Denham to Perth

Day 27—Tuesday, June 24, 2008
At 8:50, Tim Hargreaves picked us up in the 6-passenger 4WD from the Monkey Mia Wildsights tour company for our all-day tour of the François Peron National Park. Part of the reason we hired a tour company is that the area has had three years’ rain in three days (spread over about 2 weeks) and the ground cannot absorb all that so many roads are underwater. I wish that so much of Australia wasn’t accessible only by 4WD! In Western Australia alone, there are at least six national parks that have NO roads accessible by other than 4WD!
As the owner of Wildsights told us we might be, we were the only people on the tour! We are getting so spoiled by being the only or almost the only tourists in most of the places we have visited. That won’t last, however, after we get further north; it’s winter and the north is much warmer and therefore more desirable to a lot of people in Australia. But not Americans; we still haven’t met a single American. We’ve met Germans, French, Dutch, Singaporean, Chinese, Japanese, British, but no Americans or even Canadians or Central/South Americans.
Before the park part of our tour Tim drove us all around town showing us the sights, many of which he had a part in constructing at some time in his 30-year tenure in the town. Among them was The Old Pearler restaurant, hand-built by Tim in the 1970s of seashells. Well, actually of the shell blocks mentioned earlier (the shells bonded by pressure) he had quarried with a hand saw from the Hamelim Pool area. Railway sleepers were used for the door and window frames; the tables and benches were made from timber salvaged from the original Peron shearing station. The Old Pearler is the most westerly restaurant in Australia (and has great food—we had a wonderful dinner there with a BYO Clairault Chalice Bridge Margaret River Shiraz 2005)
François Peron was a Frenchman who was interested in maintaining his ranch as a natural reserve. When he lived he was a naturalist as well as a sheep station owner. He ran about 80,000 sheep (the sheep man in Busselton said that 4,000 was the minimum needed to sustain a family) on over 50,000 hectares, all of which is now the national park. We saw the original shearing sheds and shearers’ quarters; it’s hard to imagine the backbreaking work of shearing 150 sheep per day in searing heat. The shearing sheds and living quarters and kitchen are all constructed with corrugated metal walls and roofs. Can you imaging the heat? The outside temperatures are routinely as hot as Tucson in our summer.
After touring the sheep station Tim drove us out into the park. All the roads into the park are 4WD roads and one of the reasons we went on a tour is that the only car rental place (we didn’t learn our lesson with the last rental) isn’t allowed to send its vehicles into the park because of the recent rains. Tim told us that in the past 3 weeks they have had 3 years’ worth of rain. The park land doesn’t drain well so there is still standing water in many areas. However there is also deep dust on many of the roads and Tim had to lower the pressure in the tires to about 20 pounds in order to navigate them.
He found us a large blue tongued lizard (about 1 foot long and as thick around as my wrist) and captured it for me to take pictures. The lizard was not impressed. He wanted nothing more than to be let go and he hissed and bared his teeth and generally let us know that he wanted to be let alone. So we gave him his wish after immortalizing him in pixels.
For lunch Tim took us onto the beach at Bottle Beach. Randy and I would NEVER have even attempted what Tim did: drive along the beach through the deep sand to a spot about a kilometer down the beach. He was weaving back and forth from the harder wet sand (the tide was coming in, we thought) and our tire tracks were being washed away as we drove through the froth of the incoming tide. Our car would slew back and forth in the deep sand; Tim said he does it all the time but it would have been extremely difficult without his having lowered the tire pressure.
Randy still hasn’t seen a live kangaroo, but we did get to see a lot of ‘roo tracks in the sand.
After lunch we did a short hike from Cape Peron to Skipjack Point. It was a bit of hard slogging for a while as the sand there was pretty deep at times but it was beautiful. Lots of cormorants and sea gulls and lots of wildflowers just starting to come out. And the occasional lizard and snail.
A wonderful day with a delightful—if opinionated—guide. Followed by the aforementioned dinner of Australian Rock Lobster at The Old Pearler.
Day 28—Wednesday, June 25, 2008
We have TV for the first time in several days and the lead story is about Jane McGrath’s losing her 11 year battle with breast cancer. She was the 40-year-old wife of an Australian cricket player and apparently ha s been working very hard to raise money for breast cancer research. She was extremely well known and loved by Australians and it seems to be a national story. Very touching, even for Randy and me, who didn’t have any real idea who she was until we got here.
It is so interesting to get caught up in the local news when you are in an area for a long time (we’ve now been here a month). One of the issues now in the news is polygamy; not the polygamy of the Mormons as we have in the American news, but the polygamy of Muslims. It is becoming a bigger and bigger issue here although most of the Australians are against it. Then of course there is political corruption: one of the MPs apparently got caught up in lying about a fracas in a nightclub and now the Prime Minister has to deal with her. He ordered her to take anger management classes but that is seemingly not enough and he may have to fire her. We’re not at all certain how the PM can fire an elected official, but that may happen. News at eleven!
We have also gotten quite interested in footy (Aussie rules football) and—heaven help us!—cricket. Trying to learn the rules of any sport just by watching the game is frustrating. When that sport is cricket, it is a recipe for madness. Of course, if you rarely get TV then when you do get it and you only have one or two stations, you’ll watch ANYTHING!
