from Albany to Geraldton

Thursday, June 12, 2008
Off to the way south of southwest Western Australia (WA—the Aussies say Double-U-A) to see and walk the Tree Top Walk outside of Walpole, the old whaling town of Albany, and maybe the whale-watching town of Augusta.
It’s a beautiful drive down to that area through sheep and cattle country and since this is their rainy season (it’s winter and they get about 185 days of rain every year, mostly in the winter) everything is green, green, green.
Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate (winter, did I mention that?) and it was raining off and on by the time we got to Walpole. We decided to continue on to Albany and spend the night there and leave the Tree Top Walk for Friday. The visitor bureau in Walpole couldn’t get hold of the people in the B&B (luckily, we found out later) where we wanted to stay, so we just pushed on to Albany, hoping to get a place when we got there. We did, a beautiful complete house, although all we wanted was the bedroom.
I already wrote about the Whaling Museum and how gross it was. I am glad we went there just so that I can attempt to understand what whaling was all about. In the years they were whaling in Albany they killed 40,000 whales—one whale weighs as much as about 35 elephants! That is just one whaling town. Immediately I can think of many more; Hawaii, New England to start and I’m sure they all killed at least that many. I find it difficult to comprehend that much living-to-dead flesh. The whaling museum attempts to put a nice face on all that blood at the same time that they pull no punches in the tour of the areas where they skinned (“flensed”) the whales and broke up their bones (using giant “head saws”—our guide said the name should be “self-explanatory) all the while warning us about the “graphic” nature of the color pictures on display. And the graphic nature of the descriptions. Australians are much more graphic than we are.
After the whaling museum, we went to “The Gap.” No, not the store, the area of Australia that was attached to Antarctica until Gondwana broke apart 25 million years ago. We are able to see rocks that have their sheared-off counterparts thousands of miles away in Antarctica. Kind of cool, but we’ll see even older rocks in a few days at Wave Rock.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Albany and the weather is fantastic! Just a few tiny, puffy clouds and the temperature is about 15°C. We walked to a little restaurant, Bay Merchants, that serves breakfast and, to quote our Lonely Planet Perth and Western Australia: “Just a sandy-footed stroll from the beach, this café-cum-providore makes the best coffee in town and to-die-for gourmet sandwiches.” Definitely the best coffee we have had so far (although the train was pretty good as was the B&B in Freo); the sandwiches sound great but we will withhold judgment until we have lunch (later: they were fabulous!). I passed on the octopus-and-chilli [sic]-sauce sandwich however and ordered a sandwich of chicken with mango salsa and salad on a whole wheat roll. Don’t remember what Randy ordered but it had chicken and some kind of Thai sauce on it.
Before leaving both the hotel/house and the restaurant Randy was subjected to many minutes of political questioning. Both proprietors, one a man and one a woman, wanted to know if we thought there would be a change in political parties this fall. Both—and many others we have talked to on the train, in passing, after breakfast, on a tour, pretty much anywhere there is time and they realize we are Americans (pretty difficult to hide THAT!)—really hoped that Bush’s policies won’t be continued. Trish, the owner of the breakfast place, wanted to know if Obama was really a Muslim! We explained how dirty tricks work in American politics and she pointed out that we don’t have a monopoly on that!
It seems that whenever we get to talking with Aussies, politics and specifically Bush, comes up. Outside a restaurant in Freo we were looking at a map and two Aussies stopped to ask if we needed help; as soon as they heard our accents they asked if we were Canadian or American—we should have said Canadian. When we replied that we were Americans, he said, “Too bad. I used to like Americans.” That is probably the rudest thing an Aussie has said to us, but he continued by telling us how much he dislikes Bush and that’s why he doesn’t like Americans.
Apparently there aren’t too many Americans who make it to WA which may explain why everyone wants to talk politics with us—more correctly, with Randy. This is a rather macho society.
We have yet to meet another American outside Sydney (we were, as far as we could tell, the only ones on the train). Which in many ways is a lot of fun. I don’t want to meet and talk with Americans, I want to meet and talk with Australians!
We are still shell-shocked with the prices here: breakfast this morning (essentially bacon, eggs, toast and coffee) and two sandwiches to “take away” was $56.33! The fill-up this morning after 431km (270 miles) cost $55.72. Dinner last night was over $75 for an appetizer, pasta, and chicken and no alcohol!
