Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone! Western Australia is certainly busy at the moment with hundreds of families taking to the roads to enjoy the Christmas break. Caravan parks and free camping spots have either been full or very, very busy but luckily so far we’ve always managed to find a place to sleep for the night.

Kalbarri was our next stop after Christmas and we enjoyed viewpoints of gorges in the National Park, dramatic costal cliffs, saw a host of cute tropical birds in the Rainbow Jungle Zoo and had an unsuccessful pelican feeding session. The pelicans have been turning up at around 9am each morning to the beach shore to be hand fed in Kalbarri since the 1980’s where a local fisherman used to feed them his scraps. If he didn’t turn up in the morning then they’d go to the fisherman’s house nearby and make a lot of noise and mess until he woke up to feed them! Unfortunately for the last few months the pelicans have stopped coming to be fed, the theory is that they’ve forgotten as a lot of them migrated at the same time earlier in the year but hopefully if one of them gets fed again then they’ll spread the word to all the other pelicans in the area about an easy meal. For now though, as the feed still goes ahead each day, all the local seagulls are beginning to look a bit fat.

Oakabella Homestead is one of the most haunted places in Australia and this is where Kat decided we should spend the next night camping in their field. After surviving the night with no spooky goings on, we then took the tour of the homestead to find out more. It’s a restored sheep farm from the 1800’s and has been in the same family for generations. Many deaths have occurred on the property and the current custodian is certainly a believer that their spirits still remain. Loretta lived in the homestead for two years whilst she restored the property and many supernatural things happened to her including being pulled off of a ladder by a spirit, getting electrocuted, having doors and furniture constantly open and close, vacuums breaking instantly, the radio switching itself on and off, hearing voices of the dead and seeing evil red eyed ghosts. Mysterious indeed! We did hear footsteps in one of the rooms and when panning the camera around (a technique to see the energy of the ghosts) the screen would flicker, lose focus or have bright white, blue or pink spots suddenly appear. We’ve tried panning the camera again when we weren’t in the house and none of that happens. Very strange indeed!

Moving on we slowly made our way down the coast towards Perth stopping at a pink lake and all the coastal towns along the way to look out for sea lions which unfortunately we didn’t manage to spot. We took in the Pinnacles, a series of naturally forming rock jutting out of the desert and were heading towards Yanchep National Park to see some Koalas on New Year’s Eve when our fan belt snapped! Quick call to our breakdown cover and every mechanic had already closed for the holiday weekend so we had a tow truck come out and take us to Lancelin which is a small town popular with windsurfers, kite surfers and sand boarders. To celebrate the New Year we had the rest of our Christmas beer and wine on the beach keeping an eye out for fireworks. Now we just have to wait for Tuesday when the garage reopens and we can carry onto Perth and try to find some more fruit picking work.

Love Chris & Kat xxx