Day 44 - Back in Western Australia!

Monday, 12 July 2021

The sky looks different at 2am. Unrecognisable. There is no Southern Cross and the Milky Way spreads from south to north rather than east to west, with none of the familiar milky bits and dark patches I've come to know. I’m squinting at it, face upwards, while Johan collapses the tent. We tack everything down, lock the locks and we’re on the road by 2:17am.

The camp is quiet. The road is empty. Until we get close to the highway and we start to see cars, trucks, campers, caravans parked on the side of the road. The exiled travellers awaiting a dawn border crossing.

We arrive at the well-lit facility at 3am. A young police officer steps up to the car and asks for our G2G passes, which he scans. He spends a bit of time looking at his phone, scrolling up and down, then says we’re good to go (the acronym for G2G) and we can move forward to the gloved and masked young agent who will ask us about quarantined items. Any fruit? Honey? Veg? Just onions. We can keep them if we peel them, but that’s too much work at three in the morning so I surrender them. She takes a cursory look through our fridge, hardly a glance at the inside of the car and tells us we’re G2G.

Unbelievably easy. My restless and very brief sleep was plagued by thoughts and worries. We’d get grilled with questions – where have you been? Have you been sick? Why are you crossing the border so early? What are you going to do in Kununurra in the wee hours of the morning? And a sniffer dog that would have us unloading our baskets and boxes of food, half of it destined for the quarantine bin, and then, because the dog is looking curious, we're asked to open the camper trailer – no small deal – and watch while the dog sniffs and the agent opens all the cupboards, drawers, under-seat compartments. It would take hours.

It took approximately 7 minutes. We sail into W.A. on a black road, our spirits high. Our exile complete!

Nothing is stirring in Kununurra, the small Kimberley town that mostly services the booming outback tourist industry, when we glide in just before 4am. Now what? A 24-hour fuel station is open so we fill up. We find the nearest “park near me” on Google maps and settle in until the first shops open at 6am.

The park is next to a commercial caravan park and I glibly walk through the gated entrance to check out the laundry room. It’s open and costs $3 per wash so I head back to the car to gather up our bedding and bring it back in. The park is packed with campers, dimly lit, not a soul stirring. I feel like a bandit, worry about the 24-hour security man stalking me, but nothing happens so I deposit my load in a washer, click in the three $1 coins and head back to the car.

At sunrise a steady stream of travellers enters town from the east. 4WDs, caravans, trailers loaded with dust and camping gear hanging off rooftops and back ends. They weave through the town like a gnarly snake recently emerged from the bush, filling all available empty lots and parking areas. By 9am the town is crawling with grubby travellers, shuffling around in hats and shorts, ready to stock up, get a good feed, and spend money after their exile in the Territory. 

By 10am we’re done with our shopping, showering, emailing, and whatever else we intended to do in civilisation. After enjoying a celebratory double-stack gelato, we head west out of town on the Victoria Highway, then veer south on the Great Northern Highway, the long ribbon that extends all the way back to Perth, just short of 4000 kms. It's a big state.

We relax into the drive, listen to Obama read his biography, happy to be on the road again. The Kimberley landscape is scenic and the traffic minimal. We still have our head start. Two hundred kms down the road we find a flat spot on the edge of a roadside rest area and pitch camp for the night. A herd of grousing bulls watch us from the other side of the barbed wire. A triptych scene blazons across the western twilight: the sliver new moon with Venus and Mars in conjunction just above. A beautiful talisman to guide the return to our home state and the final two weeks of our journey.