Planning a Trip to Western Australia

The gate to the Ningaloo reef and for the Whaleshark-Tours (best time for whalesharks: end of april - mid of june). Only place in the world for a "whaleshark-guarantee" ( during the time above!)
Amazing, awesome, unique !!!

Tthe best time to visit Busselton Jetty is between November and May, Australia's summer and early Autumn months. The remaining months bring strong west and north-west winds which make diving rough and boating dangerous. It is diveable between storms, but visibility is usually less than impressive.

Beware of schoolies week!  Schoolies is the week at the end of exams when a large number of year 12 students run amuck and let of steam.  If you don't want to inundated with hundreds of drunk and loud teenagers it's best to avoid Rottnest at this time of the year.  It's usually late November to early December.

Best time to go is Australia Day weekend

The blowholes are located on Frenchman Bay Road, Torndirrup National Park, about 17km's from Albany

The best time to experience the blowholes is on rough days with a large swell when they really do blow! Don't stand too close to them because it can cause quite a fright!
And do remember to be careful along this stretch coast as can be unpredictable and dangerous. Many visitors have drowned by being swept out to sea by an unexpected and unseen king wave.
Don't turn your back on the sea!
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Redback spiders are found throughout Australia and they are very common in urban areas.
RedbackS like living around humans and they build their webs in dry sheltered spots among rocks, in logs, shrubs, junk-piles, sheds and even toilets.
Female Redbacks are black with an orange to red long stripe on the upper abdomen and they have a body about the size of a large pea (1cm long) with slender legs (nice!).
The males are only about 3-4mm long and the red stripe is less distinct. The body is light brown with white markings.
Redback bites occur frequently but only the female bite is dangerous. They can cause serious illness and early symptoms include pain, sweating, muscular weakness, nausea and vomiting.
An antivenom is available and no deaths have occurred since its introduction. Apply an ice pack to the bitten area to relieve pain but do not apply a pressure bandage because it only worsens the pain.

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Built in 1855, the limestone and shingle Bunbury Courthouse remains the oldest building in the Bunbury CBD and it is still in use today.
The building has been used as a courthouse, post office, bond store and police quarters before being used as a court administration building. Its role as a court finally ceased in 1984 when construction of the current courthouse was completed.

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Western Tourist Radio operates radio stations in East Perth , Bunbury, Busselton, Dunsborough, Cowaramup (near Margaret River) and Karridale (near Augusta) . These stations provide listeners with some really great tourist info on this region.
For any globetrotters planning to travel in this part of the world, I can highly recommend this website –
-A-http://www.touristradio.com.au/" rel=nofollow target=_blank www.touristradio.com.au/
In it you will find Travellers Links, a WA Holiday Planner, Special Interest Accommodation, Events in the South West and internet cafes or Telecenters. There are also links for Products/Services, Things to do, Places to eat and Places to stay in major towns around this region.

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When you go to Kalgorlie be sure to take a flight over the goldmines, in particular the super pit, as you can get really amazing pics with your camera!

not a lot to do here except to have your photo taken with the giant sheep- another one of australia's big things

The beach is very nice, you can see it in my profile's photo.

Where University of WA is located... lots of people get their wedding photos there because it is a very picturesque sandstone university. Walk or cycle along the foreshore and visit Steve's pub... where all the uni students go. Restaurants along the foreshore are expensive but really good.

Bunbury Dive Charters offer personalised diving experiences around the Bunbury region. A very popular local attraction is the world class "Lena" dive wreck just 3nm from the coast.
The "Lena" is a pirate ship which was scuttled off Bunbury's coast during December, 2003 and is now sitting in 17m of water. This makes it very accessible to open water ticketed divers and has proven to be a popular photo site for with a myriad of fish making their home in and around the stern.


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In Clermount between Perth and Freemantle you will find one of the nicest beaches within Perth. 

