perth.

My new favorite place in australia, perth! maybe it’s from not loving adelaide, maybe it’s because it was still 20 degrees at 8pm, maybe it’s the incredible family of sammys that we were staying with meeting us off the plane with smiles and a ride home, but within minutes of being in perth I already loved it! We were lucky enough to be offered a place to stay by Sammy’s auntie, uncle and cousin for our visit to perth which is brilliant, and on the drive from the airport to their beautiful home in Yanchep they took us to Kings Park to a lookout with amazing views over the city, all lit up and sparkly! After a long day of travelling and hanging about we were really tired, so got an early night ready to start exploring the next day.

Our bodies were still in early morning mode, so we got up and went for a run before getting ready and heading out with Nicola. She showed us all the local area and told us what was where, we then went to a place called Hilarys Boat Harbour which was lovely, it’s full of shops, cafes, restaurants and bars, we had lunch at a place called Little Ceasars and I had an amazing salad, followed by an ice cream from a gelato shop, yummy! After that we drove up to Yanchep National Park and went for a walk round, there are lots of koalas in the trees and tons of parrots and different birds, such a lovely place so close to where they live! We spent the evening watching films and hanging out which was lovely, ‘Focus’ with Will Smith is a brilliantly clever film that you should definitely watch, and ‘Machine Gun Preacher’ if you haven’t seen already it needs to be done, really makes you appreciate what you have in life and have a good think about things.

We spent Tuesday exploring the city which was great, the weather is brilliant over here so it’s lovely just to walk around. The cbd is quite small but there’s lots of lovely buildings and parks to see as well as the waterfront as well. We walked down to Barrack jetty and along the water, before jumping on the cat bus- a free service that runs in four different loops around the city, and having a good little tour whilst avoiding getting too hot! We then walked up the steepest hill ever to Kings Park to check out the views. There is a great war memorial in the park, a little cafe and lots of different view points with great lookouts over the city, it’s such a lovely place to chill out and relax on the grass for a couple of hours. On our way home we went and watched the sunset on Yanchep beach which was so pretty, one of my favourite things to do! Nicola also introduced me to the most amazing fruit, a nashi pear! It’s like a cross between a pear and an apple and is so so good, I’ve never seen or heard of them before now, I feel like I’ve been missing out!

Another nice early start the next day to collect a car for our next road trip! We packed all our camping gear and set off up north to see what western australia had to offer, it definitely didn’t disappoint! Our first stop was the weirdest little place called Wedge, there were loads of small shacks with tin roofs and fishing nets outside all surrounded by sand dunes, but there was nobody around, it was the strangest place i’ve ever been too, it reminded me of something out of the hills have eyes! after the weird, creepy village though there is a beautiful beach with white sand that looks fantastic! We then went on to the Pinnacles Desert in Nambung National Park which was absolutely incredible, there are thousands of rocks across a huge desert, it looks amazing and we took so many photos. It’s $12 to enter the park and it’s well worth it, such a great place. Jurian Bay was our next stop which was another lovely beach and bbq area where we stopped and had lunch, after that we carried on further north and set up camp at Drummond Cove for the night. The sunset on the beach at the campsite was beautiful, the skies look so beautiful in western australia, it’s definitely worth it’s title ‘sunset coast’.

We woke up super early on the Thursday morning and got showered and ready, the facilities at Drummond Cove are great and the showers and toilets are so clean! The rest of the drive to Kalbarri National Park was about two hours, there’s not much between Drummond Cove and Kalbarri except a lot of long roads and a few kangaroos! Once you get there though there are a few different lookouts to stop at and they all have amazing views of the gorges and the river, we stopped at Hawks Head, Ross Graham, Z Bend and the Loop. All the viewpoints are awesome but the best one is definitely the Loop as it has Natures Window which looks awesome and of course has great selfie and artistic photo potential! We spent a couple of hours driving between the lookouts, a lot of the roads are dirt roads so it takes a while to get between places. There are also a lot of lizards about, we saw loads, one was 3 feet long, about a foot tall and run like hell when we drove towards it. After that we drove to the town of Kalbarri and along the coast, before turning round and heading back towards Perth. It takes about five hours to drive back down and we stopped off at a couple of places along the way, including Dongara which had a great little bakery where we had lunch. As the sun was setting we stopped off at Lancelin which was really beautiful, although driving home in the dark we were in constant fear of roos jumping out into the road! It was a bit of a drive for only a couple of days but it was totally worth it!

On the Friday we took our car back really early before getting a train down to Rockingham, then a bus down to Shoalwater, then a ferry over to Penguin Island! Such a trek to get around Perth but they have such good transport links with the trains ans buses that get you literally anywhere. Penguin Island was really small but a nice place, the penguins come in at sunset and go out at sunrise so there isn’t a lot of opportunity to see them unless you go to the discovery centre. We walked the tiny three or four km round the whole island, over rocks and beach, it was a really nice walk but once we’d done that there wasn’t much else to see so we spent about two and a half hours travelling back up north to Yanchep and had a nice relaxing evening having dinner with the family!

Such a great first week in Perth, looking forward to another week of sightseeing and adventures!

hilary’s boat harbour.