On the Road, Version Australia: Perth to Coral Bay

We're in Coral Bay! We've been on the road a week -- and oh, boy, do we have a lot of things to talk about. I'll just start at the beginning and try to keep it organized by day. This is going to be a lengthy post, so bear with us.

Day 1: Perth to Cervantes, or, Justin and Meredith Meet the Improbable Chariot. She is equipped with a fridge, microwave, sink, bed, table, curtains, and all the amenities. Justin, especially, is utterly enamored by RVing, commenting brightly after we ate our first sandwich lunch, "This is so awesome. A sandwich! With mayonnaise! At a table!" It's the little things.

We left Perth in a flurry of nerves and windshield wipers, having been steeled for the weirdness of driving on the left but not for the standard transmission. We succeeded in only driving into oncoming traffic once -- a major victory, if you ask me. [Justin: Meredith kindly uses "we" here, but of course it was me.  The most embarrassing thing I think is turning on your windshield wipers when you mean to use your blinker.]  It only took us about a half hour of trundling through the wineries lining Perth's outskirts before we were essentially alone. Well, us and the emus.

This one was hanging out at a gas station off the highway called Southern Cross. It had a windmill. I took a lot of pictures of the windmill. And then we were on our way to scenic Cervantes, where we experienced our first caravan park, right next to the Indian Ocean. And we were rewarded in our survival of jittery Day 1 by a miraculous sunset.

Day 2: Cervantes to Dongara, or, The Day We Learned What A "Skimpy" Is. Our day began with a southerly circuit down to Nambung National Park to see the Pinnacles.

 

No one exactly knows what created these things. The Aboriginal people of the area say that they are the reaching fingers of lost sons who went wandering in the desert and got sucked down under the sand. First explorers thought they were remnants of shipwrecked vessels. Now, some scientists think that they are some kind of fossilized or limestoned petrified forest, or compacted sand, or something. What they are, for certain, is otherworldly.

Flocks of galahs perch in them -- galahs are common, but very striking, pink and gray parrots. We wanted to see a honey possum, one of the tiniest marsupials, but were not rewarded. And emus eat desert berries and poop around the pinnacles. We were very proud of our discovery.

[Justin: As if I had made it myself]

Then we headed out to Lake Thetis, one of the many hypersalinated lakes around this area, and one of the locations where stromatolites still persist. Moving on the road, saluting other campervans, we took a detour down a dirt road towards Lesueur National Park to check out some of this season's wildflowers. Three observations about that road. First, we were introduced to the fact that not very many of Australia's roads are paved at all; you go two seconds off the beaten track and you're on red dirt. Second, we didn't see a soul. For ages. Ages and ages. Third: The road was so deserted that we nearly hit a kangaroo. (It hopped! That's still such a novelty!!) We freaked out, stopped the van in the middle of the road, and ran off into the bush chasing him for a while. He won the race.

We filled up on petrol at a station where a friendly station owner washed our windshield for us out of kindness and impressed us with his ability to do math very quickly in his head. And then on to Dongara, a workingman's town, where we went to the pub to work out our itinerary for the next day and were a little shocked that the barmaid, a very attractive woman in her mid-twenties, was dressed like a naughty policewoman, complete with gun in garter belt. This, apparently, is the concept of the "skimpy." (After we were educated in this concept, I realized why the bar did not have a ladies' room. I had to go next door into the restaurant.) The highway workers in their reflective vests who peopled the place were very taken with her. We wound up putting a few rounds away with the fellows at the pub, chatting about purchasing property in San Antonio, their weapons caches, and the "aboriginal problem" -- none of my probing questions, by the way, will ever change these guys' minds, but after a beer or two I did try a bit. We ate some meat pies for dinner (we've gone native!) and meandered our way back to our caravan after a memorable taste of "real" Australia.

Day 3 and 4: Dongara to Kalbarri, and then Kalbarri Again. We hauled out of Dongara in a flurry of dust, having miraculously avoided a hangover by a whisker. We drove straight up to Kalbarri, passing through the towns of Geraldton and Northampton, where we missed the annual Airing of the Quilts. [Justin: And let me say I'm still smarting from that one.] Let me just say, at this point, that the vast majority of our time is spent driving and looking at this:

Australia has a STAGGERING AMOUNT OF NOTHING IN IT. We drive for kilometers and kilometers and it is all low scrub and red dirt and barely anyone else on the road. The emptiness is just remarkable. And we're hugging the coast! We're both looking forward with trepidation and curiosity to what it's going to be like in the middle!

Our introduction to Kalbarri was a lookout point over the Indian Ocean, where we watched migrating humpback whales pass.

Thar she blows!

We stayed at Big River Ranch, a relaxed horse ranch with probably 35 horses and several goats, two of which were feral (a big problem, actually; the owner's mom, Rosalyn, asked us to drive slowly unless we saw a goat, in which case to "speed up."). It had a large campers' kitchen and attracted a bunch of other wanderers like us. We had great conversation with a couple of Ozzies from Melbourne who are driving all the way around the country, and who had seen all six seasons of the West Wing. (Side note: can you imagine watching six seasons of a television show detailing the nuances of Australian politics??) We slept peacably.

