossible with our low-set Mitsubishi Magna and the torrential rain that had taken over the south coast. Okay, that was more or less expected. We looked for a nice campground to stay in that night. One with a hot shower and a covered kitchen or sitting room, but the best we could find on our route was a paid campground in the Stirling ranges. Since we didn’t want to hike the ranges until the weather was better (in two days) we decided not to pay the fee that night, but to camp somewhere free and then go there tomorrow for a nice shower before hiking the following day. We ended up camping in Borden, a small town north of the ranges where they have a public toilet, barbecue, covered picnic area and not a single sign saying it’s illegal to camp. It was very nice. There was even a streetlamp so that we could cook after sundown without attracting all the bugs to our headlights.

Honestly, by this point I’m feeling more homesick than I have in my two years of travel. I’m not miserable, I’m just no longer enjoying myself. I’ve been missing a lot of things from my old life for a while, and now, I was really missing just the freedom and comfort of being able to cook without being attacked by mosquitos and having to have insanely early dinners so as not to risk chopping my fingers off in the dark. Of being able to go to the bathroom without holding my breath because the drop toilets are a bit grim, or constantly swivelling my headtorch around in case there are deadly spiders above me. Of being able to have a hot shower and a change of clothes and a dry place to sleep. I’m not planning on cutting this road trip short but I am genuinely wondering what I want to do after it and whether I’m getting anything from being in Australia anymore.

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The next morning as we tried to leave the site in Borden our car wouldn’t start. Luckily it was just the battery being flat but it meant a few more hours before getting to our cosy campsite. It was maybe a good thing, however, as the rain had stopped and we were thinking of embarking on the infamous Bluff Knoll hike that afternoon, instead of tomorrow morning as originally planned. When we did finally reach the campsite we had about 10 minutes to settle in before the most insane thunderstorm started. Good thing we weren’t halfway up that hike! As the rain faded, the sun set in pink and red hues behind the backdrop of the Bluff Knoll mountain. For no reason that I can even slightly comprehend, there was a man playing the bagpipes on the field between the campsite and the mountain. It was very atmospheric, I just am still not 100% sure I didn’t imagine it in some sort of camping hysteria.

The next morning we set out on our hike. After my previous time on Frenchman’s Peak I was smuggly assuming that I’m much fitter than I actually am. Well, those illusions were destroyed pretty quickly on this horrific hike. They advise a time of 3-4 hours – I took the full 4 hours and I was honestly dying. I was being overtaken by old ladies and small children and I couldn’t feel my legs by the time I got back in the car. It’s been three days and it still hurts to move. It’s because the whole thing is steep steps! Thousands and thousands of steep steps for four hours. It was only the ridiculous fantasy that there might be a drive-through Oporto at the top so I could feed my unfit little self and hitch a ride back down that kept me going. Obviously there wasn’t. There was just a ton of hilarious cloud cover. I can only laugh when I think we were going to do another hike that afternoon and the castlerock skywalk the next morning. Ha bloody ha.

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The weather has been better the last few days. Still not the stereotypical Australian weather you imagine, but it’s been cloudy rather than wet. We’re done with the south coast and are finally climbing north now though. The roadtrip from Perth to Adelaide, which we thought would be about 8-9 days has taken us three weeks. I have no idea how. I guess your days are a lot shorter when you have to match the daylight hours.

After the National Parks we drove down to Albany, the next big town along the coast from Esperance, which every Adelaide to Perth itinerary will tell you just to pass through. I like Albany a lot though, it has a really nice vibe. We didn’t spend long there at all: just enough time to grab food, petrol and a free hot shower from the local surf club, but there are cute streets, a pretty waterfront and lovely old style buildings. Honestly, I’m a big fan – I’ll take Albany over Esperance any day. By this point in the trip I need a break from living in a car. I feel so homesick which I’m hoping is linked to the fact that I haven’t had walls around me in a really long time and a little break will make me feel excited to travel again. For that reason we’re kind of hurrying up to Perth so, we didn’t stay and explore Albany, or Denmark, which came next and also seemed really cute. Our next major stop was in the Margaret River region, just south of Perth.