Pleasanter topics are the tourist spots we visited, notably the Tree Top Walk. What a spectacular venue! Forty meters—METERS!—above the ground is a steel walkway through the tingle treetops.
An aside: The Aussies have wonderful names: tingle trees; wineries: Howling Wolves, Catching Thieves, Moaning Frog, Mad Fish, Suckfizzle (I am not kidding about the name and we even were told by a vintner that it is very good wine, so we have a bottle to drink for a special occasion); not to mention all the Aboriginal names like Cowaramup).
I am afraid of heights. No, I am TERRIFIED of heights. I have no idea how I managed to walk FORTY meters above the ground with an open walkway beneath my feet. I even looked down. It is so breathtakingly beautiful to actually walk in the trees—no, not in the trees, in the tree TOPS. Tingle trees (eucalypts) are amazingly tall trees—well, if you come from California and have seen redwoods they aren’t THAT big, but a tree that grows to over 45 meters tall and up to 20 meters around is no slouch in the size department!
The walkway itself is pretty amazing, too. It was designed by an engineer who said he looked at the tassel flower plant and the design came to him. I don’t know about that, but the design looks to me like an upside-down suspension bridge: all the support is underneath rather than above. But then I’m not an engineer. Eventually I will add photos to this journal, but I may not be able to do it for my blog; too bad because the pictures of the suspension are awesome, especially considering that they used no cranes or
To describe the construction I can do no better than quote, “The construction consists of 6 x 60 metre lightweight bridge spans on 7 pylons, reaching a maximum height of 40 metres….The spans were especially designed to sway slightly as you walk in order to create the sensation of being in the canopy of the forest. The see-through steel decking reinforces this sensation of being high up in the forest canopy.
“The inspiration for the design of the pylon platforms and the trusses is the tassel flower Leucopogon verticullatus and sword grass Lepidosperma effusum. These are both understorey plants of the tingle forest. The pylons are constructed from Austen steel, which oxidises and develops a rust colour that blends into the forest to give the impression of the walk being suspended in the air.” Over a million people have walked the Walk since it opened in 2002. Pretty impressive, considering where in the world it is.
Leaving aside my stupendous achievement of actually walking on a path that had holes in it AND was forty meters (have I mentioned that forty meters before?) above the ground, we had a tour guide for the walk around in the tingle forest at ground level who was fabulous! Tony. He was informative, entertaining, and knowledgeable; what more can you ask of a guide? He was earthy as well—he described the Karri wattle (Acacia pentadenia) as smelling like “Tomcat piss.”
Tingle trees are eucalypts and there are many, many subspecies. The ones that have the walk through their tops are Red Tingles (Eucalyptus jacksonii). In the same forest are Yellow Tingles. They have one thing in common with saguaros: their roots are very shallow. So shallow, in fact, that if many people walk on the roots it will kill the tingles, which is why the Tree Top Walk! A distinctive feature of the red tingle is that the center of its trunk gets hollowed out by fire, ant, and fungus; so much so that one could drive a car through the center of the larger ones, which they did until they realized that that would kill it eventually and until several trees, because they were so weak from the opening in their trunks, fell over on people. Tends to put a damper on wanting to walk or drive through them!
Day 18–Saturday, June 14, 2008
I’ve decided that I’d like to keep track of which day of our trip it is. I expect to be here for 75 days. That’s assuming we leave on August 10, as we plan.
Today was our last day in a timeshare and our first day in a campervan (Australian for motorhome).
In spite of our GPS we got lost. It didn’t recognize that 266 Great Eastern Highway was in Belmont, just outside Perth; it thought it was who-knows-where WAY outside Perth. Luckily we recognized that we didn’t go past the airport when we picked up our car (we are getting our campervan from the same company).
Apollo has upgraded us to a an almost new (11,000km) 6-person campervan although we had ordered a 3 person campervan. We watched their DVD on how to do everything and walked around the campervan with the Apollo woman and drove off into the sunset—almost literally; we left Apollo about 3pm. Stopped for some groceries (we get 4 cents off a litre if we spend $30 at Woolworths grocery and every penny helps when diesel costs $1.90 and UP per litre!) and drove like hell to get to a caravan park by dark. Just made it at about 5:15 (sun goes down early in the winter!).
