Go West - Life is peaceful there!

Saturday 19th February

Australia is very strange, they have a border crossing from the Northern Territory into Western Australia where you have to give over all of your fruit and vegetables, then as a thank you they give you 120 minutes.

Literally, on one side of the street it was 15:00 and one step later we were back at 13:30 lunch time again, which would have been great if we hadn't just given all of our food over to the quarantine police.

I couldn't help wondering if they would perhaps have given us back more time if we had a larger stock of items in our possession, maybe you could even regain an entire day if you had the right sort of veg.

Just to throw out an idea out to the Australian tourist board, it may prove helpful to come up with some kind of a basic scoring system for the clueless tourists, nothing fancy just the necessary information:

Carrot = 10 Minutes

Broccoli = 20 Minutes

Avocado = 1 Hour

Etc etc

It turns out that whilst Pauline is terrified of snakes she seems to have an innate ability to spot them wherever she goes.

We had decided to visit Lake Argyle on the recommendation of a few tourists that we had bumped into en route, the scenery was breath taking, the kind of place that makes you want to stop and applaud mother nature on a job well done.

We had settled into our site for the night and Pauline had nipped out to the toilet whilst Tyler and I relaxed in the back of the van.

Two seconds later I heard Pauline bellowing out "Shut the door, Shut the door"

For a moment I thought that she had decided to play an impromptu quiz where you had to guess the celebrity catchphrase and I was about to chastise her for using incorrect wording when she promptly followed it up with "Snake!!! Snake!!!"

Sure enough, slithering directly beneath our van was a beautiful, bright Yellow and Black snake, about 2 meters long, looking extremely nonchalant in the face of two weirdly dressed highly animated tourists who were brandashing torches at it and gibbering incessantly.

Luckily we had brought a book on the deadliest animals in Australia so we immediately set about identifying the species, it turns out that we witnessed the first ever, western taipan -king brown - death adder cross breed, which would make it by far the deadliest animal on the planet.

In fact I am amazed that it didn't kill us all just by looking at it!

In all likelihood though it was probably just a common grass snake that upon reaching its home tried to identify what it had just seen in his reference manual on the weird creatures of Oz.

Because of the weather we have made pretty short work of this stretch of Oz, having averaged about 600kms per day so we decided that we would take an early break and pull over at a free camp site.

When we got out of the van the heat hit us instantly and in a few seconds we were completely soaked in sweat, luckily there were a few German tourists already there who advised us that there was another site about 100kms down the road and this one was on top of a hill so it should provide a pretty good through wind for the evening.

However, what they failed to inform us was that it was a bloody scary place indeed, sitting on the top of a cliff with a crocodile infested lake in front of you, snake infested grass either side of you and inhabited by large black crows who stared eerily at you anytime you moved.

If Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger and Jason from Friday 13th were sat around a table, having brunch and trying to identify the most idyllic spot to murder someone, this would definitely have to be in their top 3.

We are about 300kms from the nearest community, if you were to look up the word "Remote" in a dictionary it would probably have a picture of this place so that you could see it for yourself.

What made matters worse was that there was a full blown electrical storm occurring all around us, literally no matter what way you looked fork lightening was hitting the ground at a rapid pace.

We sat there for some time trying to work out if we should stay in our giant metal box on wheels or whether we should retreat to the giant metal shelter adjacent, a rock and a hard place sprung to mind.

Just before we put our heads down for the evening a beaten up old car drove up the path, when it neared our van it did a U-turn and then hid behind some trees and turned its lights out.

I could have sworn that the driver was wearing a hockey mask but the light was bad and I could have been mistaken.

Amazingly we weren't all slaughtered in our sleep and continued onwards to Broome at first light.

Also incredibly a Toyota Hiace campervan cannot outrun a cyclone and as a result we are currently sat about 20 yards from a beach, watching a full blown electrical storm that this time seems to be centered directly above our van.

Broome is currently on a "Blue" alert for a cyclone which is middle of the road and seems to be broken down as follows:

Yellow Alert : No Cyclone

Blue Alert: Maybe a Cyclone

Red Alert: Bugger its a Cyclone

Its alright though the woman at reception told us that if there was an actual cyclone they would try to come down here and tell us to evacuate if they had time, so if you don't here from us again you know why!