Other news that may directly affect us is that the only fuel station in Tom Price (a town near Karijini NP) has been running out of diesel, occasionally for as long as a week (11 times in the past 12 months, the news reported. Since one of the main places we want to see one this trip is Karijini NP and Tom Price is the nearest town with diesel, we may have a problem!
But we’ll deal with that later.
Today was Monkey Mia and feeding the dolphins. I had the idea that we could wade into the water and just feed any dolphin that happens by and that there are lots of dolphins. This is really hyped to the tourist trade and I have to say we fell for it.
That said, that it is a really touristy thing. They (the national park) are trying very hard to protect the dolphins. Originally (the early 60s, I think) the dolphin feeding started just as I said, wade in and feed any passing dolphins. Researchers discovered that none of the young dolphins (offspring) were surviving. They didn’t have the skills that wild dolphins need to hunt for survival. Therefore the current orchestration of the feeding began.
The program reminds me a lot of the Desert Museum’s Raptor Free Flight (minus the feeding, of course!). There is a narrator (a ranger) who stands in the water with a microphone interpreting the behavior of the dolphins as they come in (the dolphins may not have watches, but they certainly know when feeding time is!) for about 30-40 minutes. The narrator knows the individual dolphins by name and talks about all their behaviors from their feeding behaviors to how they sleep: half their brain sleeps and the eye on that side closes. The other side of the brain and the other eye is awake to any dangers in the area. They spend about 1/3 of their time sleeping (one half brain at a time), 1/3 eating/hunting, and 1/3 playing.
After about 35 minutes of talking to the visitors who line the beach and the jetty (at least 100), the ranger makes everyone move back from the edge of the water (“if your feet are wet, you need to move back”) and volunteers with pails of fish arrive and the volunteers get to choose at random who of the 100 get to step forward and feed one dolphin one fish. I was lucky and among the first chosen (probably because I was directly in front of one of the volunteers), given a small fish—they only feed the dolphins 1/3 of their normal intake, divided into 3 separate feedings each morning—and instructed to lay the fish flat on the water and allow the dolphin to take it. Hopefully gently, which she did. Boy! do they have a mouthful of teeth! They only feed the female dolphins (if the fed the males they would take all the food and the females wouldn’t get much if any) and only the dolphins already in the “beach dolphin feeding program” and their daughters.
That’s it. That’s all she wrote, folks. My feet were freezing from standing in the Indian Ocean for 45 minutes (we got there at 7:25 and they didn’t start feeding until about 8:10). I got to feed the dolphin, we got some pictures (Randy stayed on the jetty so he could get pictures of me), so we left. Got fuel (now up to $2.04/litre) and headed about 400 km north to Carnarvon on our way to Exmouth.
We were running low on vegetables and our caravan park sent us to a family farm nearby. They had the largest avocados I have ever seen; they looked like large, green softballs and were way too big for Randy and me to eat before it spoiled so I asked if they had smaller ripe ones. The owner brought one out that had a small blemish—to me, a TINY blemish—and said it wasn’t salable, so she GAVE it to us! I can’t say it too often: Australians are so friendly and wonderfully generous! By the way, the avocado was absolutely delicious and once the skin was off, I couldn’t even find the blemish she said made it not salable.
Ian and Melinda gave us a bottle of “champagne,” Pas de Deus 1999 Pinot Noir and Chardonnay Methode Champenoise (I know that’s not how it’s spelled but I don’t have a dictionary—darn!). Quite nice and Randy was thrilled because he loves champagne.
Day 29—Thursday, June 26, 2008
The weather is turning a bit, lots of clouds on the western horizon and last night I heard the pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof. It’s nice to be snug as a bug in our campervan when it rains. I have vivid memories of tent camping in the rain and this beats that, for sure!
Today was just drive, drive, drive another 400 or so kilometers. We haven’t resolved the pronunciation of kilometer. Is it KEE-loh-meet-er or is it kih-LOM-it-er? We hear it both ways. I lean towards the first pronunciation, kind of like centimetre is pronounced, but Randy leans toward the other pronunciation. And we hear Aussies do it both ways.
We got to our caravan park, another Big4, Exmouth Cape Holiday Park, and it wss supposed to have internet but didn’t. Oh, well, whatever happened to truth in advertising?
One of the items we have been unsuccessfully searching for in every city we have driven through is a cheese “planer.” I guess Aussies use something else because nobody seems to even know what it is! In the US you can find a cheese planer in any Safeway or gourmet kitchen store or anything in between. Here, I guess, they just use a knife.
We drove out to the lighthouse and drove out on to one of the beach access roads to a wreck of a cattle ship from 1907. I am amazed that the wreck is still visible, not more than 100 metres from the beach. I would have thought that an iron ship would have corroded completely away in 100 years. But I would have been wrong.
Still cloudy but very nice temperature. Not so nice bugs, however. I am bitten from stem to stern and Randy seems immune. Bummer! But he is sympathetic.
We discovered that our refrigerator isn’t working. We can’t determine what is wrong; it’s not the circuit breaker, it’s not the power, we don’t know what it is but we have no refrigerator and we went shopping yesterday. Apollo will call us in the morning about repairs.
