Margaret River, Bangkok and Chiang Mai

For our final few days in Australia we decided to head south to Margaret River, another region of Western Australia famous for its wines. Apparently in terms of weather, climate and soil conditions the area is very similar to the South of France – Bordeaux Region – and so will be able to produce similar style wines.

Compared to Perth, the first thing you notice about Margaret River is that the temperature is a few degrees cooler and the wind has dropped considerably, so it was much easier to pitch the tent!

We arrived on Kev’s birthday so we headed straight out to start celebrating. The wineries were all a short drive away so we decided to stay in the town instead and visited a new brewery that has recently opened and sample some of their craft beers.

The next day we booked on to a wine tour so we’d both get to taste the wines and neither one of us have to drive. Gemma recommended us a company called Bushtucker Tours, which took us to four vineyards, a chocolate factory, a dairy (to sample some of the local cheeses) and a brewery – with a big lunch thrown in to soak up some of the alcohol! 

We were treated to a gourmet buffet of local delicacies including kangaroo, crocodile, quondong (a fibrous desert fruit) and ‘bush limes’ – it was our first time to eat kangaroo and crocodile and both were lovely – lean and flavoursome and not really like anything else I’ve tried.

The weather began to turn on our last day, so we decided to head back to Perth before the rain started and pack our bags ready for our flight to Bangkok and the next leg of the trip.

We’ve been to Bangkok once before – at the start of our last trip – so we decided to spend just one night there before flying up to Chiang Mai for the start of our travels around Northern Thailand. 

Still, it was good to be back. Bangkok is a huge and crazy city so we booked a place to stay on the Khaosan road – it’s really touristy but good fun for one night and has plenty of entertainment and things to do. 

One of the first thing we noticed when we arrived was the humidity compared to Australia – given that the temperatures are pretty similar, it’s a lot more humid here, even though it’s dry season (or Thailand’s winter)

After a quick nap and dip in the pool, we popped out for a wander around. Despite being in a tourist hot spot, the bars and restaurants are so cheap (especially compared to Australian prices!) There’s excellent street food, all cooked fresh and we really were spoiled for choice. Amongst the various street food stalls was a cart of (cooked) insects, ranging from tarantulas, crickets, cockroaches, beetles, scorpions, snakes and mealworms – but neither of us fancied taking our chances with them!

As the evening progressed, the city really began to wake up. More and more people flooded the streets and there were hawkers everywhere, selling their wares. It was really vibrant and great for people watching...

Amongst the many bars, restaurants and market stalls there are also loads of massage places, with a Thai massage costing just £2 or £3 for half an hour – this was a welcome sight and we opted for a foot rub, but soon went back later on for a shoulder, neck and head massage – to undo the damage done by carrying around a heavy rucksack. I think we’ll be having regular massage during our time in Thailand! The only slight drawback is the language barrier so Kev found it hard tell his massage therapist if the pressure was a bit too firm – the standard was otherwise pretty good!

Chiang Mai is the capital of Northern  Thailand and is much less hectic and smaller than Bangkok. 

We've been staying in a hostel a short walk away from the night market and a short tuk-tuk ride from the temples of the old town/city centre. We enjoyed taking in the temples by day and shopping, eating and soaking up the atmosphere at the night market in the evening. 

We spent a day wandering around the old town's many temples, filled with golden Buddhas and monks in their orange robes. 

We felt like we'd hardly scratched the surface - there are so many of them!

We wanted to see some elephants in the wild whilst in Chiang Mai. There has been a recent shift in elephant tourism with people historically wanting to ride the elephants, but now prefer to see them enjoying their natural environment and not being asked to perform circus tricks or take people on treks. Tripadvisor has even stopped advertising any tours that contains any such animal cruelty, so it was important for us that we picked a tour with the elephants’ welfare in mind.

  
At the Dumbo Elephant Spa (so called because you get to give the elephants a mud bath then wash them off in the river afterwards) there are six elephants, of which five have been rescued and one baby who has never known any ‘circus life’ or any cruelty.

We spent time with all the elephants, who all have very different personalities. Elephants have a similar life span to humans, living up to a hundred years old and have similar levels of maturity so a three-year-old elephant will be like a naughty toddler! One such elephant has even been given the name ‘Naughty Boy’ and he was always misbehaving, trying to get more food by stealing our lunch, or by acting boisterously in the mud, so we had to keep our distance.

We started off by feeding all the elephants some fruit for breakfast then followed them up the mountain path to watch them digging and feeding on tree roots. The highlight of the day however was the mud spa (both for the elephant and for us!) The elephants were absolutely delighted to roll around in the mud and have mud splashed all over them. The sanctuary staff were also very keen to splash mud all over us, making sure we got stuck in.

It was thrilling to get so close to these massive animals and also to see such strong personalities and such a sense of fun, despite only spending a few hours with them – but also a little bit scary – and therefore wise to be cautious around them!

Tomorrow we’re off to our next destintion, Pai. I’ll write again from there.