At breakfast this morning, I carefully lifted the milk jug from the buffet table and was slightly surprised to find that the whole thing fell apart in my hands. Several pints of milk sloshed all over the carpet and I found myself standing in the middle of a small white puddle holding nothing but a handle. For a moment, I imagined that I was about to find myself surrounded by kitchen staff cursing and swearing at me - but instead the waitress merely raised her eyes to heaven for a moment, walked casually over to take what was left of the jug from me, smiled and said "Well that's not the first time that's happened, I can tell you!". Good milk jugs must be at a premium in Western Australia. I went out to see Broome. It's only five blocks to the shopping center, promised my map. What it didn't point out was that the scale was about 1:1,000,000 and that every intersection was about a kilometre from the last. So I walked. And walked. Every block was exactly the same - roads in four directions, a couple of houses on each corner, weird pineapple shaped trees lining the roads. There seemed to be no pavements in Broome, but it didn't make much difference because there appeared to be no cars either. Occasionally a bloody great road-train would rumble by, the cab belching vicious looking chemicals into the air and attached to six or seven freight containers, each the length of a bus. This would give me a moment of amusement as I sat on a wall and watched the driver trying to negotiate a corner without demolishing the houses, and then I'd head off again for the next intersection, another kilometre further on. All four sides of every intersection were bordered by huge octagonal signs adorned with the word "STOP" in large red letters. So I would stop, look both ways, repeat a few times for comedic effect, and then erect my own sign underneath which read "Why, exactly?". Nothing was ever coming in Broome. On the subject of road signs in Australia, I am definitely noticing a lot of dumbing down going on. When I first noticed the chalk outlines of people drawn on pedestrian crossings in Sydney, I let it go - but it seems to have got worse as I've travelled westward. On a post near the Boulevard Shopping Centre in downtown Broome, I discovered a big yellow octagonal sign upon which was printed in large friendly letters: TO CROSS THE ROAD, FOLLOW THE FOOTPRINTS A set of footprints, drawn on the road, led the way to the other side. Who exactly is this for? I have also seen, painted onto the road in various places, a picture of a bicycle above which is another picture of a mother and baby - somebody needs to tell the government of Australia that road signs are supposed to be comprehensible to visitors. What does this mean? Only bicycles and mothers with babies in this lane? Be aware of mothers and babies when riding your bicycle? All new mothers must ride bicycles? What? I wanted to get a film developed so I found my way eventually to the big new Boulevard Shopping Center downtown. This was a place for serious shopping - hundreds of boutiques arranged in tidy rows, benches to sit on next to ornamental fountains, shiny polished walkways with tapestries of Australia hanging from the walls. No customers, of course - but then I wasn't really expecting anything else. Personally I was just glad of the air conditioning, which literally smacked me in the face as soon as the doors slid back and allowed me to drag my dehydrated carcase inside - it must've been at least 110 degrees out there today. I clawed my way across the lobby and into the Kodak shop, where I pulled myself up to the counter with the last of my strength and flopped down in front of the disinterested looking assistant:
"Please," I begged her, "Tell me you develop APS film here."