Day 30—Friday, June 27, 2007
I had a terrible night, I woke about every 30-40 minutes (unfortunately I could see the clock on the microwave) because of the itching from whatever tiny bug has bitten me and bitten me and … Randy is not affected at all and I have somewhere around 55 bites (when I couldn’t sleep, I counted bites!). Oh, well, travel always has problems! If that’s the worst problem we encounter, I’ll be grateful.
We are now on a first name basis with Ivan at Apollo (campervan) repairs. When we told him this morning where we were, he said, “You are at the end of the world!”
This is not shaping up to be a great day. We waited until about 10am for Apollo to call back about the fridge, which they finally did, telling us that it couldn’t be repaired today, but the refrigeration company could diagnose it for us today. The company, Bill Ruby Refrigeration, called us and told us to come by. Luckily they called before we left town on our way to the Cape Range National Park or we would never have had the experience we did.
Well, I said “they” called but it is a one-person shop and Bill himself called, said to bring the campervan over and he’d look at it. We went there and our serious problem rapidly became a highlight of the day. First of all, Bill came out to look at the refrigerator and then said he had just put his tea on and would we like some tea or coffee while he had his tea because he liked to drink it while it was hot. So we had coffee while he had his tea and we admired his cartoons. Like, “When you’re stressed, treat it like a dog would: piss on it and walk away.” That set the tone for the rest of the morning.
The shop is dilapidated. There are old refrigerators and old air conditioning units everywhere. There are trailers, loaded with old air conditioning units, that are never going anywhere because they don’t have wheels, nevermind having tires. Everything is rusted. Bill has an old RV in the back that he made us walk back to and look at the old English script name over the front of the vehicle: Far-Kin-Off. He said that most men liked that and most women didn’t. I loved it!
He worked and cussed and worked and cussed and made innumerable trips to get the part or tool he had forgotten. Bill was supposed to be going to Coral Bay because his parts supplier had sent 6 of the wrong part rather than 1 of the right part. Instead he stayed around to help us. This is why I love Australia and Australians.
Finally, after about an hour or so he found the problem—the manufacturer or the builder or somebody had forgotten (?) to crimp a wire to a connection and guess what, it came apart and of course the fridge couldn’t work. He fixed that and soldered it to make SURE the connection was secure.
Then, he said, I make my own beer, would you like to try some? Would we? Is the Pope Polish? Oops, that doesn’t work any more. Does a bear shit in the woods? Of COURSE we’d like to try some of his home brewed beer. He opened two bottle of his own recipe stout—as they say in Australia: Brilliant! I sort of like stout and Randy loves stout and we both thought it was—brilliant!
He even showed Randy his makeshift cellar. Very difficult to describe: The house (which is in back of his refrigeration business) was originally 3 feet off the ground. He wanted a cellar; he had a customer who wanted to repay him for letting him (the customer) park his caravan in the back yard. The customer excavated an additional 4 feet under the house and, because he was a bricklayer, bricked in the whole basement. It is accessed from a hidden trap door in the middle of the living room of his house and there, underground, Bill has his brewery. There is even a neat circular stair to get into the basement. I stayed in the back yard admiring his vegetables while Randy got the tour of the underground brewery.
Then, to make things even better, when they surfaced from his brewery, Bill cut some bok choy from his garden and gave it to me to cook for dinner, even including a recipe. Now I finally know what to do with Australian bacon!
Our fridge was fixed, Bill gave us a CD of all his jokes he’s gotten on the internet, we had some wonderful beer; life is good!
We headed off to Cape Range National Park and some lunch and hiking, comforted in the knowledge that our fridge was repaired and we could keep our beer cold.
Yardie Gorge was our destination. That is as far as one can go without a 4WD. If you have a 4WD and you are gutsy, you may (can? That’s iffy.) drive across the sandbar dividing the Yardie River Gorge from the Indian Ocean. How’s that for a pucker factor? You want to drive across a sand bar that divides the river from the ocean??? Are you nuts? Every once in a while there is so much rain (a major “rain event” as the weather guessers say) that lots and lots of sand washes down and the sand bar becomes, instead of an occasional thing, a MAJOR thing trapping sharks and all kinds of animals above the sand bar, sometimes for years, unable to return to the sea!
Yardie Gorge is about 70 km from Exmouth and is the end of the road unless you have a 4WD and major cojones. We don’t have a 4WD. There is what is laughingly called a medium difficulty hiking trail. MEDIUM difficulty ? I’d like to know what the Aussies call difficult. Randy and I hiked up hill and down dale; we clambered over sharp rocks; I sat down and sort of inched my way down a few ravines; we huffed and we puffed and finally we made it to—what? A lookout over the river. I should have taken the boat trip that was offered. It was a beautiful view up and down the river, toward the ocean and toward the hills. But, MEDIUM difficulty?
The flowers are just starting to come out. I think about what the weather is like in Tucson when the wildflowers are blooming. What that reminds me of is that when the wildflowers bloom, it’s getting warmer (today was in the high 20s—that’s low to mid-80s Fahrenheit) and the snakes are getting ready to move. Remember I said that Australia has 10 of the top 10 venomous snakes in the world. Some of which are nicknamed things like the 50-pace viper? Or their pictures in the visitor center have tags that say “Extremely venomous.” So I see those pretty flowers and I think: SNAKE! I like snakes and I’m a little nervous!
