Australia's West coast and its outback is one of the wildest and least populated territories in the world. Here the hand of man has barely managed to modify what is the original landscape of this incredible area of Australia.
The climatic conditions have meant that only a few inhabited centres arose here, concentrating mainly on the coast, to then give way to the desert and its creatures, as one pushes towards the hinterland.
Darwin was my starting point.
If you are here, you cannot miss the mini cruise along the Adelaide River where you can organize a close encounter with the gigantic crocodiles that have populated it for decades. They lure them out of the water with pieces of meat, making them jump to be able to admire them in all their majesty.
As soon as you move away from Darwin, the landscape soon becomes desert, the earth begins to become more and more red, the roads longer and longer, and the vegetation begins to disappear to make way for the huge termite mounds.
That's right! Driving through this area you will see nothing but huge termite mounds as far as the eye can see, for miles and miles, scattered across those vast fields that look like no man's land.
This is where we realized that our road trip to Australia had really begun!
Crossing the Kimberley area you will come across numerous National Parks, and each one is unique: Litchfield National Park overflows with waterfalls and natural pools.
As we would soon realize, these lands guard their wonders with jealousy: the best landscapes are the most difficult to access, in fact, you can only get there with a 4x4 vehicle (we did not have it and we had to reluctantly give up).
The Northern Territory is also rich in aboriginal communities and their history, and there are many sites where you can admire their art, engraved forever in the rocks of this area of Australia.
If you are in these parts, I strongly recommend that you visit the Mimbi Caves, a collection of caves as old as 350 million years old, where the predecessors of the aboriginal family that still owns and manages them lived until a few generations ago.
Then we crossed the border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
The following stop on our road trip to Australia was Broome, one of the pearls of Western Australia where we finally saw the ocean again, leaving behind the red and dusty earth of the outback.
Here, at sunset, you can admire the famous camel parade and swim in the most turquoise waters I have ever seen in my life.
From here on, Western Australia reveals itself in all its glory.
The next stop is Eighty Mile Beach, a long beach that is heaven for someone like me who collects shells. Not far away is Shell Beach, a beach completely covered with tiny white shells.
At this point we found ourselves at a crossroads: continuing along the coast or venture inland to make a stop in one of the most famous national parks in the country: the Karijini National Park, located four hours from the coast. The park is so vast that it takes at least two or three days to visit it all, and unfortunately the most spectacular and most remote part is accessible, again, only to 4x4 vehicles, because the road is unpaved and often in poor condition so we decided to visit Monkey Mia before flying back to Sydney from Perth.
Monkey Mia is a nature reserve where some dolphins go ashore every morning to be fed: this happens because in the 60s a fisherman and his wife began feeding the dolphins, thus earning their trust.