She looked at me as though she couldn't quite make up her mind whether to feel sorry for this bedraggled mess slumped over her counter, or call security and have me escorted from the building. After what seemed an age, she decided instead to turn and stride away into the back room, calling back as she went that I wanted the Image Plaza in Chinatown. That's another thing they all seem to think they're good at over here - mind reading. Chinatown was more of a Chinastreet really, on which the local shopping centre and all the shops had been built to resemble little white pagodas. It was very pretty and quite surreal at the same time, and not at all what I had been expecting to find in a place like Broome - in my experience, Chinatown is somewhere you'll find in big international cities such as New York and London where there is a large Chinese community, but this one seemed to be there just for the sake of it. There wasn't a single Chinese person anywhere, but if there had been they would have been very impressed with the community Broome has built for them. Just to confuse matters even further, the shopping centre in Chinatown contained a number of cafes and restaurants, none of which was Chinese. I had lunch in an atmospheric little bistro which had a tree growing right out of the floor in the middle of the dining area. The place was decorated in an Italian style, I was waited on by a chirpy American girl, and the menu was made up of a combination of foods from everywhere in the world except China or Italy. Chinatown in Broome was quite the most multicultural place I'd seen for quite a while - then again, perhaps they're all just really confused in this part of the country. Broome is famous the world over for Cable Beach, a twenty kilometre stretch of perfect powdery white sand which can be reached by a fairly strenuous walk to the outskirts of town or by grabbing a taxi, if you can find one. There's never any junk or crisp packets to distract you on this beach, as the tides are high enough to wash the sand clean twice a day. The walk is worth it just to be able to say that you've swum in the crystal blue waters of the Indian Ocean, although, however inviting it looks there is always some spoilsport hanging around to point out that there are plenty of box jellyfish in the sea between November and March just waiting to sting an unsuspecting tourist to death. There is an episode of Star Trek (Go with me on this one) where Kirk and his crew land on a planet which appears to be paradise but on which all the fruit and the grass and everything that looks even remotely beautiful is filled with acid just below the surface. Well, sometimes you get that impression in Australia - if you ever see something really stunning over here, the first question to generally ask is "How is it going to try to kill me?" Cable Beach also boasts Australia's most famous nudist beach, so if you're the sort of person to whom perfect white sand mean throwing off all your clothes and running in slow motion towards the sunset (which is, naturally, jaw-droppingly beautiful), then there's nearly seventeen kilometres of the beach just for you. At least if you're a man, you won't have to have any cold weather worries in this part of the world! The locals run camel rides up and down the beach - and if you still haven't been put off by my account of sore backside syndrome riding camels in the Red Center, riding a camel along the beach at sunset really isn't an experience you're going to be able to have in many other places around the world. Unfortunately, I'm only in Broome for a little over a day so I can't cram in everything I'd like to see. Other attractions of the area which I will have to schedule for a later date include the hundred million year old dinosaur footprints embedded in the rock at Gantheaume Point, which can only be seen when the tide is out. There's also a perfectly round pool nearby which was built by the lighthouse keeper to give his wife Anastasia relief from her arthritis, and I would particularly like to witness a phenomena which occurs for three nights every month between March and October called "The Staircase to the Moon", caused by the full moon rising over the rocks and reflecting in the shallow waters. I hadn't reckoned on the floods delaying me so much in Queensland and the Northern Territories, and I'm booked into a hotel in Perth for the next few nights on a non-refundable basis - I can't help feeling that I am missing so much of Western Australia! Back in my room tonight, I switched on the television in a foolish attempt to sample the delights of Western Australian entertainment and soak up some culture - but after coming half way around the world, it felt exactly as though I was watching TV back home. Neighbours was on.

