Cordinc
April 16, 2022

Esperance (and places along the way)

Tags: Travel, Australia

Late last month (scheduled to avoid school holidays) I went on a week’s holiday. Three nights in Esperance, and 3 nights on the journey there and back.

Some thoughts:

  • I expected to be unimpressed by Wave Rock. While the rock itself is largely as expected and will be largely “done” in a matter of minutes, the surrounding area has a few other interesting sights and walks. Well worth spending a day checking the place out.
  • The size of the wheatbelt is astounding. We could drive for hours (often speeding) for 2 days only seeing continuous wheat fields broken occasionally by huge “bins” (horizontal wheat silos) and even more rarely by a tiny town.
  • Esperance is larger, greener and further than expected (again). It is a decent sized town with enough local industry to maintain itself - it is not just a tourist town (but there is a decent amount of that). I have this idea that the desert starts not far from Perth, and nearly no one lives out there. Clearly this is not true, although it took long days of driving to get to Esperance, and we passed very little on the way other than dry’ish farmland.
  • Tourist Esperance is mainly about spending time outside. There are so many beautiful beaches we became numb to them by the end.
  • It was incredibly and constantly windy for our entire time in Esperance.
  • If Albany harbour was in Europe or China I’m sure it would be the base of a famous or historical town. It definitely looks like it should be full of tall ships or triremes.
  • Restaurant food continues to be disappointing outside Perth and a couple of tourist towns. We had one good (and one decent) restaurant meal on the entire trip - the rest were poor.
  • IPhones take decent photos! All the photos here were taken on phones despite having my old trusty point & click camera. It is hard to justify taking the extra device when the phone does so well. I suspect just discovering this means I am years behind the times.

Some photos from the trip are in a short slideshow available here.


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