I have yet to see a snake in the wild.
We had the Frazer Woods 2004 Shiraz with dinner. Very nice.
Day 31—Saturday, June 28, 2008
I realized that what the signs said in the Rainbow Jungle, that many parrots are pests, is really true. Looking out my door I can see a bunch of beautiful cockatoos (pure white, beautiful crests) plundering the garbage. One I watched was able to open a large garbage can lid to get at the good stuff inside.
From Exmouth to Karratha is over 600km. A long day through the most isolated part of Australia we have yet been to. We will be even more isolated later in our campervan trip as we head south and of course on the camping tour we’ll be taking out of Darwin, but from Exmouth to Karratha there are two, count ‘em, TWO, petrol stations (actually, “roadhouses”) and absolutely nothing else. No houses, no ranches, no towns, nothing. Not even telephone poles or electric wires. We stopped at the first one, Nanutarra Roadhouse, and diesel was $2.349 per liter! I’m getting pretty good at not translating measurements—like kilometers to miles, or Celsius to Fahrenheit—but I can’t stop myself from translating dollars per liter to dollars per gallon: over $9 per gallon. We’re getting about 6.2 km/liter; I just don’t want to know how many miles/gallon that is.
It is so isolated that part of the highway is actually a runway for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, complete with runway threshold markings. We didn’t measure the length of the runway, but I’d guess it was about two kilometers.
We’ve also been learning that, unlike in Tucson, there is no “stupid motorist” law. Here, it’s pretty much, “Y’all be careful out there!” If you get stuck, maybe—MAYBE—someone will come along and pull you out. But there are places where they say: if you get stuck, it’s your problem.
When we arrived at the Big4 campground we were again told they do not have internet access. We joined Big4 because, we were told, every Big4 campground had what they call Net4, a transferable internet access program. Hard to transfer credits when there isn’t any internet! Our future travels may enable me to use it—we will stay at a Big4 in Perth and I’m pretty sure they have Net4. If all else fails, when we drive from Adelaide to Sydney we may stay at a Big4 even though we won’t have a campervan. The Aussie parks have very nice cabins as well, so we might well choose to stay in a caravan park even if we don’t have a campervan.
Randy finally saw ‘roos!
Day 32—Sunday, June 29, 2008
In general, Australia seems to be a country where you are left to do whatever you want to do but you also then have to accept any consequences. Suing others when something bad happens is, until recently, almost unheard of.
You are also expected to behave responsibly while driving. Since we have left Perth, some 1600 km south of here, I could count on the fingers of one hand the stop lights and stop signs. Instead, they have “round-abouts.” Instead of the stop signs we have at almost any intersection that doesn’t have a traffic light, they have a sign that says “Give Way.” In other words, Y’all be careful out there! Randy and I LOVE round-abouts and wish the US used them more. But nobody is asking for our advice about traffic. Bummer.
Today we went on a drive in the immediate vicinity of Karratha. In the spirit of being in Australia, “immediate vicinity” meant we only drove about 200km.
There are several small towns in the vicinity, old towns dating back to pearling days of the mid-1880s: Roebourne, Cossack, and Port Samson. We wandered around all of them, poking through the old buildings and reading about the towns and the townspeople and a little about the aborigines. Until now we have seen very few aborigines. By very few I mean fewer than a dozen since we arrived in Australia. The shadow of the aborigine is always there in the place names, the museums, the occasional comments on pictures in museums, but until now we haven’t seen many of them.
After wandering around for several hours and climbing a couple of hills to see the view we were tired and, of course, thirsty, which meant we wanted to find a pub. In Port Samson several places were recommended and we chose one with an upstairs deck and a view of the beach, the ocean, and the tankers unloading.
Near Cossack is a place called Whim Creek (I love these Aussie names! There is also Intercourse Island, not to mention East Intercourse and Mid East Intercourse and West—you get the idea!) that holds the record for most rainfall in 24 hours (28.6 inches) and 36 hours (on average, an inch an hour for all those hours: 36.5 inches)
After a great beer and an uninspiring but filling lunch in nearby Port Samson, we were ready to leave, but met up with some very young Aussie men who started up a conversation with us for about 20 minutes. They wanted us to have lunch with them. Too bad we’d already eaten! Anyway, we talked about politics and politics and oh, yes, politics. Plus some economics: They were all working in Port Hedland and making killer salaries. One said a friend of his was a first year apprentice mechanic and he was making $100,000! None of the others said exactly what they were making but they definitely said that Port Hedland was a place for a young person to go for 5 or 6 years and make a nest egg for later in life. Such fun talking to them! One had a t-shirt from Tombstone; he’d never been there, he just liked the t-shirt. Another told us about having “Destiny” tattooed on his forearm and realizing when they were done that they had tattooed “Destjny” instead. He was a good sport about it, he said, “The letters are right next to one another in the alphabet, it’s an easy mistake to make!” It’s all done in Old English script so it’s hard to read, and anyway, he said, that made his tattoo distinctive.
After that we went to Dampier, about 50km back past Karratha, mainly to see the statue to a dog, “Red Dog,” who lost his master and spent the rest of his life hitchhiking on busses and private cars. He was so well known and so popular that the town erected a statue to him after he died in 1979. Pretty ugly dog, though.