Fremantle to Kalbarri

We started off the week with another trip to Fremantle – Gemma and Sean had some complimentary tickets for a twilight cruise around Freo on a sailing boat which they kindly gave to us, so we made the most of the fine weather – albeit a bit chilly on the water – and enjoyed a glass of Champagne as the sunset over the harbour.

We were offered a bed for the night at Gemma and Sean’s friends’, Jess and Darragh, though we didn’t actually get to meet them on this occasion – with us being out and them having already gone to bed when we got back. Still, we have a camping trip with them planned for the weekend so we’ll actually get to meet them properly soon! 

After our night in Freo, we started the long drive north, with a few stops along the way to see the sights and break up the journey. 

Our first point of interest was the Pinnacles Dessert; a collection of hundreds of limestone formations in the middle of the desert in Nambung National Park. They look a bit like termite mounds and their formation still remains disputed.

Driving to the Pinnacles the scenery is pretty spectacular – blue skies and seas, white sand dunes, yellow desert roads and scrubby desert plants and bushes. 
There are road signs warning us to watch out for emus, kangaroos and echidnas, but despite the warning we were still shocked to see two emus walk across the freeway in front of the car! 

Four hours north of Perth, we spent our first night at a campsite in Jurien Bay, a pretty beach resort along the Turquoise Coast – it’s easy to see how the west coast of Australia got this name!

After a good night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast of pancakes cooked in the camp kitchen, we set off north, aiming for Kalbarri – stunning cliffs and national park situated eight hours outside Perth.

We had a quick stopover in Port Denion for a lunch of our favourite Australian camp food Indonesian flavoured ‘mee goreng’ noodles, cereal bars and jam sandwiches (for both posterity and budgetary reasons – we pretty much lived off these when we were last in Australia in 2010 and the exchange rate was so bad it was all we could afford. Fortunately this time the exchange rate isn’t so bad, but we still enjoyed our lunch for old time’s sake!)

Originally we had planned to do a quick stopover in Kalbarri and continue north to Monkey Mia and Coral Bay, but with limited time and not wanting to spend all our time in the car, we decided to make Kalbarri our home for the next three days. On balance, it was so beautiful there we really didn’t need to continue north to see more natural beauty.

We camped at a site right by the river and enjoyed watching the pelicans at sunset every night. It hasn’t got too hot yet – especially with the pretty persistent cool wind that hasn’t stopped blowing since we’ve been here! However, the breeze was a welcome relief during the day. A bit like in Perth, the wind dies down over night and picks up in the afternoon – which is great for the temperature, but not so great when you’re trying to pitch a tent in the afternoon!

There are so many natural sights to see here – certainly too many for our short stay, but we made the most of the ones closest to us. We started on the coast with Kalbarri cliffs: Pot Alley, Red Bluff, Mushroom Rock and the Blue Holes – all within a ten-minute drive from our campsite and breathtakingly beautiful! The rough seas stirred up by the strong winds certainly made an impressive backdrop to the red sandstone cliffs.

Now in possession of a head net (apparently, it’s fly season, which explains why the flies are so annoying right now!) we decided to head in land and check out some of the natural wonders and gorges in the interior of Kalbarri National Park.

To get there we had to drive along twenty kilometres of unsealed road – probably something that our car hire place would rather we didn’t do and which was rather painstaking – but it was worth the effort.

It was considerably hotter in the park – it’s often said to be ten degrees hotter inland versus on the coast, so we decided against doing a long walking trail. Instead we headed to the closest of the sights, ‘a natural arch in the sandstone called ‘Nature’s Window’.

Heading back to the coast in search of cooler temperatures, we booked on to a quad bike tour on Wagoe Beach, which took us along the shore line and up into the sand dunes.

It’s a stunning beach with reef directly on the shore line before a steep drop off, meaning as the big waves hit the shore they were forced against the reef and upwards into a huge plume of spray and foam. It was unusual to see such big waves that didn’t then continue up the beach – just up into the air! The waves were also particularly big today due to the swell created by the strong winds.

The strong winds also whipped up a bit of a sandstorm, meaning we had quite a blasting on the quad bikes – I think we all finished the tour looking younger having had a good sand exfoliation along the way!

Heading back down south we stopped at the ‘Pink Lake’, or ‘Hutt Lagoon’ to give it its official name. According to Wikipedia, "The salt lake gets it pink hue from the carotenoid-producing algae ‘Dunaliella salina’ which is a source of ß-carotene, a food-colouring agent and source of vitamin A.” Interesting stuff and a very pretty lake!

Our final stop on our way south back towards Perth, was at Lake Thetis, famous for its stromatolites – and again I’m going to rely on the internet for a definition: 

“A stromatolite (literally, ‘layered rock’) is a solid structure created by single-celled microbes called cyanobacteria (blue-green algae).

The stromatolites at Lake Thetis are thought to be 3,500 years old.

Right, that’s quite enough geological phenomena for one blog post! We are now back in Perth and will spend a couple of days enjoying the home comforts of living in a house, as opposed to under canvas, before we head off on our next camping adventure – wild camping in Wedge Island.