You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

Last time I came to Perth, I stayed in a charming little Swedish hotel called "Miss Maud's", which was full of winding corridors, creaky lifts and even had it's own Swedish Coffee Shop and Restaurant. This time, my hotel is a new addition to the city and has been having a few teething troubles. Nevertheless, they seem to exhibit the standard Australian relaxed and friendly attitude towards the situation, and the reception staff have been happy to put anything right the moment it goes wrong. When I pointed out to them casually on the way out the other day that they were showing the wrong movie on the in-house movie channel, they instantly refunded the cost and changed it over immediately. While I was out, I imagine they must've had several complaints from couples all over the hotel who had been happily snuggled up in bed watching a romantic comedy and suddenly found themselves watching the second half of Die Hard 2. The next day they were showing the movies in the wrong order and because the VCR swaps them over on a timer according to the lengths of the films, everything was getting cut off ten minutes from the end. Again, they just refunded everybody. Perfectly good customer service, of course - but if they don't get things right at some point I can see them being bankrupt in no time! The TV stations themselves don't seem to entirely know what they're doing either. According to ABC, every night at 8.00 is supposed to be "Classic British comedy" - tonight, I turned on for an episode of Black Adder and found myself watching a program called Murder Squad, in which Essex Police were looking for a man who was going around casually setting fire to people who passed him in the street. Not quite the same thing. On my second day in the city, I joined the local "tourist tram" service which takes visitors on a two and a half hour tour of the city - a service which appeared to me to be sponsored by the local nightlife as it was mainly the casinos, nightclubs and bars which we trundled past, even to the point where we were offered the chance to get off and walk through the biggest casino in town. Perth is a sprawling city of suburbs and an extensive train system links all the outlying areas to the city center, where the central station is large and modern and reminded me of Liverpool Street in London. The trains are sleek and modern, and a pleasure to travel on compared to the dirty graffiti covered ones back home. They aren't overcrowded, and there are four suburban lines serving all the outer districts. Each line has slow and express services in case you don't want to stop at every station - on each line, there are trains that stop at every station, trains that stop at the first half of the stations and skip the second half, and trains that skip the first half and stop at the second half. This struck me as a very efficient system which seems to get everybody to where they want to go in a reasonable amount of time. The large, shiny information machines located on the platform of every suburban station, however, rather let the system down for me and should probably be renamed "lack of information machines" - no matter which button I pressed, the screen lit up with the helpful statement "No Information Available", so I'm afraid I can't regale you with vast amounts of knowledge about the outer districts of Perth. Instead, in an attempt to at least see some of suburban Perth while I was here, I simply closed my eyes and took a random stab at the map and ended up heading out to the town of Cottesloe which turned out to be a fairly small suburb, the station backing onto a sleepy side street. I spent a couple of hours browsing happily in the shop windows, and had lunch in a café near to the shopping precinct. It was nice to find the small urban side to this vast city, and quite unusual to find it more like the towns back home than the traditional outback village. The nightlife in Perth is every bit as vibrant as you would expect from a big city, and there are no shortage of things to occupy you after the sun has set.
I had been told that most of the decent nightclubs were based in the James Street area, but it quickly become obvious that the whole of the Northbridge area around James came alive at night - but the nightlife here seems to be somewhat different to the nightlife back home. In most parts of the world, nightlife means a handful of darkened clubs playing loud dance music while lines of scantily clad girls and blokes in jeans form outside waiting to be frisked by bouncers who don't appear to have much chance of holding down any job which doesn't involve lifting people from the ground and throwing them several metres. Perth, and in fact Australia in general, seems to have a much more enlightened and relaxed way of enjoying themselves. The entire area around Northbridge is littered with cafes, restaurants, pubs, bars, clubs and coffee shops - the average night out can involve having a meal and coffee, sitting outside a bar chatting with friends, and then wandering up and down the crowded streets for hours checking out several clubs. Clubs are far more diverse than at home, offering anything from Jazz to Dance to music from the 70s - a night out in Perth seems to be much more about hanging out with friends outside a bar and occasionally wandering into a club for a dance than the six hours of sweating on a single dance floor we're used to back home. The fact that everybody is so friendly is also a bonus - especially as being a traveller in a foreign land is usually a pretty good way of meeting people. No sooner had I walked through the door of my first club than I was being chatted up by two stunning Australian girls called, rather exotically, Skye and Monique. They were on a short holiday from a small town a couple of hundred miles away, and had just wandered into the club and started introducing themselves to everyone - although as soon as they found out I was from England they seemed to forget about everyone else and just wanted to buy me drinks and find out if I needed showing around Perth. This also happens in America, and I've never really been able to get my head around it - it seems that just having a British accent makes a person very popular in certain parts of the world, and the fact that we seem to have spent most of the last few hundred years invading and starting wars with everyone in the name of the British Empire seems to have gone mostly un-noticed! Monique and Skye introduced me to just about everyone else in the club and by the time I was too tired to stand up any more, at about five in the morning, I felt as though I'd known everyone for years.

