Greetings,
As this is my first real post since I'm in Australia I'll do a quick introduction and explain you the plan.
My name is Kevin Hansen and I decided to travel to Australia, hopefully for 1 year but the duration of my stay will all depend on whether I find work or not. My good friend Sam is traveling along with me.
We are planning to go all around Australia, starting from perth, then heading north towards Darwin, and after that we'll probably go down the east coast and then maybe go more inlands towards Alice Springs. Atleast that's the general idea, because as I've already found out, you can't plan to much out here as there will be a lot of unexpected events.
So how is Perth? Quite awesome to be honest, Perth is an absolutely beautiful city, from the tall skyscrapers in the Central Business District to quiet beaches, everything has been made to please the eye. I can't quite comprehend the amount of walking we did around the city as it's a LOT. The city motivates people to have an active lifestyle, plenty of outdoor fitness areas and a lot of parks where everyone is jogging,doing yoga or any other kind of activity. In the evening you can relax at the many public squares where people meet and can watch outdoor "cinemas". Or if you're more into drinking in a pub you can go to the many bars spread around the city, I however found that the prices for a beer are way to high, as it's like 3x as much as what I'm used to paying in Belgium. We did find a cheaper way to get drunk, which is drinking "Goone" or "Plonk" as I prefer calling it, this is cheap local wine, which you can get for as low as $15 for 4L, so needless to say, we bought a lot of that.
As far as accomodation goes, there are plenty of backpacker hostels which start from $25/night with a lot of like-mnded backpackers. Some just passing through and other staying there for longer times to work. Or, like the case with us, needing an adress for your tax number and bank card to be posted to. We first stayed in a really small hostel called "Ozy Inn" which was alright, but Sam didn't really like that one as it was quite dirty. After spending 2 nights there we decided to check out another hostel, a lot bigger and cleaner called "The Old Swan Barracks". This one looked amazing when we entered it so we decided to book a week there. I have to say I did prefer the Ozy Inn as it felt more friendly and social but I can enjoy myself anywhere, and I did that for sure in the Swan Barracks. Staying at a dorm with 6 people we met a few nice people there. Bill, a swedish guy who slept in the same room as us, and Stefan, a fellow Belgian who was already working in Perth.
One thing I have to add is that the aboriginals in Perth are absolutely aweful people, begging, yelling and even attacking people, to keep it short they're just dangerous people whom you should avoid. This one night a german girl called Sabrina got assaulted by an aboriginal lady because she was wearing a short skirt, and an aboriginal man was looking at her, I had to come in between and try to keep the aboriginal lady away from her. Sadly there was no reasening with her, and the only reply I got was to "fuck off". They eventually called the cops and they took her away. I have a feeling the aboriginals will be a lot different when heading out of the big city's though, so I won't make this my final judgement.
After you've seen all the nice places in Perth it's time to take some small trips to places like Fremantle, Cottesloe, Scarborough beach and many others. The one place I regret not having the chance visit is Rottnest Island, it's a beautiful island only like 20km's from Perth where you can go snorkling, cycling or just enjoying the lovely nature. We were lucky that when we visited Cottesloe there was this nice event called "Sculptures By The Sea" where all kinds of artists present their work.
After a while I started to notice my budget was dropping quite fast so we decided to start looking for a job, we didn't go the the place where most of the backpackers go called margareth river where there are lots of vineyards, but we went to Northam on advice of a local I know. When we arrived here we quickly noticed that there wasn't any work here either, they are experiencing a massive drought just now. It hasn't rained for over 90 days in the entire Perth region. So all the farmers are basicly waiting for it to start raining so they can finally get back to work. I called around to farmers and working hostels and it was the same situation everywhere, even in the Margareth River region.
We started looking for places a lot further away, since staying here seems quite pointless, and I remembered this place called Kununurra. It's a farming town like 3000km from here. I did some calls there and was glad to hear that they haven't had any drought whatsoever, Actually it's still the raining season right now and it's ending in about 1 week, so the perfect timing to go there, just before the fruit picking season starts. We researched how we can go there and booked it all on my cellphone. We will take a train to Perth, 100km from here. Then we'll take a 3500km flight to Darwin where we stay a few nights and then we'll take a 12 hour bus to Kununurra. So we got quite a big trip ahead of us. The region around Darwin is absolutely amazing though, they have great beaches, the have the worlds most amazing national park "Kakadu' and so many other things. I'm looking forward to the pool at the hostel we booked.
So now we're here, in small local town of Northam, waiting for our train to arrive in a few hours, then we'll have to sleep in the airport as our flight leaves at 8AM, not looking forward to that at all. But ah well.. It's all part of the adventure, and I'm really loving it so far!
I'm having some problems uploading photo's so I'll do that later, anyway, thanks for reading this big wall of text! :)
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