On the Road, Version Australia: Coral Bay back to Perth

We're safely back in the stellar public library in Perth, having completed the first leg of our journey: shown beautifully by Justin on this map. And once again, this is going to be a long post. *deep breath.* Here we go...

Day 9: Coral Bay, or, A Manta-bulous Day. Coral Bay, population 190, temporary holidayer population 1,900, is a delightful little seaside town with the world's most accessible coral reef right offshore. The beach walk we took after our last blogging episode was very shiny.

The SCUBA dive and PADI refresher course (it had been three years since my last dive, and one year since Justin's) we took the following day was world-class. Our camera isn't waterproof, so I have nothing pictoral to share with you -- but the coral bommies were gigantic, and we saw little yellow box fish, an octopus, a nurse shark named Matilda in a cave (who came out to say hello, chomping her teeth ominously), and a huge 4-meter-wide manta ray doing barrel rolls to feed, which looks like this.

Coral Bay also gave us our first taste of kangaroo. Aussies are obsessed with barbecues, and almost every caravan park we have stayed in has had one available. [Justin: Really, though, they are griddles!  What's so hard about a normal grill?]  We picked up some 'roo kabobs, whipped 'em up on the grill, and ate them in the van. They were delicious, see?

Day 9: Coral Bay to Exmouth to Giralia Bay, or, Darn You, Exmouth! It has to happen at least once every trip. You have a day where nothing goes particularly right. The snorkel gear you rent is broken (twice), the campsites in the national park you want to visit are all booked, by the time you've paid for your snorkel gear the weather is threatening a monsoon, the guy at the health food store thinks you said "latte" instead of "lassi," so you get a hot caffienated drink instead of a cold fruity one, etc. And you don't get to eat any of the town's famous king prawns. That was our day through Exmouth. So this was the only photo we took on the Exmouth / Cape Range National Park peninsula.


Darn you Exmouth! Darn you and your giant prawns!

We fled the cursed town and stayed the night on a homestead called Giralia Bay. Which, incidentally, is not really near any water, but still has this charming sign.


Wishful thinking?

Day 10, 11, and 12: Karijini National Park, or, This Place is Gorges! From Giralia Bay we hightailed it to Tom Price, going stir-crazy in the car. I know I said it before, but I've got to say it again: Australia is FRIGGIN EMPTY. Justin and I were crazily singing songs about emus and dugongs and taking photos out the window of piles of rocks. You think I'm kidding?

Yes. Those are rocks. That we were excited to photograph. At one point we got out of the car to take pictures of ourselves among rocks. Australia does this to a person. And this to our gas tank.

We made it on fumes to Tom Price, a nice little town full of miners and their wives and babies. We took a "spinifex walk" to Mount Nameless from our caravan park, picked up a cord for our iPods so we didn't have to listen to each other's songs about emus and dugongs anymore, and prepared for the following day in Karijini National Park.

Karijini is Western Australia's second-largest national parks and one of its most popular, despite being quite far from anything. Its signature attractions are its river gorges. Like most national parks in Australia, its offerings for visitors are a little bit limited; there were only a couple kilometers of walks through the park. But what kilometers they were.

We spent our first day exploring Dales Gorge, a stunning walk past waterfalls, swimming holes, ferns, and gigantic red walls. We swam at Fortescue Falls,

That's Justin's splash!

... and saw a goanna,

... and then went to the park's signature lookout over four different gorges.

After staying the night in an "eco lodge" in the park, we explored way down in those gorges (Weano and Hancock) in the morning. I don't mean to scare you, Mom, but it was a wee mite bit sketchy. The red rocks were worn glass-smooth from many years of erosion and flash floods and people walking on them, and the trail spent a long time being underwater. We swam. A lot.


I'm not wearing pants for a reason.

Those safety-conscious Aussies thought to put a handrail in only once: when the trail went thirty feet of vertical down a waterfall.

Every other time, they just put a little trail marker saying "go this way." Sometimes "this way" looked a little bizarre.

That's the trail. In the water. Which came up to my chin.

That's the trail. Down a raging water chute. One is supposed to stem along with one's feet and hands on opposite walls. They call this the "Spider Walk." I call it a tort waiting to happen and declined to proceed.

But it was beautiful. Really beautiful. And really fun. And Justin only fell once!  [Justin: but not on the hard part!]

We survived the gorges!

Before I move on, I have to share with you some final observations about Karijini. First, as you can tell from these photos, the land is red. It's very, very striking, and the photos don't capture the depth of the color on the gorge walls, or just in the land itself, particularly when the shadows get long.

Second, the main road through Karijini is, as you can see from the above shot, unsealed. Western Australia is so empty that most of the roads outside the main huge highways are not paved. This makes them bouncy and corrogated for many, many, many kilometers. Justin liked driving through puddles in an effort to make our van respectably dirty, and I dare say he succeeded. I just tried to keep the fillings in my teeth in place. These roads are so rugged that the 70+ kilometers we drove through Karijini actually churned the cream we have in our van's fridge into butter. (I couldn't make that up. It happened.)

Day 14: Newman to Payne's Find, or, The Long Drive. We woke up in Newman (where I poured butter into my morning coffee) prepared to make the long haul down the middle of the country, in the outback, as efficiently as we safely could. And we did: we drove nearly 700km yesterday down the middle of Western Australia, with 53-meter road trains (basically three trucks hitched together) flying past us. Some of them were extra wide. Some of the extra wide trucks were extra extra wide. We had to pull over for this one:

IT WAS IN OUR LANE.

9 hours in the car with an aching back prompts me to crack stupid jokes.

JUSTIN: "Hm. We're passing a place called Youthapina. I wonder what that is."

MEREDITH: "If Youthapina me, then I'll testify."

JUSTIN: "......."

It also prompts me to do the happy dance when exiting the vehicle, no matter how utterly crappy the caravan park is.

Also notice the healthy amount of red dirt on our van.

Note to all future travelers: skip Payne's Find. Its tourist attraction was a Gold Battery, which was closed, and alongside a large pile of rusty things without any explanation whatsoever.

No clue.

And its "pub" was like walking into someone else's living room. We ate rice and beans in the campervan and pushed on the following morning back to Perth.

Day 15: Payne's Find to Perth, where we are now, and probably to Fremantle. We stopped for lunch at Australia's only monastic town, New Norcia, which is run by benedictine monks. They fry up a mean steak sandwich and brew up a delicious Abbey Ale.

It was a really improbable place. Very peaceful. Big gum trees, a healthy bread-baking business, lots of large old monk-y looking buildings and cathedrals. We purchased a loaf of olive bread and a bottle of monk-made muscat and are back in civilization now, having successfully navigated the suburbs of Perth. It feels like we came from the outback two seconds ago, and these rolling hills and large eucalypts are surprising.

We're going to explore Fremantle, Perth's port cousin, tonight, and then make a loop through the southern corner of Western Australia in the van over the next week. We're expecting a great contrast to the huge, long, empty distances through the outback that we have just covered. We're particularly excited for Margaret Valley's wines; seeing Point Leeuwin, where the Indian Ocean meets the Antarctic; and exploring the gigantic old-growth tingle forests near Walpole.

Oh. And we've been traveling together now for a month. And yes: we still really like each other.

We should have better Internet access as we explore the south, so hopefully I'll be able to blog more than once a week. A big hug to our families and friends: we miss you guys like crazy.

xoxo,

Meredith [and Justin]