The weather changed on our way back and we drove through some rain and saw huge black clouds and the isolated downpours that our western US also has. Really black clouds and pouring rain then nothing and sunshine. By the time we got to Dampier, it was clear again.

Day 33—Monday, June 30, 2008
It was suggested by many people that we not bother with going to Port Hedland. Perhaps they were right, but go we did and, among other things, we bought a modern aboriginal painting. Unfortunately we shipped the provenance and the painting to Kathy and I can’t remember the name of the organization that sponsors the young (and not so young) aboriginal painters. Got some email done after paying $15 for 24 hours of wireless internet but the connection ended just before I was going to upload my journal. I try to remember back to trips before laptop computers when I wrote my journal longhand in a book.(Of course, the last time we came home from Australia I left my journal on the plane when we landed at LAX and never got it back.)
I can’t figure out why I could get to the website of the company that offered the internet service but every other site tells me there is no connection. Even big ones like CNN that have bandwidth to spare.
We didn’t do much in Port Hedland other than wander about looking at the town. We did what the visitor center suggested: go to an overpass and watch the loaded ore trains. Sounds pretty boring and it was; waiting for a train is only marginally more exciting than, say, cricket (or golf). But we wanted to see the extremely long trains that routinely arrive in Port Hedland. The longest was over 7km. How’d you like to wait at a railroad crossing for THAT train? It did come, we did watch it, it was very long.
Day 34—Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Continuing our train motif, we did a tour of BHP Billiton, a gigantic iron (and others) ore company.
I have to comment on profits. I do not think profit is a dirty word. Companies have to make a profit or they won’t be able to pay their employees and continue in business. But driving through BHP Billiton and listening to the guide telling us how much money they make—the infrastructure alone is worth $6 billion and every loaded ore train is worth some huge sum of money that I can’t remember at this point—does make me wonder why, exactly, they charged us tourists $24 each for the damn tour. And the heir to the finder of all the ore is the richest woman in Australia. Why, exactly, do they need the $480 from the tourists on our bus?
It was interesting to see how, exactly, they take raw stuff from the ground and turn it into valuable ore. Probably the most interesting was how they dump three ore cars at once. At once! They have a building that will sort of grasp three full ore cars at once and turn them 130°, dumping all the ore onto a conveyer belt.
We then drove from Port Hedland to the Auski Roadhouse on our first southbound day. From Port Hedland to Meekatharra (400km beyond Auski) is about 900 km on the major north-south highway, the Great Northern Highway, Australia 95. In that 900 kilometers there is almost nothing—no fuel stations, hotels, restaurants, ranches—except for one town, Newman, that didn’t even exist 40 years ago and two roadhouses that offer fuel, food, and minimal accommodation. In the US, outside of Alaska, I doubt there are areas as isolated, even on small highways, and certainly not on major highways. The longest segment of our trip so far will be about 608 kilometers from the Auski Roadhouse to Meekatharra. In that 608 km there will be one town and one other roadhouse. There are more remote areas in Australia—the Gibb River Road, the Canning Stock Road—but those are dirt tracks, not paved main highways. This road, the Great Northern Highway, is the main connection between Perth and the cities and towns of the north—Darwin and Broome.
After we stop at Auski Roadhouse for the night we will go tomorrow to Karajini National Park.
Auski Roadhouse looks just as if it we plopped down from the 1930s, lots of dirt, scruffy trees, and broken down vehicles scattered around. But, it has all we need for our campervan: electricity and water. No cell phone service, no internet, but we haven’t had those much at all on this trip anyway.
Day 35—Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Karijini National Park is one of the reasons we came to Western Australia. We had heard so much about the beauty of Karijini that we wanted to see it for ourselves. Beautiful it is, and interesting, but not spectacular. Since we live in the state that has the Grand Canyon, it’s hard to see any other canyon as spectacular.
Today was our tour of the park and we decided to go with Pilbara Gorge Tours (www.pilbaragorgetours.com.au) because they got great recommendations from the Visitor Bureau in Port Hedland and they take smaller groups. On the basis of a phone call, no deposit, just a verbal commitment, Jeff picked us up at the visitor center of Karijini NP. We were a bit nervous that they wouldn’t pick us up since we gave them no deposit and they couldn’t even get in touch with us (we have had no cell phone service since we left Port Hedland).
We needn’t have worried. Jeff picked us up at the promised time and we were numbers 5 & 6 of the tour that started in Tom Price. We first drove out past Dale’s campground (where we planned on staying), one of only two campgrounds in the park and on to Circular Pool, one of many water features in the park. There is access by foot and we could have done that if we stayed at the campground. On to Fortescue Falls and our first experience with how the Australians designate their trails. The trail to Fortescue was marked a Class 3 (of 6).
From the brochure: “[Class 3 ] users require a moderate level of fitness. Trails may be slightly modified, and include a combination of steps, some hardened sections and unstable surfaces.…Weather can affect safety.” OK, I can handle that. As Jeff—who, by the way never stops talking and who one of the others described as a “tour sheepdog: he nips at your ankles to keep everyone together, barking all the time”—said, there was no OSHA around when they constructed the steps. One step would be 3 inches, the next, 8 inches and the one after that, 16 inches. No consistency at all. And very steep but there were handholds and a railing part of the way. At the bottom was a beautiful pool and Fortescue Falls about 70 meters away. The only way to get to the falls was by swimming and Jeff said the pool was about 16° although the falls was warm; like a warm massage, he said. The water comes directly from the underground aquifer. Nobody volunteered to swim over there although Randy has regretted not doing it, so Jeff swam over alone.
