If anyone's interested, google Red Earth Safaris and it's the 8 day Perth to Exmouth tour. We're traveling to caves, beaches, jungle and the outback. We'll be staying in dorms and camping under the stars. Activities include swimming with sharks, snorkeling, a traditional Aussie BBQ, going on a glass bottom boat, seeing some cliffs and a whole lot more!
Day 1: Yanchup National Park
And so it begins. We're traveling on a tiny bus with really uncomfortable seats and no bathroom! We make stops every hour and a half though so its ok. There are 20 people on the tour, mostly female and around our age. Actually they're probably only 18...Europeans look so much older and everyone we meet turns out to be 18 so who knows! Mostly everyone on the trip is European. Except us!
Our tour guide is Darren and his nickname apparently is Boobs. We will not be calling him that. He looks like the guy from Crocodile Dundee. Well actually I've never seen that movie but I can imagine that's what he would look like! He seems to know his stuff so that's good. He the one cooking our meals all week...let's hope he has better taste in food than in music.
Side note: I don't remember if I already said this but we heard Australian country music!! They play the regular Keith urban and Kenny Chesney and stuff, but then they play songs about "the boys from the bush" and "hitch hiking back to the outback." I guess it's similar to our country music except ours is way better.
Today we went to Yanchup National Park. We went on a tour of some caves -- there are lots of caves in the park and they're all 200-600 thousand years old! They were full of limestone and stalactite, I'm not entirely sure how they form but stalactites are the spiky things that take hundreds of years to form and hang down from the ceiling.
Then we walked around the park and saw koalas sleeping in trees. So cute! They just hang out and sleep in funny positions. They have 6 thumbs so they can climb trees and mother koalas feed their joeys their poop so the babies can get the bacteria they need to digest the tough eucalyptus. Glad I'm not a koala!!
We went to a pond in the park that used to be full but it's down to 20% full because of the lack of rain here, which is funny because it's been nothing but rainy everywhere we've been! They say there's only enough water in Perth and Western Australia to last 100 more years. No good.
We're spending the night in Cervantes and went to a desert called Nambung National Park to see the Pinnacles tonight, which are huge rock formations that the sun sets behind. Aussies are all about their rock formations!! We also went to a beach today and saw two dead sharks wash up on the shore!! They were small, maybe sand sharks?? And hopefully harmless!
This is probably the last time we'll have Internet...see ya next week!
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