Wondering what it’s like on a Western Australia Road Trip? Read on as Letz Live gappie Siana, from South Africa, shares her highlights and tips.
Day one of my term break and the beginning of my holiday, road tripping in Western Australia! I was feeling a bit nervous about meeting up with the family friends I was staying with in Perth (I haven’t met them before), but there was no need to worry. By the end of my time with them I honestly didn’t want to leave (they have become my honorary Aussie Mum, Dad and siblings).
We spent a few days together to kickstart my holiday and wow, what a way to to begin! My first experience in Perth was watching the Cirque du Soleil, which was absolutely INCREDIBLE! We drove along the highway to get there and as you come over a hill, there is the most stunning view across the whole city. I was so impressed with how beautiful Perth is. After visiting a few cities around Australia, Perth is my favourite for sure!
We spent the next few days exploring and adventuring together. Some of the highlights were Kings Park, four wheeling down sand dunes, jet skiing in the ocean and up Moore River to a stunning dam, and of course, we had to make a Timezone trip, obviously! We also ate a rather Saffa brekkie, having Boerewors and chakalaka wraps – which was all absolutely to die for!
Staying with family and friends throughout my travels in Australia has surprisingly been some of my favourite times. It definitely makes me feel very at home when I’m with people I love and know from home, especially when they have all the best snacks from home, like milk tart, Oros, Aromat and how could you forget Biltong. But I reckon hearing the accent is the most refreshing part of it!! I’m tired of these Aussies calling them thongs…. they are called slops bru!
The Road Trip Begins…
Its now time to leave my Aussie family and go on a much-awaited road trip from Perth to Esperance with four of my Gappie mates. Its been so cool to meet like minded people, two of my travel buddies I met through the Letz Live Facebook page, one of them I met at the Letz Live orientation, and the other one works at a school near mine! We had organised a Toyota Prado and a camping trailer to be our home for 10 days of camping and exploring.
We had a rough plan, but nothing booked so we were going with the flow. I guess that’s the fun of it!
Where to stay on your Western Australia Road Trip
We just booked campsites along the way, we got very good at searching for the good ones, and by good ones I mean the cheap ones that are somewhat pretty. Most of our campsites were pretty good, except for the fact there weren’t exactly flat… so we were all kinda rolling in our sleep ahaha.
It took us a bit of practice to learn how to set up the camper trailer, but after a few tries we got super quick. We started timing ourselves to see how quickly we could do it, we started at around 30 minutes to set up and got down to around 16 minutes – that was our record, that’s got to be a world record!! We were pretty darn impressed with ourselves.
This trip has been awesome and exactly what I dreamt of when I decided to do a gap year. We sit on the beach each night and watch the sunset with music playing and hot chocolate in our travel mugs. We then get up each morning, sometimes at 3am to hike for hours to watch phenomenal sunrises (one of my favourites was Bluff Knoll in the picture below), all with my new best mates – it honestly doesn’t get any better than that.
Another highlight was swimming at Middleton beach which is really only very cool cause my name is Siana Middleton. A second beach we visited that I loved was Lucky Bay in Esperance. It’s the famous beach you see on everyone’s Instagram with the kangaroos and super blue water. What they don’t tell you is that the water is freezing… like cold cold! Despite this I loved it and we were lucky enough to see a kangaroo and a joey which was just adorable.
We also went to the Valley of the Giants and not to brag but I’ve seen the tallest trees in Australia, pretty sick!! We did a tree top adventure with ziplines and obstacle courses, very spontaneous but was so worth it .
We did tonnes of other cool stuff and I could seriously waffle on forever and ever!
All good things must come to an end…
As we came to the end of our road trip we had to make the journey all the way back to Perth. It’s quite a drive so we decided to split it up – 3 hours on one day and 4 the next. We ended up driving for around 6 hours on the first day, towards what the GPS was saying was the way to our campsite. No one had said much for a while and we were just following the maps. It then directed us onto this dirt road in a forest in the middle of nowhere… by that time we figured out we had driven an hour and bit too far and our campsite was wayyy behind us…LOL!
We figured as we were closer to Perth we may as well keep driving, then ended up driving for 13 hours straight. We ended up staying with the people that I stayed with in the beginning…. what dumb kids we are but what a memory… lots of laughs and some tears from Lara freaking out in the back ahaha.
I said a sad goodbye to my road trip mates and stayed with my family friends for a final night before heading back to Brisbane. We went to get some ice cream, went to the aquarium, and of course another Timezone visit! There were then lots and lots of tears when I had to say a final goodbye and leave to go to the airport.
THIS WAS THE MOST EPIC ROAD TRIP I EVER DID GO ON. Definitely one for the books! I would recommend a Western Australia Road Trip to anyone on a Gap Year in Australia.
Go checkout @mini_on_a_mission on Instagram and TikTok to see my other adventures.
Thinking about following Siana’s footsteps and embarking on a Gap Year in Australia? Take a look at our Australian Gap Year programme.