Margaret River is renowned for producing about 20% of Australia’s premium wines and as such, the whole area is filled with things to keep the entire family entertained on a weekend getaway. Let’s talk about the obvious activity first: wine tasting. There are apparently thousands of wineries to choose from. From Vasse Felix, the oldest and original wine producer of the region, to the stunning Knotting Hill Estate with it’s wide glass windows overlooking the water, to Cape Mentelle with it’s outdoor cinema. Without a hired driver we could only reasonably have one tasting and be recovered enough to drive to a campsite later that afternoon, so how do you choose? Well, I went with Amelia Park, because it’s sounds like Emilia Clarke, and if the genocidal Mother of Dragons can’t help us then there’s just no point believing in anything anymore, is there.

It turned out to be a good choice, as for $30pp you can have a plate of cheese and charterurie and taste all 14 wines on their list. I don’t really like white but I must admit, I was pretty tipsy before we even hit the red. We ended up buying a bottle of Shiraz and having a little carpark nap before we felt comfortable enough to be on our merry way. We also dropped in to Vasse Felix, just to see it, and the building and grounds are utterly beautiful. The main cellar door is symetrical and curvy, and draped with autumnal grape vines whilst it sits quietly amongst the many trellises that make up the vinyard. It’s got a little art gallery in there so is worth a look, even if you don’t have the capacity to taste the wines.

What really took me by suprise was the town of Margaret River itself. I sort of just thought it was a wine region, I didn’t think there was an actual town in the middle of it, let alone a big one with a woolworths and everything. It’s utterly delightful: it reminded me a lot of the town in Mission Beach. It had lots of cool and quirky shops and eateries, packed tightly along both sides of a long, wide main street. It would be a really nice base to explore the rest of the region from if you were going to spend a few days here. Another town I have to mention is Cowamup, which is tiny, bovine-themed and utterly adorable. If that’s not enough to tempt you, it has not one, but two, chocolate shops. Temper Temper has a wide range of exotic and adffordable flavours: the honeycomb and dukkah was something special but the real favourite is the ginger, togarashi and sesami dark chocolate bar. Just afforadable enough to tempt you to spend a ridiculous amount. That’s how they get you. That and the fact that you’re probably slightly drunk from all the wine nearby.

There are cheese factories, breweries, honey tasting, several mazes and lookouts and, what I was most excited about: the Rok kombucha factory and shop. Unfortunately, due to covid they’re not offering tours or tastings right now but the region is definitely a really nice place to explore either way. I liked it a lot more than the Tamar Valley in Tasmania which I visited a few months ago. We’d already been on the road for longer than planned so we only spent one night in Margaret River, but the whole area is so lovely and interesting that it would be easy to spend a few days, and a lot of money, here.

Salt and Sand

The beginning of our roadtrip: taking our new camper-car conversion from Adelaide, around the Eyre Peninsular and across the Nullabor Desert. We swam with dolphins and seals, slurped down fancy oysters and showered less than is ideal.

Here I am, just over one week into our trip, living it up in sunny sunny Esperance (this is a joke that you can’t possibly get but let it be known that it is, in fact, pouring down with rain and we are shacked up in the local McDonalds drinking hot chocolates and exploiting their WiFi). So far The Duchess has genuinely been far comfier to live in than expected, apart from a small mishap this morning with above-mentioned rain. It turns out that a tiny portion of the sealant around one of the rear windows is not … um … present … and therefore not completely, 100%, fully waterproof. We found this out the hard (wet) way at 5am, getting dribbled on through the gap.

Other than this, however, the camper-car has been working amazingly well. Let’s take our tale back in time a moment, to that cold morning in Adelaide when our friend Nao waved us off with my first good dirty chai latte in about 8 years and a vanilla custard doughnut. We were heading to Robertstown, just above Adelaide to drop in on the farm that my travel buddy, Robin, used to work at. He still maintained a good relationship with the owner and wanted to catch up before leaving the state. This was quite possibly the first working farm I’ve seen in my 18 months living in Australia, as we all know how I’ve deftly avoided (read: missed) doing the 88 days of agricultural work required to receive a second year VISA. Whilst we were there we noticed all of the tools and scrap materials around and Robin admitted that yes, actually, we probably could have converted our car quite easily here without becoming quite so intimately familiar with the floorplan of every Bunnings in the city. Oh well.

