Australia


08/01/09

Kununurra

42 days away

Cloudy

319 km / 198 miles since last post

10,119 km / 6,288 miles total

Sarah

Slideshow / Fullscreen


Antipodean Adventure Overview

Antipodean Adventure Photos



Welcome To Western Australia

Our Route (to 08/01/2009)

Welcome To Western Australia

All Photos (Click for larger)

This morning we left the roadhouse and headed towards to the Western Australia border. Before setting off Stu noticed a small red-backed spider crawling on our van... urgh!

The landscape continued on from yesterday, lots of lush green countryside surrounded by beautiful ranges. There was also plenty of evidence that the rains had visited here with flood water on both sides of the road along the way. Thankfully, it was just a few centimetres deep and posed no problem. It does have you pondering what the situation would be like after several days of heavy rain. We were happy to be making this part of the journey in fine weather.

At the Western Australia border they have a quarantine checkpoint where all fresh fruit and vegetables must be declared. This is because they can carry pests and diseases into a fairly delicate ecosystem. Our travel book advised us that that onions and washed salad leaves were allowed in small quantities. We now assume this advice to be out of date as they took our groceries from us! We presume it's an onion salad for the checkpoint guards tonight! Thankfully, we didn't have anything else that was confiscated and so we proceeded onwards into Western Australia. I'm not quite sure what pests and disease could be carried inside an onion which has been peeled and chopped, but there you go...

We decided to stop at Kununurra, the first town after the Western Australian border. We had plenty of time to proceed a little further, but after the last two nights in very basic roadhouses, and sharing toilets with frogs and toads, we thought we deserved a bit of luxury. One of the campsites at Kununurra is rated as 5 stars and it has a pool and spa - we were sold! Soon after arriving we made the most of the pool and spa, which was such a nice relief from the burning hot sun. The weather report advised it was 38 degrees today, and should be the same tomorrow. If we head down to Halls Creek it'll be 40 degrees!

On a side note this blog is likely to be updated in little bursts as opposed to every single day. Visitors to Western Australia will understand why as it's pretty sparsely populated and even managing mobile phone reception is difficult. In the last 2500km we've had reception a grand total of 3 times! Readers will also notice that we've topped 10,000kms! As another factoid we've crossed two time zones and are now on our fourth state!