The walk down and back was truly beautiful. Lots of rock figs growing along the way. These are gargantuan compared to my little rock fig at home! Where my fig’s roots grow over a rock about the size of two or three bricks, this one grows over the side of a cliff. The roots were twice as tall as I am! We saw several small birds, notably the Willy Wagtail.
On we went, back to the Visitor Centre for tea and muffins (homemade by Jeff’s wife), and to pick up six more tourists for a half-day tour, and a little walk-through of the Visitor Centre and of course, the shop. I would have liked a shirt with their logo, but the only sizes they had in any color were XS, S, and XXXL! I probably don’t have room in my suitcase anyway.
Next stop was Joffre (pronounced Jof; I have no idea why) Gorge, then over to the Oxer Lookout, also known as Four-Gorge Lookout, for lunch and the sad story of what can happen when there are accidents. Lunch was great, boxes and boxes of fresh veggies and fruits and some meats and breads for sandwiches. All laid out it looked too pretty to eat! Nevertheless, we all stuffed ourselves.
The main overlook at the Four Gorges actually has a gate in it for the specific purpose of attaching huge rescue pulley mechanism—that’s how many rescues they have at that particular spot! Perhaps I should say “had” because guides will no longer take people into these gorges, they STRONGLY recommend that nobody go hiking in this gorge, and the paths down are blocked. Not that that will stop everybody, but it’s a start.
On the day of the accident, two separate groups went into Hancock Gorge (one of the four gorges); each had one of their members injured enough that they couldn’t walk out. The SES (which is, I think, Shire Emergency Services) came out to rescue the hikers—there is a radio-telephone for just that reason; there is NO cell phone service at all in the park—along with the police and fire department.
Three men pulled out the first guy and were working to get to and pull out the second victim, a woman. They had been working for hours, it was by then the middle of the night . Jimmy Regan, one of the SES volunteers came out to the rescue site and told the other SES guy to go home, he’d been working too long. Jimmy was then dropped into the canyon in the other man’s place to help the other rescuers just before a huge flash flood came roaring down the canyon. Two of them had already hooked up the stretcher to the giant pulley mechanism and were able to hang on to the stretcher with the woman in it and they survived. Jimmy had nothing to hold onto and was swept to his death. They finally recovered his body several days later.
As Jeff was telling us this story, he actually broke down and cried.
In the advertising for Jeff’s Pilbara Gorge Tours he mentions that there is a hip-deep walk through a pool of water. We walked down into Weano Gorge towards Handrail Pool. These are rated Class 3 and Class 5: “Mostly indistinct trails through undisturbed natural environments. Terrain is rough. A high level of fitness is required. Users must be prepared and self reliant, with advanced outdoor knowledge.” I hiked down to where we would have to wade through hip-deep water and Randy continued on. I would have continued but Jeff’s attitude of “come on, keep up, keep moving, don’t be slow” turned me off. I have difficulty with high places and I have difficulty if I think I’m being pushed. I figured it would be better to stay behind and take pictures of all of them in the water. It is a beautiful canyon, but I just couldn’t go on.
This was our last stop on the tour, but before we could get back on Jeff’s bus we helped a couple whose car had died. First the guys tried pushing it to give it a jump start, but that didn’t work so they tried again. Still didn’t work so Jeff brought the couple back to the Dale’s Gorge Campground where they said they had friends who could help.
By this time it was after 4:30 and the ranger at the Visitor Centre had earlier said the campground usually filled up by lunchtime. Since we weren’t going to be doing anything more at Karijini the next day, we decided to go back to Auski and start our long drive early.
Day 36—Thursday, July 3, 2008
The scenery is awesome. Not just because of the vast distances but the variety of the land and the vegetation. In most areas you can see forever across a vast level plain, punctuated only by an occasional tree; go over a gentle rise and before you are mountains—well, large hills. These must be very old lands as the mountains are mostly low and smooth rather than steep and jagged.
We were driving south toward Perth through some of the most desolate country I’ve ever been in. Many of the hills have jagged outcroppings, probably loaded with ores of various sorts. Iron is the biggest ore around Western Australia and one of the mountains of iron ore—yes, whole MOUNTAINS of iron, and yet not so long ago (the 50s) Australia had an embargo on the export of iron ore because they were afraid they would run out—was discovered by a man just flying over. His compass would deviate wildly and he saw rust colored water running off; from those two clues he deduced that there was a lot of iron in them thar hills and got control of them. His granddaughter now gets a percentage of each ton of iron produced from the many mines in those hills. She is now the richest woman in Australia.
We finally got to Meekatharra. What can I say. Dirt, dirt, and, did I mention: more dirt. BUT, adversity has yet again spawned a wonderful experience.