An Australian campervan is nice, and as Australian campervans go, this is very nice, but they don’t compare to US motorhomes! For example, we have only the water we carry onboard, there is no way to hook up to a water faucet; the black water goes into a tank that we have to physically carry to a toilet to empty. Guess what we are going to try not to use!
Anyway, we got to a campervan park and we got a powered site (very important!) and we cooked our first meal (hamburgers, natch!), and we slept well. Pretty good, all in all.
Day 19–Sunday, June 15, 2008
Our first diesel fill up: $125! Ouch, ouch, ouch.
We spent the morning running ahead of a storm to get to Wave Rock before it could start raining. We made it by a couple of hours and had Wave Rock to ourselves—how neat is that? We are getting spoiled by the number of attractions that we have to ourselves!
So, What, I can hear you asking, is Wave Rock? It is a granite cliff, 15 metres (45 ft) high whose shape and coloration resembles a large surfing wave. Weathering and water erosion have undercut the top, leaving a rounded overhang and thus the resemblance to a wave. Particles from Wave Rock have been dated at 2.5 billion years old. That’s really, really, old! Yes, Doug, and weird!
We also drove over to the Hippo’s Mouth formation and yes, it looks somewhat like a hippo’s mouth, but it pales in comparison to Wave Rock.
By now the rain was getting closer so we have headed off to the north. After an overnight in York, we will head to the Benedictine Monastery in New Norcia.
It sounds easy, a drive of about 300km and it would have been except we were dancing with the leading edge of a front and the winds were horrendous and mostly from the side, so our slab-sided campervan was buffeted about quite smartly. Then the rain began and pretty much continued for the entire time from Wave Rock to York. It was no fun to drive!
Our York campervan park is a lot nicer than the last one, but, honestly, who cares? We pull in, attach the power cord and go inside and fix dinner—at least we do when it’s raining—well, first we have a martini, then we fix dinner. No TV—although we do have a TV set—because there IS no TV out here!
Day 20—Monday, June 16, 2008
Another rainy day. It’s not all bad as the rain is showery rather than an all-day downpour but it is still depressing. To relieve our depression we took a side trip out of Mundaring to the Kalamunda National Park where there were some delightful Aussies, a young girl who just started working there (she told us) and her boss, another delightful Aussie and they seemed to take as their mission in life to help us figure out where to go and where to stay overnight and which National Parks we could get into without 4WD.
We have been treated so wonderfully by the Aussies! Everyone—EVERYONE—seems to want to make our holiday the best we have ever had. What a treat!
Anyway, they told us about the Zig Zag Road—that is really the name of the road—and they write the number of the zig on the roadway: 1, 2, 3, and 4. The road is two-way but we sincerely hoped that nobody would be coming up the other way as there was no room for two vehicles to pass, even if one went to the edge of the paved roadway.
Before we started down the Zig Zag, there was a beautiful view of downtown Perth from a pull-off. We parked there and had lunch looking down on Perth as rain showers alternately obscured and then cleared the view of the skyscrapers. We could see the airport and jets taking off and beyond that the skyscrapers of downtown Perth and then the Indian Ocean. Too bad it kept raining and obscuring our view!
After that we just drove in the intermittent rain northward to a small town called Ledge Point. We stayed at Ledge Point Holiday Park, a Big4 (but hadn’t decided to join yet—bummer) that promised internet but it was out of service the whole time we were there. That is our problem here in outback Australia, very spotty internet. There are internet cafes, but I like to sit in the camper and write my journal and then just log on and send it. Isn’t happening very often.
The caravan park, in spite of the non-availability of the internet, is very nice. Brand new, hardly anybody here and everything is so clean and modern. Although we have a toilet and shower in our campervan, we are using the public facilities in the caravan parks; much easier!
Day 21—Tuesday, June 17, 2008
From Ledge Point we headed north to Cervantes and Nambung National Park, better known as the Pinnacles. Since we will be going to several more National Parks—I think the Aussies must have the most National Parks of any nation in the world, including the US!—we have bought their equivalent of a pass. But it only is good for a month. That’s all we need; by then we’ll be on our 4WD tour and they will take care of all the National Parks that we go to.