Next we drove to a free campsite located just below Port Augusta, where we made dinner in the dark and I realised I needed to invest in a much better headtorch, and settled in for an early night. Here it was, our first night sleeping in the bowels of The Duchess. I was afraid we’d be cold – I’d been so worried about boiling to death up in Broome that I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of freezing to death here on the south coast – but it was toasty. Turns out that cheaply made velco reflective panels did a great job of keeping the heat inside the car. There have been a few moments where I’ve woken up scrunched into a tight ball because I’ve obviously gotten a little chilly in the night, but not enough to really disturb my sleep or wake me up in shivers. We were still asleep by 9am, in fact, when the sun beating down on the car started to make it uncomfortably warm. But still – very succesful for our first night I would say.

That day in Port Augusta was mostly admin based – we’d left Adelaide in a bit of a hurry to meet Robin’s employer and hadn’t had a chance to really check what there was to see along the way. We spent the morning in a cafe researching and then (after purchasing better head-torches and a camping lantern) headed down to Port Lincoln, the South Australian capital of seafood, that afternoon. We got fish and chips from the award-winning Fresh Fish Place for dinner, and ended our second full day of adventure camping at another free site at Fisherman’s Bay.

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By the third morning I have reached the following verdict: the insulating panels are great – they keep the cold out and the warmth in, but also reflect the sun’s rays and keep the car cool when it’s sunny – the only teeny tiny little issue is that the glue on the back of the velcro I used to attach the panels to the windows is starting to melt in the sun, meaning the velcro is no longer as adhesive as would be desirable. I’ve got some spare dots of velcro but I think next time we pass a Bunnings I may have to go inside (bleeehhhh) and purchase a packet of white velcro. We currently have the black dots and have decided that this must be the issue with our otherwise genius solution to insulating our car. The black absorbs the heat more and melts, whereas the white must surely be more resistant to this. Well, we’ll see. We’re not likely to hit a Bunnings for a while and the panels are staying on for the most part, but they won’t last the whole trip in their current state.

Other than spending far longer than any reasonable human contemplating the colour attributes of velcro, we went to the forebodingly named Coffin Bay that afternoon. It’s actually named after the guy who discovered it, rather than the eternal housing of our earthly remains which I’m not actually aware the town has any strong connection with, just FYI. But, it’s actually quite renowned for it’s oysters. I just want to make this clear – I do not really like any kind of mollusky food that you slurp out of it’s shell – but we figured we’d give them a go since we were here and they were meant to be amazing. We went to the cafe at Oyster Farm Tours (which incidentally offers oyster farm tours) and explained, rather clumsily to the staff there that we didn’t really like oysters but wanted to try them, and they very patiently helped us pick a mixed half dozen to try. We went with 3 raw with japanese flavouring, and 3 cooked with barbecue style flavouring. They take ages to come out but I’m pretty sure they’re being opened fresh (if not legitimately being taken from the ocean whilst we wait). After taking as much time as possible trying to photograph them from every angle, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we’d have to tip them down our throats. Eurgh. I’m gagging remembering it. Turns out I definitely don’t like oysters. They didn’t taste bad – I think they tasted very fresh given my limited experience. I just don’t like the concept of them. I dutifully swallowed my three and reaffirmed my faith that oysters, even those from somewhere as renowned as coffin bay, are not for me. I’m probably just not refined enough for them, let’s be honest. I didn’t see any of the other people gagging over the side of the bar.

We visited a few viewpoints around Coffin Bay National Park and camped in a nice free camp in Coula. There was more to see but we’d booked a tour in advance and we therefore had to race up the coast a little bit to make it there on time. The next day we were going to be snorkelling with sealions and dolphins with Baird Bay Eco Tours. This recommendation had come from a friend (hey Charlie, hey) who had recently travelled SA and said that this was the best thing she’d done. It was quite an expensive stop ($180 per person – which at this point we didn’t really have as we still hadn’t been paid for the medical trial yet) but we’d decided to go for it as I’d never seen either sealions or dolphins up close, let alone had the chance to swim with them.

