Hello Again!

I'm proud to say we made it back safely from our sixteen person, 4,000 kilometer road trip around Western Australia.  As great an experience as our excursion that I wrote about in my last post was, I think the past week up north may have been even better.  We picked up our four rental cars from the Hertz depot in Perth early last Saturday morning, and were met with a relatively inconvenient surprise.  While we had booked and paid for four Toyota Corolla Sedans, we were given four Toyota Corolla Hatchbacks, which, as you can imagine, had considerably less space to store everything that we all wanted to bring along.  That being said, we made it work, and were soon on our way out of town for another Australian adventure.  Our first official stop was set to be in Coral Bay, almost 1,200 km north of Fremantle on the West coast.  On the way up, however, we found a couple other neat things to stop and see.  On Saturday, we stopped at the Pinnacles, which is basically a HUGE area made up entirely of things that look like this:




They're made of limestone and they're awesome.  That's pretty much all you need to know.  After stopping at a free overnight camping area just off the highway for the night, we continued heading north on Sunday.  We managed to get distracted again, however, and worked another unexpected stop into our journey.  This time it was at Kalbarri National Park, the site of a rock formation known as "Nature's Window".  This was a pretty quick stop, but extremely cool nonetheless.  While we were leaving the park, the lead car in our group (mine) narrowly missed hitting a kangaroo as it crossed the road, and the car two cars behind us did actually hit one.  They must have just clipped him, though, because he got up and hopped away and there wasn't any damage to the car itself.  Sunday night was when we finally reached Coral Bay, but unfortunately all of the caravan parks were full.  This left us with an interesting predicament.  We needed a place to set up camp for the night, and Coral Bay was the only town for quite awhile.  We ended up being directed to the hostel in town, and were told that they sometimes allowed people to camp on the grass behind their building in emergency situations.  Sure enough, they let us do it (and for pretty cheap, too!).  Monday morning we were awake and down to the beach as soon as possible, as everyone wanted to make the most of their time in Coral Bay.  We had been told that Coral Bay was the best place for snorkeling over Ningaloo Reef, and we certainly weren't disappointed.  The coral was bigger and more elaborate than anything I had expected to see, and you didn't even have to be out over the reef before you were surrounded by huge silver fish that were more than happy to have you swim with them.  At one point I apparently stepped on a stingray (or so I'm told, I didn't actually see it).  Fortunately, I was wearing my flippers and he wasn't feeling aggressive so he just swam away.  After a long day at the beach, we decided we would head north to Exmouth, another popular spot along the reef.  We stayed at a caravan park there, and had a barbeque for one of our friends on the trip who was celebrating her birthday.  On Tuesday, a few people in our group went off to swim with some whale sharks (the biggest fish in the world).  As cool as it sounded, a lot of us decided we didn't feel like spending the $400 it would take to do it, and decided we could find something cool to do on our own while they were away.  Turns out we were right.  The rest of us went to a place called Cape Range National Park, which is just outside of Exmouth.  We did a couple major things in the time we were there.  The first was a hike at a site named Yardie Creek that ended at the top of a gorge, and produced some really cool pictures for us.  Once we were all hot and tired, we headed over to a place called Turquoise Bay and did some swimming and snorkeling.  It was a pretty awesome day.  We found another free campsite along the highway on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday we headed for Karijini National Park in the Pilbara.  It was a pretty long drive, so we didn't have a ton of time once we got to the park.  We ended up stopping at the first thing there was to see at Karijini, and that was Hamersley Gorge.  We were swimming most of the time we were here, so I wasn't able to get too many pictures, so you'll just have to believe me when I say it was absolutely incredible.  When we were done, we got a campsite in the park and settled in for the night.  Thursday was definitely my favorite day on the trip by a lot.  In the morning we hiked down to Joffrey Gorge, which wasn't a swimming gorge, but had some really great waterfalls and places to climb.  After Joffrey, we stopped at Knox Lookout and Oxer Lookout, both of which had some pretty spectacular views.  In the afternoon we stopped at the Karijini Visitor's Center, and then headed over to Dale's Gorge.  This was easily my favorite part of the day.  We hiked for a really long time down into the gorge until it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere, and then all of a sudden we came across a swimming hole tucked away behind everything, so we hopped in for awhile.  Once we were dry again, we hiked the other direction and the same thing happened.  Just as it seemed like we were completely lost, we ran into a beautiful swimming area with a waterfall, so we all hopped in again to cool off.  By 3:30 we were all so tired that we decided to set up camp for the night, and we sat around and chatted until it was time to call it a night.  Friday was one LONG day of driving back to Fremantle.  We left Karijini by 6:30, and 1,400 km and seventeen hours later, we were finally back at the P&O Hotel.  I realize this post isn't as long as the last, but don't be fooled!  Blog post length doesn't necessarily reflect quality of experience, and I would be hard pressed to say that this past week doesn't rank right up there with the best experiences I've had since being on this side of the world.  As usual, I've got some pictures from the trip up on facebook for all the visual learners in the group.  Cheers!