You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

The 26th was Australia Day, which is a national holiday and appears to be an excuse for just about everybody to stay in bed or spend the day at home with the family. It's the one day of the year when those parts of Australia which don't already have tumbleweed blowing down the road get to find out what it's like to live in a Ghost town. I'm sure somebody up there has got it in for me - wait until I arrive in the biggest city I've been in since Sydney and then arrange for everybody to stay at home! I went out, wandered the deserted streets wondering where the entire population of Perth had vanished to overnight, and finally had the Australia Day phenomenon explained to me by the girl behind the counter at Hungry Jack's, who clearly hadn't seen another customer all day and was just happy to have somebody to talk to. And it also gives me a good excuse to tell you the story of Hungry Jack's. Tourists coming to Australia on a fast food diet can sometimes be found scratching their heads and wondering why McDonalds have such a large presence in the country but Burger King can't be located anywhere, and the story behind this is actually one of those rare cases where a small company has managed to get one over on corporate America. It would seem that when Burger King finally noticed that McDonalds was all over Australia and decided they ought to compete, they sold the Australian franchise operation to a man called Jack Cowin. Having done this, they were slightly surprised to discover that they didn't own the universe as they had previously thought and that the name "Burger King" was already trademarked in Australia by a small food shop on the Gold Coast. After presumably cursing for a while and trying everything they could think of to get the name back, Burger King provided Cowin with several alternative names to which it owned the trademark and he jumped at the rather lucky chance to use the name Hungry Jack's as it meant he could have his name on all the restaurants - Hungry Jack's had previously been the name of a pancake mix sold by Burger King's parent company in the States. Hence the first branch of Hungry Jack's opened right here in Perth back in 1971 and Burger King has been called Hungry Jack's across the whole continent ever since because of one small businessman in Queensland. Now, that's what I call sticking it to the man! But wait - it gets better. In 1996, the Australian trademark on the name "Burger King" ran out and Burger King immediately attempted to take the franchise away from Jack Cowin, trademark the name themselves and move into Australia. Over the next few years, they opened more than sixty Burger King locations around the country, until Jack Cowin looked at the small print on his franchise and decided to sue them for breach of contract. And he won. Burger King was told to pay seventy-five million dollars in compensation, appealed the decision to the High Court but the case was thrown out. Australian courts seem to have the same attitude as Australian people, and don't like to be bossed about - so they were probably never going to be told what to do by a big American company. Burger King sold 51% of its Australian operation to the company operating the Burger King franchise in New Zealand, who took advantage of their new majority shareholding and promptly decided to change all of their Burger King restaurants across New Zealand to Hungry Jack's in an attempt to boost sales. So don't look too hard for a Burger King in Australia or New Zealand. It has proved remarkably difficult to set up the next leg of my journey across to Adelaide in South Australia. It seems that they're currently holding some sort of National Cycling Championship over there, and this is obviously considered such an important event that Greyhound have been booked solid going in and out of Adelaide all week. I've had to book one of the last two seats on the only available coach all week, so it looks as though I decided to take my break in Perth at just the right time - I really can't think of anything I'd enjoy less than being surrounded in Adelaide by thousands of guys comparing bikes. Mind you, being stuck on a coach with fifty people talking about bike accessories might also be enough to drive me insane!

You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

great place for travels and entertainment. quiet.

Caversham Wildlife Park U can cuddle a Wombat, observe shy Possums, feed the Kangaroos, see the Tasmanian Devils and ride the Camels...........

Trip to Rottnest is nice. Great views of Perth Harbour on the way out.

Very tropical. Fabulous beach. Camel ride is nice at dusk. Poor camels though!

When you go to Kalgorlie be sure to take a flight over the goldmines, in particular the super pit, as you can get really amazing pics with your camera!