We arrived in Meekatharra at the only caravan park in town (nothing to write home about!) and our credit card was refused. Sigh. We had called the credit card companies before we left but obviously they didn’t care that we said we were going to be in Australia for three months. Off we went to call the credit card in the US (“Call collect” they say). Well, that’s not so easy when we have no cell phone coverage and all the public phones (two, 2!, in town) accept only Telstra cards (what’s that? We asked.) Not to mention that “dialing” 0 doesn’t work. What to do? Go to the local pub, of course! They served my new favorite beer, Emu Bitter, so what else matters?
The phone book and the caravan park owner and anyone else we asked had no idea how to get hold of an operator (the logical, to me, “0,” doesn’t work). But, when we went to the bar and asked the barmaid, she just yelled out to the group around the bar. One of them knew the number to get the operator. Simple, right? Not exactly: call 12455 is what Randy was told. 12455 told Randy to call 1234. 1234 told Randy to call 12550. Then press 1 then 2 and then and only then get to an operator to make the collect call. Whew! Good thing we’d only had one beer!
Finally, we got our problem solved. How would we ever have known that, to get an operator, we would have to dial 12455? Whatever happened to “0”?
While we were waiting, a woman came with an orphaned kangaroo, about 8 months old; his mother was killed by a car. He was SO cute! I went to talk to her and she immediately handed me the ‘roo to hold. It was wrapped in a baby blanket just looking around, totally tame, seemingly. The only part that was sticking out from the bundling blanket was its face and ears. SO cute! We have pictures.
Day 37—Friday, July 4, 2008
Happy Independence Day! Kind of weird to not see American flags flying everywhere.
We thought that we’d see a couple of towns along the way back to Perth and only go a few hundred kilometers. Well, by 11:30 we had seen Cue and Mt. Magnet. Now what? Well, we might as well continue on to Perth and spend the days there that we didn’t at the beginning of this trip.
So on we went, another 500 kilometer day to Dalwallinu, another gold country town. The owner of the caravan park was out when we arrived so her note said to pick any spot and pay her later. We picked a nice spot sort of away from everyone else, had a nice steak dinner and opened our bottle of Suckfizzle wine. Laugh if you want, but Suckfizzle (the name) has a nice history and the wine was wonderful.
Day 38—Saturday, July 05, 2008
Dalwallinu is only about 180 kilometers from Perth and about 90 km from New Norcia. Today we decided to go to Perth tonight but stopped in New Norcia on the way.
New Norcia is the only religious town in Australia. It is owned, lock, stock, and barrel (I wonder where that expression came from? If only we had better internet access I could look it up. Even caravan parks that advertise “wireless internet” don’t seem to have it. I don’t know if it is the wireless provider or if I am doing something wrong. Since I have been able to get access at some places, I have to believe it is not what I am doing.) by the 9 remaining Benedictine monks. They are NOT “brothers,” I was told, they are monks and some are priests. One of them has just celebrated his 98th birthday and is the only remaining monk who immigrated to Australia from Spain—80 years ago! What will happen when the 9 monks die off, I don’t know. The tour guide, who herself is an immigrant from England, says that the Abbot says the community will remain as long as there are at least 2 monks. But the youngest is 38. And few are taking up the monkish lifestyle, none from Australia.
Every building in the town is owned by the monks. If you want to live in New Norcia (Norcia, Spain, was the birthplace of St. Benedict), you must work for the monks. Their mission in years past was education, now it is hospitality. They own the hotel and a guest house that is, according to the guide, very comfortable and modern. They also own a bakery with a new, but old-style, brick oven that makes delicious bread. I can attest to that, we bought a loaf and it is wonderful. Two years ago, one of their benefactors, who is the owner of a brewery, decided the best way to help them would be to create a beer (?). The monks agreed but it had to be a realistic recreation of a beer that would have been made and drunk when the monks were in their heyday.
As an aside, the guide told us about the Rule of St. Benedict. One of the differences between Benedictine monks/nuns and other orders is that they have no father/mother house, no place that is monk heaven that they all go back to occasionally and which dictates their behavior. Each community is its own community and each one interprets the Rule of St. Benedict according to where they live, and that is, they s, how St. Benedict wanted it. A community in the Australian desert will interpret the Rules differently from a community living on an island in the Pacific. She gave the example of how much wine each monk should be allowed to drink. The Rule says that each monk will have a “[some strange word] of wine each day.” The monks of New Norcia have no idea what that word means and so they have interpreted it to mean that they each get a half a bottle of wine every day. Since one of them is 98, it’s hard to argue with that interpretation.
We had a wonderful tour and a wonderful tour guide. We’ve had some pretty great guides over the past 3 ½ weeks, and she is at the top of the list! Knowledgeable and entertaining; what more can you ask? I have to give the monks a lot of credit as well. She was able to talk about their lives, their daily activities, their lifestyles, everything about them with humor. She could not possibly do that without their permission and it made the tour and the information so much better. How much fun to know that they drink half a bottle of wine every day! That the seats in the chapter house are canted forward so that when the novices fall asleep over their lectures, they will fall into the aisle.
Some of the sad things have to do with Vatican II. According to our guide (I have to stress that, although she did seem to know a LOT!), after Vatican II, a lot of the art work that had been done in the churches and other buildings was covered up—it was too overwhelming, and Vatican II mandated that it should be more relative to the people. So wallpaper was put over some frescoes that had been done many years earlier. And other frescoes have even been painted over. Without money, it will remain—except for isolated patches that have been cleaned—hidden. And they do not expect money any time soon to do any additional restoration.
