We stay at the Kalabarri Motorcamp, which reminds me of Christmas holidays as a kid. More pelicans and galahs. We are turning into birdwatchers so decide to get serious and head down to Rainbow Jungle, an enormous local privately run aviary.

The place is built around a series of enclosures where every parrot under creation seems to be featured. Fountains and shrubs keep the place cool, and the central feature is a walk-in cage where you can stroll amongst flocks of birds that fly past your head, watch you from the branches and occasionally crap on you from their roosts on the ceiling beams. A cockatoo grabs my camera cord in its tricky claws and tries to draw it into its cage, no doubt for closer inspection and destruction. I eye it back and retrieve my camera. It’s sly eye changes to a glimmer of rage and it squawks.

Enough birds. We drive south through endless farmland and past a pink salt lake. Stay overnight at a tiny coastal village called Horrocks in a trailer park style cabin. It’s cold!

For our last day on the road we have a relatively short journey to Lancelin, a couple of hours drive north of Perth. Stay at the local YHA which is good value. Perhaps we have done too much driving, but we have seen a lot of Western Australia. Lancelin is empty and quiet, and we spend some quiet time down at the long, white beach watching the huge waves smash the reef a few hundred metres offshore.