We saw our first road train. In the US we think that an 18-wheeler with two trailers is pretty big. That’s like saying to an Alaskan that Texas is pretty big. These road trains are a tractor with three—THREE!—trailers, each with 20 wheels. So a full blown road train is a 66-wheeler behemoth! And they don’t give way for anything. If you are going the opposite direction, you’d better pull over a bit because the wind gust from their passage could blow you off the road. I cannot even imagine what it would be like to meet one on a dirt road. And yes, they do travel dirt roads as well as paved roads. We have read that at 110kph, it can take 2.5km to pass one going the same direction you are. We may find out as we get further north and further into the outback.
I’ve been trying to keep track of the (wild) animals I have seen so far. There aren’t actually that many yet. I’ve seen emus, wedge-tailed eagles (and, of course, lots of little birds I can’t identify), a bob-tailed lizard (that’s what I was told the name was), two live kangaroos and innumerable dead ones, some vultures (on the dead ‘roos), one small snake the size of a pencil (I’m leery of ANY snakes in Australia as I think they have 10 of the top 10 most venomous snakes in the world), and quokkas (marsupials). Randy is really unhappy as he has not yet seen a live ‘roo. We are told that the further north we go the more likely we are to see them. This is not all good: they tend, we are told, to jump onto the road and hop along with the car and then suddenly hop in FRONT of the vehicle. Especially early in the morning and late in the afternoon. I can hardly wait.
So we got to the Pinnacles fairly early in the morning (no ‘roos yet). The National Park gate lady suggested, nicely, that we not drive the Pinnacles Drive as we probably wouldn’t fit between a few of the pinnacles. So we walked a 1.5km trail through the pinnacles that was much nicer anyway.
The Pinnacles are hard to describe; I think of it as being a desert that formed upside down from the way a cave forms. Rain leached lime from the sands and sea shells and it accumulated beneath the sands. Plants stabilized the sands and a layer of acidic soil built up and as more and more leaching of the lime developed a layer of what they call calcrete (sounds like caliche to me) formed over some softer limestone below. Cracks formed and gradually the soft limestone was worn away by water and later, wind. What was left were pinnacles: pillars of calcrete in amongst the sand. Eerily beautiful. They remind me of the Greek mythology story about Jason.
That was the highlight; the lowlight was the caravan park. Crowded. We were 3 metres from the next vehicle. ‘Nuff said. It was however, close to town (Jurien Bay) and close to the beach so we could do some walking around.
Day 22—Wednesday, June 18, 2008
We’re in Dongara-Port Denison in a beautiful Big4 Caravan Park. We’ve decided to join Big4 so that we will get a discount and so that MAYBE we can get some internet coverage as they have wireless and supposedly all Big4 parks have the same and you can carry forward your balance. We’ll see.
The weather has turned “fine” at last. By my count it has rained at least part of every day for the past 12 (of course the first 10 were fabulous so I can’t really complain) and all day for many of those 12. Into each life, etc.
This was a leisurely-drive day. We’ve only gone 129km and stopped lots along the way to see little towns and walk around.
The drive did have one exciting moment—well, it actually was several moments long. We—uh, Randy was—happily driving along the main highway, the Brand Highway. Some signs warned us about upcoming construction and we expected to have to stop for a signman and one-way traffic as we have had to do before. Nope, they had completely torn up the whole highway, from one side to the other, and all it was was dirt. Fairly deep, uncompacted DIRT (at least it wasn’t mud!) currently being made even more uncompacted by several large pieces of machinery. Randy drove through it, the huge road graders nicely moving to the side so we could get by. I, in the passenger seat, felt as if the campervan was slewing to the side. Randy, in the driver’s seat felt even more that it was slewing to the side. There was little traction, little stopping or going power, and he had to drive about 500 metres that way. I was SO glad Randy was driving at that point. The good news is that we made it through but if we had any ideas of ignoring the rental company’s dictum to not drive on dirt roads, that convinced us that it would definitely not be a good idea!
Got to Dongara about 1-ish and had lunch at Southebys, a good Aussie lunch: fish ‘n chips.