From the little we could see, it is truly a tragedy. I wish I were Bill Gates.
We’re only 3 days from flying to Darwin. I’m really going to miss the campervan, in spite of its many bad points. Well, maybe I won’t MISS it. We’ve had such a great time travelling about and stopping when we want to. Going on a guide led tour and having to stop when they want us to stop will be a severe change! Eating in restaurants and on the tour will be a really different activity to eating what I cook. I sort of look forward to the tour and yet will miss our freeform travelling! Oh, well, on to a new adventure.
We’re going to be in Perth for 3 nights and we’ll figure out what to do when we get there.
Day 39—Sunday, July 6, 2008
We found a Big4 campground that is very, very nice but as usual the wireless isn’t working so I have no ability to send my journal or to check my email and download my bills.
The caravan park is beautiful, set in the wine country amongst grape vineyards—it is winter, so it looks kind of bleak and we are about to fly to Darwin so we can’t really stock up on wine. Bummer.
Today was my botanical garden fix. We went off to Kings Park and Botanical Garden and walked and walked and walked. It was so beautiful! The weather was fantastic, not a cloud in the sky and the temperature in the teens (Celsius!). One part of the walk overlooks part of the bay where there was a sailboat race going on. So beautiful! They sailed out, around a buoy, and unfurled their spinnakers. We watched the whole race and thought the boat with the blue and red spinnaker would win. At one point he (she?) was WAY ahead—we thought. But by the third time around a boat with a red spinnaker had caught up and by a hair, crossed the finish line first. Although watching sailing races is akin to watching paint dry, it was fun to see the order of the boats change (although we could only tell when their spinnakers were up because otherwise, the boats looked identical!).
We did a few other touristy things like the Western Australian Museum where we saw exhibits that were very bland and exhibits that would have stirred up some angst in the US. They are unapologetic about evolution. Throughout the Museum there was reference after reference to evolution. There were whole exhibits about evolution. Nowhere was there anything to say, Well, maybe evolution isn’t to everybody’s taste. The exhibit statements were all: This evolved from that; Evolution of this shows that…. In the US such unapologetic evolutionism would have engendered huge demonstrations, perhaps not in Tucson, but certainly in most other parts of the US.
This is why I love to travel!
Day 40—July 7, 2008
34 days to go! I can’t believe we are past the half-way point.
Today was a short, relaxed day except for the fact that we had to drive around to many, many hotels to find a room for tomorrow night. Good thing we decided that, since we have to drop off the (cleaned!) campervan, we should make arrangements for a hotel for tomorrow night. One might think we could just call several hotels, but one would be wrong. There is no list of hotels so we drove all around the airport looking for hotels—you might think that was just an expression, but you’d be wrong; we drove completely around the airport and there were NO hotels on the roads that were directly contiguous to the airport.
We thought there would be no problem finding a room for a Tuesday night, but the first three hotels had rooms tonight (Monday) but not tomorrow night. We started to panic. We went to another couple of hotels; same problem, rooms tonight but not tomorrow. Finally we found one. Now our only problem is to pack (ha, ha; not MY problem, Randy’s problem) and to find a taxi to get us to the airport before our 8:20 departure.
Putting that off for tomorrow, we headed off to Yanchep National Park. What a great idea it was to buy a month pass to national parks! Unfortunately, they don’t offer a pass for a year as they do in the US! We only have a month so we won’t be able to use it when we start out from Adelaide.
Yanchep is fantastic! It is more like a city park than a national park. There is a hotel (with great beer!), tours, caves, tons of picnic areas, a koala enclosure, a lake with rowboats for rent and, did I mention, lots of picnic areas? Randy & I just took off and walked and walked and walked.
First we went through the koala enclosure. You may not hold the koalas, but they do do a good job of putting the koalas up close and personal. In the small enclosure that they have, the park could not possibly grow enough eucalyptus to sustain the nine koalas that we saw. So, they have a wonderful system: in each of the three areas, each tree has a place to put a very large “vase” full of eucalyptus branches. And they put them low, so we photographers get to get up close and personal with the koalas. Unfortunately, nobody told the koalas that they needed to be awake for my pictures. Since koalas sleep about 20 hours a day (their digestive system isn’t the most efficient), I guess that’s not surprising.
Then we decided to just walk around the park. As we approached the Henry White Oval and Picnic Area (as opposed to the Bull Banksia Picnic Area, the Lakeview Picnic Area, the Yanger picnic Area, or any of the multitudinous other Picnic Areas) we noticed lumps with ears. We rapidly determined that these were, in fact, ‘roos! They are wild but we were able to walk among them fairly easily. Our voices seemed to frighten them more than our persons did. One baby ‘roo was very comfortable nursing from its mother (meaning it stuck its head deep into her pouch) as I got to within about 2 meters.
£24,000/liter for bull semen. Just in case you were thinking that fuel was expensive.
I love watching Australian TV. Nevermind that we only get 3 or 4 channels most of the time. We get Bart Simpson and the news (but no Benny Hill. Yet.). What more is there? Where else would I learn about the cost of bull semen? Not to mention that you will hear fuck-this and fuck-that. No bleep-this or bleep-that for Australian TV!