It was a little underwhelming in all honesty. I think maybe it just wasn’t a great day for them, but we sailed over to where the sealion colony was, all 12 or so of us peering over the edge of the boat to see hundreds of seals awaiting us, to see about four lazing far away on the rocks. This was still cool, but not what Charlie or the website had described. After about 40 minutes of sailing around that spot doing I-have-literally-no-idea-what we got into the water, where a single sealion was swimming about. Imagine 12 humans, splashing about in the water, none of us wearing fins so clumsier than expected, trying to see this sealion that was about 5 metres down. She was more understanding than I would have been. Without flippers I couldn’t get anywhere close to her, I’m too bloody bouyant (probably not helped by all the time I spend in McDonalds, snaffling WiFi) but she clearly appreciated my efforts because she swam away from the big group and came over to me to say hi. She stared intently into my masked face, probably wondering what strange manner of creature I was to be floudering around so much. I was mesmerised by her little whiskered face and large dark eyes for a few moments before fumbling with my underwater camera, purchased especially for the occasion (my last one broke somewhere in Indonesia) and tried to capture a blurry memory of my new best friend.

Soon after this the two crew of the tour (I assume, they never actually introduced themselves, or the tour, or the safety features of the boat come to think of it…) called us back in and said we’d try again on the way back. Next we were going to see the dolphins. I honestly had low hope of us even finding a single one after the debacle with the missing sealion colony (can’t blame them when weirdos like me are falling into their waters everyday and flapping around). When we reached the right location, however, I saw several fins pierce the water on the side of the boat. Oh my gosh, they were excited to see us! They kept swimming up and around the boat and there were loads of them. At least twenty but they were moving so fast it was impossible to count. Excitedly we scrambled into the water when we were told to stick our heads under to be greeted by the swarm. They were everywhere and they were beautiful! One of them swam behind me so I spun under water to face it. He slowed down and spun too in a copy of my movement, so I kept spinning. Between the two of us we probably completed about six rotations before he got bored and moved on, and I tried not fall over – or whatever the aquatic equivalent is – but for about 10 seconds I had my own little dolphin friend. I honestly think he might have been trying to see how dizzy he could make the silly human but I felt special anyhow. No photos of this ridiculous incident exist unfortunately, so you’ll just have to take my word that it happened, and that me and a random dolphin just spun around and around in circles in freezing cold water in some kind of bizarre game/dance.

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We did get quite a few photographs of them swimming past us underwater and I realised that this is one of those things that tops people’s bucket lists: swim with dolphins. I mean, you couldn’t touch them or anything here, they’re wild, but you don’t need to. They’re playing all around you and it’s kind of amazing. Whenever you dipped your head below the surface the entire soundscape was dominated by their bizarre echoing chatter. It was a bit creepy actually, I wouldn’t want to be caught unawares on a nightdive with that! The tour was just about winning me over again until the skipper started shouting at us to ‘turn out’, ‘get over there’ put your face in the water’, ‘look behind you’. Honestly, some of us are trying to get salt water out of our leaking masks and do not need to be bombarded with demands to look at the dolphins we’ve been swimming with for 20 minutes. I’m sure it was meant to be helpful and nowhere near as aggressive as it came across but I felt like a naughty and not particularly bright child. I will admit that he won me over a little when he gave us all hot chocolate and biscuits as we shivered back on the boat. I’m a sucker for hot chocolate and biscuits when I’m voilently shivering whilst adrift on the Southern Ocean.

We did go back to see the sealions but none of them were getting into the water (tbh, neither was I, after the violent shivers). The tour operator had no showers so we needed to find a campsite with warm showers that night, or remain salty and cold. We ended up in Ceduna, which was actually several hours away from Baird Bay, but in a cute little paid campground which had a kitchen area, laundry facilities and those highly prized hot showers. After the rush of the last few days we ended up staying two nights there so that we could have some time to relax and do some laundry. Ceduna is not a large town, and it feels a lot like the outback when you’re there: low buildings, small buisnesses and dusty roads. There’s a cute jetty with a stinger net out at the end of it, so you can laze around in the pool and watch the sunset over the ocean, with a drink if you chose. If it had a been a little warmer I’d have loved that, but as it stood I was happy to stand on the jetty. This was our last real stop in civilisation before our journey through the Nullabor Desert – the outback divided the Southern and Western states of Australia. We couldn’t stock up on much fresh food as you can’t cross the border with most of it anyhow, but we loaded up on supplies and started our journey.

