Road Trip baby!!! How much did we love our little Wicked camper?! We picked it up in Perth on the 21st of March ready to make it our home for the next month. Only us & the animals painted on the side exploring great big Oz! It literally had everything we needed to live in it, table in the in the middle section for daytime, which then converted into a bed for night and a full blown kitchen at the rear with kitchen sink, cooker, shelves for all of our goodies, cool box (Esky if we’re being Australian) and all the crockery and cooking utensils we’d need. Perfect! We picked up food supplies & the compulsory beers at the supermarket beside Ben’s & took off on our Wicked adventure!!

Our first week was spent exploring South Western Australia, hitting Bunbury, Margaret River, Augusta, Pemberton, Walpoole, Denmark, Albany & Fitzgerald National Park, not bad for a weeks work!

Bunbury was our first stop, only a few hours drive from Perth. Free parking spot looking onto the beautiful soft sand beach, watching the volleyball players and the gorgeous sky as the sun went down. We were determined to get as much free sites/parking spots as possible as after paying so much for the van we didn’t want to have to pay another $25/$30 a night for a camping site. We were worried we wouldn’t be able to find anywhere but once on the road you see plenty of stops where people have parked up for the night. As you can imagine we didn’t get much sleep the first night, it felt weird for me sleeping in the back of a van & believe it or not it was a little bit chilly. I learned after that night that layers were much needed underneath my sleeping bag! We woke early in the morning and took off along the beach for a run, determined to get our fitness back up after basically doing zero exercise in Asia! After that it was a cold shower at the beach shower (I can hear you all saying cold shower, but trust me we’re used to freezing cold showers after Thailand), and a breakfast of cereal chilling out by the beach. You’ll never believe it but oh my god how we had missed cereal in the mornings, there are only so much white bread and eggs you can take! Off we went feeling chilled out, happy & ready for the rest of our journey.

We were excited to hit Margaret River, we’d heard it was gorgeous but the thing that was doing it for us was the fact that there are 124 wineries to visit – yum yum!!! We ended up spending 3 nights, only one afternoon was spent visiting the wineries not every day like I know you’ll all be thinking! Had a fab afternoon sampling the vino, cheese, chocolate & beer Western Oz has to offer. Even better it was all free apart from the $12 for sampling the beers. We managed to get a free spot again, this time it was literally a rest area at the side of the road. Had to make sure we were parked up & tea cooked on our little gas stove before it started getting dark, as once the sun started going down at the back of 6 it was pitch black by 7. Even though the days were scorching hot it did get a wee bit chilly once the sun disappeared….nothing our bottle of vino from Bebn & cheap vod from Cambodia didn’t sort out though! Margaret River is quite literally campervanners paradise, there are van’s everywhere. It’s funny you keep bumping into the same people, we were sure the Hippy Campers were following us! There’s an amazing beach called Surfers Point so that brings all the surf dudes & chicks out to play on their boards. After failing miserably at surfing in Kuta I think I’ll stick to watching from the sand! We ended up moving to an actual site on the third night, well when we say site it was actually a budget one we found in our free camping guide that we’d bought. $12 for the site, had a cold shower outside but woo there were toilets, no more hiding in the bush to do our business!! The site itself was pretty basic but was right on the banks of pretty cool lake. The sun was shining so we topped up our tans, got some clothes washing done in a bucket & had a fake bbq on our gas stove! The highlight of our road trip so far had to be spotting our first kangaroos in the wild, so amazing to see them hopping about the farmers fields whilst we were out for our morning run, totally made our day. Speaking of animals can’t forget our ducks that came by for tea & breakie, seriously after doing their rounds of all the vans they must be the best fed ducks in Western Australia!

The next few days we did quite a bit of driving seeing Augusta/Cape Leewin, where the Indian & Southern Oceans meet, lovely Pemberton where we met the even lovelier Randall & Marianne who fed us cheese, crackers, wine & stew, Walpoole for the Valley of Giants Tree Top walk, Denmark to check out the beaches and get another free shower (if there weren’t beaches would have seen absolutely nothing in Denmark it was a ghost town!) and onto Albany for another free night in a parking area. Thank god our gas held up & we managed to cook our tea, as one week in and our gas bottle ran out! No cups of tea for us in the morning but managed to fill it up in Albany & we were good to go.

Last stop before Norseman, the town just before we would hit the Nullabor, was Fitzgerald National Park. Honestly it’s just as well it was a pretty amazing place as the drive off of the main road into the National Park was horrendous! 65 km’s of unsealed road wasn’t good for our little Wiked Camper! We were well & truly in the outback! I was determined to spot as much wildlife as I could and what happens to the first lizard we come across, Dean nearly runs over it, good job the place was pretty much deserted or we’d be getting thrown out! The beach here was utterly amazing, we were the only people on it, totally felt like we were on a deserted island somewhere. The only other living thing we came across was two kangaroos hopping across the sand dunes, love the Joeys! They must have decided they loved us just as much as when we got back to our van they were hanging out beside it, casually munching on some crackers the last campervanners must have left. Too cute! As we said we were literally in the middle of the outback so of course there were no showers, just as well we came prepared with a solar shower!! So glad it had been a scorcher of a day so it was nice and toastie for the first time we had to use it. Dean nearly shared his with a huge spider after he hung it up on a tree branch, were weren’t quite used to the Ozzie spiders yet so stayed well clear of him! I ended up being so lucky with my wildlife spotting, a lizard, kangaroos, another huge lizard at our van in the morning and seals swimming close to shore when we were trying to spot dolphins at Point Ann. Although no dolphins came out to play the $11 entry fee into the park was definitely well worth it, really loved it there. The only downside was that Alysha and Keaton, our friends from Canada never made it in. One tip, if you’re travelling anywhere outside of a city in Oz, don’t buy a Vodafone mobile phone, they just don’t work!!

One other tip watch out for the wildlife crossing the road! In our first week on the road we came across so many kangaroos that had been hit & even a squished snake which Dean decided to stop the van & take a photo of. Sicko!!!! ;o)

Lots of Love

Chelle & Dean xxx