High adventure on Australia's Highway One

From Perth to Darwin, covering 3,522 miles of 'roos, sharks and vistas in the country's huge western state.

By Margo Pfeiff, Special to the Los Angeles Times
12:00 AM PST, January 30, 2005

The outback seeped into our hotel room with the dawn.

It announced itself first with the guffaws of kookaburras, then a screeching chorus of a hundred white corellas. They were teasing us, luring us out of modern downtown Perth and into the bush.

Jim and I, friends since long before his hair turned gray and my laugh lines became wrinkles, were in Australia to mark the 25th anniversary of our first epic road trip. We'd bounced along on broken seat springs for 5,000 miles around eastern Australia, emergency fuel cans and extra tires in the back of our temperamental station wagon.

Older and theoretically wiser — and less poverty-stricken — we nonetheless wanted an appropriately challenging sequel. We found it in Western Australia: 975,000 square miles of assorted deserts with a tropical coastal fringe.

We would follow part of Highway One, the road that encircles the continent, from Perth to Darwin. Although the route is paved, it would still be an adventure through some of the country's most remote regions. Western Australia is the country's biggest state — more than six times the size of California — but is so sparsely populated that it averages fewer than two people per square mile.

We agreed that 18 days in a tent was not the appealing option it was in 1979. We settled on a four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser converted by Britz Rentals into a home-on-the-road complete with sink, stove, refrigerator and two comfy fold-down beds.

The SUV was pure luxury compared with our first trip, when we set off on a year's journey through Asia and Australia to try to establish ourselves as travel writers. The stories we gathered propelled us into careers as freelance travel writers. Jim now lives in Bangkok, Thailand, and I in Montreal, and it was a rare treat to find the time to take on an adventure together. We were both toying with new writing projects. This part of the world had inspired us once, we figured. It might just do so again.

We drove slowly up the coast north of Perth through vineyards and farmland, stopping to buy fresh fruit from roadside stands. In the wind-swept seaside communities, the gum trees grew sideways. and windsurfers dotted the waves like neon dragonflies. In lush Kalbarri National Park, we hiked through the river-cut gorges and the eerie limestone spires that sprout from sandy desert.

On our second day, we took our first detour off Highway One. We turned off at the Overlander Roadhouse for Shark Bay Marine Park, a protected zone for the dozen or more native shark species. But the draw to this remote area is a pod of dolphins that arrives each morning and afternoon for a fish handout on the beach at Monkey Mia. In the '60s, a local woman noticed a dolphin following her during her beach walks, and the place became a mecca for dolphin lovers. As hundreds of visitors shuffle excitedly in the shallows, nine "regular" dolphins arrive like clockwork.

We stayed overnight at Monkey Mia and were glad we did. At dawn, before the crowds arrived, we had our own private pair of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins following us as we jogged along the beach. In the afternoon, we took a catamaran cruise over crystal water, peering into the shallows at several dugongs — relatives of the manatee — as they gently fed on sea grass.

Deserts are my favorite ecosystems on land. But if I'm not bolting down a sand dune, I'd rather be underwater. So on our fourth day, now 800 miles north of Perth, we veered onto the North West Cape, a finger of land jutting into the Indian Ocean. I made a beeline with a guide from Exmouth Diving to an abandoned U.S. Navy pier encrusted with brilliant multicolored coral. I saw more marine life than I'd seen during any single dive on the Great Barrier Reef: clouds of lion fish, giant potato cods and groupers, and all manner of barracuda, parrot fish and strange wobbygong and toadfish.

The cape's headline attraction is a much bigger fish. From mid-March to mid-May, the seas are a magnet for the harmless whale shark, which sifts the plankton-rich coastal waters like an aquatic vacuum cleaner. That's what I kept telling myself as I clenched my jaw on my snorkel and watched a speckled 30-footer drift casually beneath me, mouth wide open.

Plagues of epic proportion

Our sixth day was one you can have only on a road trip in the Australian outback. It started right at midnight. We left Exmouth late, heading back onto Highway One and into a kangaroo plague. Every 20 yards or so, another 'roo popped out of the bush. For an hour we drove slowly, watching carefully.

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