We had one stop before the desert, and it was a very exciting one (for me!). We were passing MacDonnell lake, a famously pink late near Cactus Beach. Apparently it’s because a certain type of algae feeds off of the high levels of salt in the water (and they are high, I stepped in the salt at one point and it entrenched my flip flop). The more salt, the more of the algae, and the more of the algae, the more vivid hue of pink. There’s a tiny causeway that runs between the pink lake on one side, and a blue lake on the other, meaning that you’re driving down a catwalk of vibrant colours. It’s very cool. Unfortunately, it’s cooler on instragram than it is on this blog, because, although the water was definitely tinged pink, it was reflecting a beautiful blue sky when I was there so the colour is somewhat reduced. The best photos seem to be from people with drones, but it’s a cool place to simply be and experience, photograph or not. We had about 20 seconds of it to ourselves before 4 other cars pulled up alongside us and we had to wait for them to move to take the cover photo above. If you are just here for the gram, I strongly advise waiting for a cloudy day and purchasing a drone or acquiring an extremely tall travel bud.

We had one final pink treat whilst in South Australia. We started our journey into the desert that afternoon, and only got a few hours into it before it was time to make camp. The great things about the Nullabor is that there are endless free camps throughout it’s expanse, although it’s worth noting that almost none of them have toilet facilities. We stopped about 200km from the WA border, ready to cross it the next morning, and set about fighting off flies as we tried to use our leftover fresh food by making campground noodle soup (or Nullabor noods, as I have so aptly named them). We had the entire campground to ourselves and set us our table facing the most magnificant pink streaked sunset. I couldn’t capture the colours so you’ll just have to imagine scene: me slurping soup, batting away flies, and twitching slightly as it’s been a whilst since I’ve seen a bathroom, bathed in violent hues that completely overshadow the pink lake from earlier that day.

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We spent two nights total in the Nullabor Desert. I entertained myself by testing and rating the bathroom facilities at every single roadhouse we stopped at and introducing The Duchess to her namesake by listening to the ‘My Dad Wrote a Porno’ podcast. Getting into WA was easy, although admittedly more complex than any other border crossing I’ve done here in Australia. There was an actual border here where you stopped and someone checked your papers and your vehicle for any forbidden items (like fruit, not drugs – although maybe for drugs…). Fuel prices were crazy, which is to be expected since they’ve done the hardwork of getting all that fuel to the middle of nowhere so we can access it when doing the long haul through. The roadhouses also all offered hot showers for a small fee, and over the counter hot food. We didn’t try either (there was no point showering when you’re just going to get covered in dust again when you go outside). There were some other bathrooms along the way in some of the camping spots, but the one I tried to use was absolutely covered in these large red and black bugs, who all flew at me when I tried to open the door, causing me to squeal and run away. I couldn’t face getting my bits out when them flying around me like that so I held it in and went back to only assessing roadhouse bathrooms and very occasionally empty and secluded bits of bush.

There was meant to be a meteor shower on this week and I thought the desert would be such an amazing place to view it but there was also a giant full moon. I didn’t know the moon could make things that bright but it was like city stars – you know, you can only see the 20 or so that are bright enough to still show when you’re surrounded by city lights. So much for stunning views of the milky way. It was quite hard to work out when to cook actually. If you cook in daylight you have flies all over you all of the time. If you cook in the dark you have flies flying over your light source all of the time. The moon helped a little but I now totally get why all of the roadhouses serve hot food.

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There are some fun road signs in the desert that gave us a few exciting minutes of photographing too. It turns out that there is a 90 km long straight road, which I think is the longest in the world, so that’s kind of cool. There are also those typical australia animal signs everywhere, which made it feel like a real outback adventure. So there you have it: entertaining yourself in the desert – get the campermate app and rate everything you pass (although seriously, get this anyway!), find a good podcast, and embrace becoming a creature of flies and dust.