Solar panels, check! Porta potti, check! Time to hit the road. Look at her go, our van (the one in the picture). The one behind the wheel of the car is me, my first time driving on the left. It went pretty fine except for the occasional putting on wipers vs. turning signals when turning to the left, followed by confusion, cursing and laughing at yourself at the same time.
However we got everything pretty much installed in the van and took off. We first went grocery shopping in Coles and had food for about a week for 140$ including some long-term things like Nutella & Nesquik 🙂 What still strikes me is that you can’t buy alcohol in the regular supermarket but have to go to a separate liquor store, which made me feel like a total alcoholic on the edge of society.. Anyway I bought my two bottles of wine, a red Shiraz and a rosé wine for 20$ together, properly wrapped in paper of course as walking the streets with alcohol (even if it’s closed) is also illegal (not helping for the outcast-alcoholic-feeling either).
Our first real stop was close to Nambung National Park, interesting to see the Pinnacles Desert. You can drive through this desert, entrance fee was 12$ per vehicle and in about an hour you can be out again as it’s very cool but pretty much all the same thing so good to know you don’t need to spend your entire day here.
After that we headed further to Kalbarri. The weather is slowly starting to get better! Kalbarri was the first impressive place we saw, the greatest attraction, ‘the natural window and Z-bend’ were closed due to roadworks but luckily this area had some extra gems in stock for us. We did our first walking trail which lead us to cool cliffs, limestone formations and gorges, first time I saw things like that so I was stunned! Every morning at 8.45 there’s the pelicans getting fed at the beach as well, we couldn’t miss that of course! Quite interesting as I must admit I had never seen a pelican up close, they’re quite large creatures 🙂
Kalbarri brought us to Denham which I thought was finally a somewhat bigger town, haha was I wrong, it still strikes me that every village here is tiny, completely dead at 8PM and restaurants usually only open from Thursdays to Sundays. I sincerely hope we get to experience a town where not everyone is asleep at 9PM or with more than 2 bars pretty soon!
We did encounter the first (and hopefully last) super douchebag, until now we’ve always stayed at TOP caravan parks (TOP is a brand) where we’ve had great spots, friendly people and perfect amenities everywhere. However when we arrived at Denham Seaside Tourist Village my ‘hello’ was first of all very much ignored by the owner, whereafter Arno gets yelled at for blocking the road with the van. But ok we were in a good mood, we kept being polite. Unfortunately however after paying 77$ for 2 nights on a powered site, we quickly saw our site didn’t even have water. Therefore we politely went back to the office to ask for a different site. The owner just mumbled to the lady at the desk to give us a full refund and said that we should go camp elsewhere already, he obviously didn’t want us in his camping. Now as there were only 2 campings in Denham, we took off to the second one, Blue Dolphin Caravan Park, where the people in the office were super friendly and helpful, such a relief! But after checking us in they kindly asked what went wrong in the other camping as apparently the douche had called them up saying that we’re not nice people, I mean can you believe that guy?! Price for douchebag of the year 2017 goes toooo… We weren’t the first ones to complain about this guy so it seemed, just glad it wasn’t us!
Aaaanyway, just had to get that out of my system, apologies for that! 🙂 We’ll start the rest of our trip by a short visit to Shell Beach tomorrow, which is the one of only two beaches in the world where shells replace sand entirely. And after that we’ll be driving to Coral Bay, sounds good already, hopefully it is!
P.S. Look below, I have finally seen some kangaroos alive quite close to me! (Yes I say alive because the majority of kangaroos we see are lying dead alongside the road, but like at least one per kilometer!!)
