Driving up the Pacific Highway from Sydney to Byron Bay is like taking a snapshot of a country in transition. Back in the day, small towns and businesses were built to cater for the heavy traffic heading up and down the coast. Kilometre by kilometre these towns have dried up, now just little off-road ramps as the government has put in safer roads and built bypasses along he highway.

My trip to the south west region of WA left me with bruises all over my legs and reduced me to tears - for all the right reasons. Located down the bottom of Australia where the country looks like it’s had a big bite taken out of it, the south west is a backpacking hotspot for two very good reasons. The first is it is home to one of Australia’s best wine regions - offering plenty of seasonal work for backpackers on a working holiday visa.  But more importantly, protected and preserved by desert on one side and ocean on the other, the south west region provides a living window to a natural environment not found anywhere else in the world.

It was a pretty normal morning. The sky was a solid, cloudless blue, the water was crystal clear, and the sunlight bounced off its surface like golden fireworks. I could feel myself getting sunburnt at 9am, and diving under a foaming, crashing and curling wave was a better wake up call than any cup of coffee I’d ever had in my life. It was paradise- and it was just an average day at Byron bay.

David Whitley meets the cave-dwelling opal miners in Hollywood’s favourite piece of post-apocalyptic Outback real estate.

The walls of my hotel room look like they’ve been splattered in blood, and there are no windows to allow natural light in. It would appear as though I am the unsuspecting star of the latest film in the Saw series. In Coober Pedy, this is all perfectly normal. My hotel room is underground, having been dug out into the side of a hill, and the deep red streaks are part of the remarkable natural sandstone in the area.