One night, I received this phone call from Attila and he asks me to join him on a road trip. "Where to?" I ask. And he says, "North, south, east, west... I don't care". So on Friday night at the bar, he hands me his keys and at 3am I found myself stumbling into his flat and passing out on the couch. The next morning, about 20 minutes before we had to leave, I saw, for the first time, the map of our journey. We were headed for the north.
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| Atte, Lucy, Me, Serena, Attila |
Shortly after we hit the highway, we were in "the bush". There was nothing around us but dusty unpaved roads, big trucks, sheep, and a lot of greenery. A LOT.
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| Atte looking suave as ever |
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| A couple of bros chilling |
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| We stumbled upon some old flattened cars |
The first town we arrived at was Moora. The roads were completely dead and everything was closed. We stopped by a hotel that had a cozy lounge, a pool table, a kitchen and bar. Maybe it was the fresh oven-cooked vegetarian pizza they made or the owner that kept singing and told us to "get the hell out" if we didn't like it... but there was something about the place that made it special.
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| The Moora Hotel, Moora |
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| Train tracks, Moora |
To be honest, there is absolutely nothing to do outside the city. It's always the good company that makes the trip worthwhile. We were constantly stopping for photo ops and it became so evident that you can have fun no matter where you're from, where you're at, and what age you are.
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| Mustard fields! |
It was getting late and we were hoping to find accomodation in a monastery in New Norcia. However, when we got there, we found out that nobody lived in the town besides the monks who led very private lives, and the people in the hotels. The rooms were all fully booked because there was a group on a 7-day walk that had travelled the same route we had by car. We were also interested in sampling products from the infamous New Norcia Bakery, but discovered that the bakery was actually operating in the city of Perth. We came a long way for nothing.
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| Basketball court, New Norcia |
Once again, we were back on the road. It was dusk which meant one thing - the kangaroos were waking up. In the exact words told to us by a local, "kangaroos have no road sense at all". We would be at risk of driving into one and completely destroying the car. I was assigned to scout for kangaroos, but I was too busy sleeping. Thank goodness we didn't come across any, and even managed to pull over on the side of the road and look at the stars. This was the best I could do without a tripod and it doesn't even do what we saw justice. No city lights, no city sounds. It was just us and the milky way.
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| The Milky Way |
We arrived safely at a hostel in the town of Cervantes. While we were outside, Attila's drunk inside voice was still too loud and we got in a wee bit of trouble. After everyone had gone to bed, Atte, Attila and I wandered our ways through some bushes and plopped down on the beach to tell our life stories. The waves hit violently against the rocks but we were so relaxed.
After a couple hours of sleep, we were off again. At Jurien Bay, we were hoping to do a bit of sandboarding but like everything else in Western Australia on a Sunday, it was closed. There were, however, people skydiving. Not just skydiving, but skydiving into the bluest ocean waters I've ever seen. I kid you not, this picture wasn't edited.
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| Jurien Bay |
In Nambung National Park, we trekked The Pinnacles, only to find that we had been walking in circles around the same limestone structures. Everything looked exactly the same, nothing but yellow for miles.
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| The Pinnacles, because I'm deep and stuff. |
South of Jurien Bay was Lancelin, another town for us to do nothing much. Attila did manage to find his new best friend.
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| Attila and pup, Lancelin |
We arrived in Perth in the evening, but not before we were pulled over by a police officer for speeding. My phone ran out of batteries twice even though Attila had 4 extra batteries. It probably exhausted itself trying to get signal. To summarize our little road trip (and pretty much Western Australia):
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.
- Arthur C. Clarke
