Western Australia

I arrived in Perth on a red-eye from Bali, and the first thing I did was rent a car and drive north. I didn’t have a plan beyond that. I’d seen a photo of the Pinnacles once — those limestone spires jutting out of yellow sand in Nambung — and I needed to know if they were real. They were. Standing among them at dawn, the only sound was the wind cutting across the desert, and I understood immediately that Western Australia operates on a different scale than anywhere I’d been before, including six months in the Sonoran Desert.

The state is enormous in a way that embarrasses the word. You can drive for four hours and still be within the same bioregion. Up in the Kimberley, I spent a week moving between gorges — Windjana, Tunnel Creek, the Gibb River Road in a 4WD I definitely wasn’t insured to take off-road. Freshwater crocodiles sunning on red rocks. Water so clear in Manning Gorge that I could see my own shadow on the sandy bottom from three metres down. In the evenings I’d cook whatever I’d bought at the roadhouse two hundred kilometres back and watch the sky turn colours I can only describe as excessive. The Pilbara sunset has no sense of restraint whatsoever.

The food culture surprised me most. Fremantle’s market on a Saturday morning is serious business — local crayfish, Margaret River cheeses, wildflower honey from the southwest. I ate barramundi grilled over jarrah wood at a camp near Fitzroy Crossing and it was the best fish of my life, which is saying something for a man who spent three years eating his way through the Yucatán coast. Down south in Margaret River wine country, the cabernet sauvignon is structured and honest, nothing like the jammy bombs you sometimes get elsewhere in Australia. People take the terroir seriously. After Mexico, where I now live, the directness was refreshing.

When to go: April to October for the north — the Kimberley and Pilbara become genuinely dangerous in the wet season (November to March), with roads flooded and heat that can kill a car engine. The southwest, including Margaret River and Albany, is pleasant year-round but peaks in spring (September to November) when the wildflowers cover everything.

What most guides get wrong: They treat Perth as a layover city on the way to the Kimberley. Perth deserves two or three days on its own — the Indian Ocean beaches at Cottesloe and Scarborough rival anything in the Mediterranean, the coffee is excellent, and Fremantle has more genuine character per square metre than most of Australia’s headline cities.