A slightly belated Happy New Year! We spent Christmas and New Year's Eve in Melbourne and were able to recharge our batteries for three weeks, relax relentlessly and prepare for our next adventures. On 9 January we flew to Perth, where we met up with Leah's school friend Jenny.
We've been travelling the roads of Western Australia in our campervan for almost two weeks now. This state takes up about a third of Australia's surface area, so it's big enough for us. Perth, the capital, is often regarded as the remotest metropolitan area worldwide. The nearest town with more than 100,000 inhabitants, Adelaide, is 2,100 kilometres away, which is practically an Australian stone's throw. In Europe, that would be the distance from Berlin to Nordkapp. Yes, it is pretty sparsely populated here.
Since Jenny joined us, the group dynamic has changed drastically. We cannot just make plans amongst ourselves any more, now we always have to take her complex needs into account ("I don't care, you just decide"). We also had to completely change our culinary routines: instead of 500 grams of pasta, we now cook 600 grams AND add green pesto. Luckily for me, there are now two coffee drinkers, so Leah can't say anything out loud against my addiction, ha!
Leah has now proofread the interim status of this text and told me to add more vanlife romance. Well, with a cursory glance at our modest travel budget, we got ourselves a van that can do one thing above all else: guzzling petrol. After all, this results in lots of beautiful pictures in front of petrol stations. We almost got caught out once when we realised that we wouldn't have enough fuel just a merely 100 km from the next petrol station. Fortunately, the nice Australians explained to us that everyone here drives on diesel and that I shouldn't get the idea of trying to use diesel, as it is also a "fuel".
It's pretty cramped in the van, especially overnight. We had actually specified "4 people" in the search filter, but it dawned on us when at check-in, we could only enter two adults and two children into the online form. Well, the upper berth is only about 1.70 metres long. But no problem at all, as Leah had carefully chosen a small friend as a precaution during her school days and always made sure that she didn't grow more so that she could join us on this road trip.
We've seen so man beautiful sceneries, so many animals (we haven't run over any kangaroos yet, but one crashed into the side of our van once, nobody warned us that they do that!) and beautiful beaches. We got stuck, ran out of petrol, broke our water tank but our spirits are high!