The Big4 park is in Port Denison. One town runs into the other with no clear demarcation other than the river between them. The town(s) have designated several Walks around from 1.5km to 9km. We decided to walk from the park up to the river and over it to Dongara but didn’t make it further than about a kilometer or so because I got a blister. So back to the campervan for some of the wool from the sheep-shearing a ways back. Works like a charm! I just got a small bit of wool, wrapped it around my toe and it didn’t need any tape or anything, kind of stuck to itself—remember all that lanolin. My toe has been fine ever since. It’s like a miracle bandage and free to boot. I will definitely take it with us on our 4WD tour.
It is taking so little to make us so happy: we have what is called an “en suite site.” This means that we can park our campervan next to a bathroom (I haven’t figured out completely what “en suite” means but it at least means a complete bathroom) of our own. This is bliss. I can get up early in the morning and not have to get completely dressed to use the bathroom. As I said, it isn’t taking much to make me happy! And our view, filtered though it is by the cabins in front of us, is of the ocean and we can hear the waves crashing. That will be so nice to fall asleep to!
The park also is putting on a little “nibblies” feast at 4:30, BYO. So off we go with our VB (Victoria Bitter) beer to mingle. We looked through their sign-in book and have only seen one other American in the past month! So we will probably be mingling with Aussies and Europeans. I have seen a lot of Japanese and Singapore tourists in our travels, but none in caravan parks. I have no idea why.
At the nibblies party we met a couple of Brits who have an even longer and more exciting trip than we do: They were in New Zealand for about 6 weeks, then on the east coast for a few weeks, now they are travelling pretty much where we are and then flying to South Africa and driving to Nairobi from South Africa. Quite ambitious! I envy them in a way, but I’m not at all sure I’d want to be driving in Africa right now—especially with an American passport!
Day 23—Thursday, June 19, 2008
Our day started with a nice bacon and egg breakfast. Note to Yolanda: Aussie turkey bacon is better than the pig bacon, so we’ll probably stick to that rather than trying to cook what the Aussies call “bacon.”
Unfortunately, after that we had to attempt a collect call to the US to VISA to make sure that the letter Greg got talking about an address change was not a identity stealing. It wasn’t, thank goodness.
Today we go to Geraldton to get the heater fixed. This morning we could see our breath and that was after we had heated up the place a bit with cooking brekkies (breakfast) and making coffee. It will be good to be warm again in the mornings!
Arrived early at the repair shop after the Garmin GPS yet again led us astray. I am glad we have it, but the maps of Australia are woefully inadequate in Western Australia in the outback at least. Perth and Fremantle were pretty good but when we get out a ways it doesn’t seem to even recognize that roads exist when the roads have clearly—to me, at least!—been there for a while. Where they tried to send us today bore no resemblance to the actual address at all. Thank goodness for paper maps! I’m still glad we have it although I suppose it’s like the old question: Would you rather have a watch that’s slow or one that’s stopped? At least the stopped on is right twice a day!
The heater was fixed quite quickly, complete with offers of coffee or tea for me (Randy was supervising).
We have a whole schedule of things to do tomorrow, thanks to the, as usual, wonderful visitor bureau. I’m really sorry I didn’t check out what trinkets the MTCVB (Metropolitan Tucson Convention and Visitors Bureau) might have had for me to bring to share.
After some grocery shopping we headed to the memorial to the HMAS Sydney, a ship that went down in WWII (November 19, 1941), all hands were lost, the ship has never been found, and it was a loss of a third of the Australian Navy at the time. It is as touching a memorial as I have seen: a canopy of 645 stainless steel sea gulls (representing the number of men lost) looking out over the harbor of Geraldton, a sculpture of a waiting woman staring out to see, and WA granite walls with the names of all the men lost on the HMAS Sydney. And just to make sure we would have difficulty suppressing tears, someone had laid a fresh wreath of flowers on the steps to the monument. The Australians know how to memorialize their war dead with elegance and pathos at the same time. “Lest we forget” are the moving words we have seen over and over on memorials around Australia.
So we come back to our home away from home, all 100 square feet of it. If we had had to live in this for a year or so while building our houses—well, we wouldn’t have survived it. We’ll make 27 days—or is it 28 days? Or 26?—but it won’t be easy!