Greetings from Western Australia!

When planning this trip we debated a lot on what areas to visit as we had more places we wanted to see than time available! Ryan had read that Perth was rated as one of the top places to live in the world. Our final tipping point for trekking to Perth is that we realized it was wildflower season in Western Australia. I love flowers so I was really excited!

Western Australia isn’t visited nearly as frequently as the east coast because it’s quite a long trek across the country. In fact, we talked to a couple of friends/classmates from Australia who said lots of people in Australia (including them!) had never been to the west coast. You can’t really drive across the country due to a lack of roads (no interstates here!), and it’s like flying from Ohio to California!

After having explored Western Australia, we are SO glad we bought an extra plane ticket to go here! We had an amazing time! Here are our top 7 reasons:

1. Averages 8 hours of sunshine a day… some say the most of anywhere in the world
2. Strongest economic growth in Australia (thanks to an explosion of the mining industry)
3. Wildflowers in the Spring – amazing!
4. Wild Australia – we ran across wild kangaroos, went miles without seeing cars… wow!
5. The seafood is awesome!
6. Gorgeous beaches
7. It takes approximately 1 minute to walk from the Perth Airport arrival area to the car rental. When you return the car, it takes about 1 minute to walk to the departure gate. 🙂

Here are a few highlights from our visit:

The Pinnacles
When you’re at The Pinnacles, it looks eery and makes you think you’re on another planet! In the middle of a desert landscape are wild rock spires surrounded by yellow sand dunes. The rocks stretch for a 10 km loop and then disappear as suddenly as they appear. Apparently the rocks are made mostly of shell and date back to when the area was beneath the sea. The really crazy part for us was that this park wasn’t discovered until the 1960s. How is this possible?! Wow!

We had a particularly wild weather day at the Pinnacles. Although rain isn’t typical in this desert, the main road into the park was closed due to flash flooding! Thankfully most of the park could still be walked so we set out hiking. In the course of 1.5 hours, we had 2 downpours, 60 mph windgusts, and 2 periods of sunshine. It was nuts! We have to give a shout out to our awesome umbrellas (soon to be mentioned in our Tips & Tricks!)! Every other person’s umbrella was flipped inside out while ours withstood the wind. The only issue was that the handle of mine actually bent in the wind and had to bent back. Crazy!

The only small issue we had was making it into another national park we planned to drive through. The park entry was down a red clay road that turned into complete mud. Our little rental Hyundai seemed to be swallowed in mud so we had to turn back. This made for an interesting time cleaning up the car before returning it to the car rental… which may have involved a rather interesting paper towel and squeegee clean at the local BP station by the airport!

Indian Ocean
To reach The Pinnacles you drive along Indian Ocean Drive. This is similar to Pacific Highway 1 and offers fantastic deep blue water views and cliff overlooks. We also saw crazy dunes of white sand located hundreds of meters from the beach and across the road. I guess the winds must be a little strong here!

We stayed right on the Indian Ocean and had a great view! This was our first time putting our hand in the Indian Ocean.

Beautiful Wildflowers
Western Australia is known to have some of the most spectacular wildflowers in the world – and we think it’s true! We managed to put almost 1100 km on our rental car while driving several hours north of Perth.

Western Australia has over 1800 varieties of wildflowers, 60% of which are native to Australia. We spent a full day stopping to hike and driving down highways filled with flowers. We didn’t see any other cars for miles and miles so it was easy to pull of the road to look at the flowers and take pictures. We kept finding new varieties even after several hours of driving! Here are some of the different varieties:

The area is also know for having flowers that literally carpet fields and red rock areas. Here are a few pictures of the fields of flowers (can you tell I like flowers?):

Even sheep and cows got to graze in fields with flowers!

Kangaroos!
I wasn’t sure if we would actually see kangaroos, but we definitely did! Our final count was 11! When driving down a small dirt road to look at flowers early in the morning, we actually came across 4 female kangaroos and their joeys. Thankfully we didn’t hit them (we saw several more that were roadkill!), and I scrambled for the camera to get a couple of shots. They are fast!

We also found that the kangaroos aren’t very exciting to local Western Australian farmers. They can be quite a nuisance!

Cottlesbeach, Perth
Once back in Perth, we took the opportunity to see Cottlesbeach, the most famous beach in Perth. This beach is know for its sunsets as you can see!

King’s Park, Perth
King’s Park is the nicest city park I have ever seen. It is set on a bluff overlooking Perth and hosts a wildflower festival every spring. We timed out our visit to be there during the festival and loved it!

Everlasting flowers are a signature of Western Australia

As are Kangaroo Paws! I loved them!

There were so many great flowers to see!

We found a cafe in the park that had awesome mango smoothies and snapper with a great view over the city.

Dining in Perth
We got to try even more fish in Perth. At one point I realized I had had different types of snapper for 4 meals in a row! We also had an amazing dessert – a warm rhubarb almond tart with passion fruit ice cream on top and a light dusting of chocolate cookie crumbs beside it. It was such a yummy combination!

We are now returning to Sydney to finish off a few activities before heading to New Zealand!