And the following day we were treated to a beautiful 8km hike around the gorges in Kalbarri National Park.

I don't know if it really comes across in this photo, but the Loop Hike follows a bend in the river and starts out on a precipitous ridge line on plated red stone, and then descends down into the riverbed where the trail gets a little, uh, rugged.

[Justin: Seriously, someone went down there and drilled two holes in the rock and attached the sign to make sure that people would go this way.]

I navigated it with skill.

We passed through acres of yellow wildflowers on our climb back up. The humming of the bees was loud and consistent. As was the bleating of the feral goats and the unwordly squawking of the Australian crows, which sounds eerily like a human -- think The Shining's "red rum." Oh, and did I mention these freaking crazy anthills?

We climbed back up to Natural Window's overlook slapping (called the "bush salute") away the dive-bombing flies and ready for dinner back at the Ranch.

Day 5: Kalbarri to Denham, or, Shark Bay World Heritage Day. Itchy feet got us on the road early to Shark Bay. Our first stop after many many many miles of nothing (and a bit of a gas scare -- we rolled into Billabong Roadhouse on empty, even though we started with half a tank!) was Hamelin Pool, home of the telegraph station that relayed NASA messages in the sixties, and the infamous Naked Telegraph Pole Man:

Yes, I bought a commemorative stubby holder. Also notice that, despite Bill Bryson's assertion to the contrary, the man is not wearing his boots. Fact check fail.

. . . and the world's largest colony of stromatolites.

These colonies of cyanobacteria were the only thing on earth for, like, 2000 million years. They photosynthesized en masse, producing oxygen, long enough to actually change the world's atmosphere and make more complex life possible. They were mostly eaten by the creatures they helped create, but here, where the hyper-saline environment (created by the wall of sea grass at the top of Hamelin Pool) is intolerable to most other forms of life, they continue to flourish, creating little bubbles of O2. We stopped in the telegraph station where kindly Terry showed us a little five-minute video and his collection of creepy things in jars, and introduced us to the only stromatolites in captivity and told us fantastical stories about the telegraph line. We learned a lot, including that human beings are the "fingernail on the armspan of life:"

And that Alan Ginsburg spent a bunch of time in Australia. There was a photo of him playing sticks on the wall.

From Hamelin Pool we trucked on to Shell Beach, again a product of the hypersalinated water; billions of little shells, the remnants of little clams that can tolerate the salt, are piled 17m deep in places.

The effect is mind-boggling.

We then rolled on through Shark Bay. At this point we were filled with thousands of questions about the salinity, the history of this place, the weird things we were seeing. Shark Bay, as this whole area is called, is a World Heritage site, fulfilling all four of that designation's criteria. Fortunately, the UN had thought to build a truly spectacular museum (they call it a Discovery Center because it's more pictures and text than objects) that answered most of them, and also told us some great stories -- about, for example, a dude who survived at sea after a wreck for 11 days in his icebox while the current blew him in a big circle. We decided to skip on the real tourist attraction in Shark Bay -- the tame dolphins that visit the nearby resort of Monkey Mia -- and tucker down with some local seafood.  [Justin: The restaurant claimed to be the westernmost restaurant in Australia, which simply by looking down the street at all the other restaurants we can safely say is a bit of an exaggeration.] Those bricks behind Justin are made of the shells we mentioned earlier.

This is Crayfish. Like everything else in Australia, it is bigger than normal crayfish.

Oh! I forgot to mention our stopoff at a wildlife-viewing overlook, where we were incredibly blessed to see a grazing dugong (a relative of the manatee!), as well as a bunch of sharks and rays.

Day 7: Denham to Quobba Station. On the road out of Shark Bay, we saw four emus on the road and chased them safari style. I don't think I'll get over those weird half circles with legs. And then we rolled into Carnarvon, and, disappointed with the boringness of that fruit-growing town, we checked the map. I pointed at a dot. "Look, Blowholes," I said. "What are blowholes?" Justin asked. "No idea," I replied, "but there's a working sheep ranch 10 km down a dirt road where we can apparently park the van." "Done," said my intrepid traveling partner, and we were rewarded with these frenzied things:

Old faithful at the end of the universe

And, at Quobba Station, a walk with stubbies of Emu Bitter in the tidepools amongst cartoon oysters:

And this sunset, with migrating humpbacks breaching in front of it:

And a quiet campsite amongst friendly Aussies and their bounding dogs. Lesson: Take the adventure.

Day 8: Quobba Station to Coral Bay, or, WE'RE UP TO DATE FINALLY. We've made it to Ningaloo Marine Park, a peninsula where we're planning on staying three or four days to dive and snorkel in Australia's "other" great reef. Today, we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. [Justin: There is so little of interest on Australian roads that they put up signs when you cross a parallel, which we have done 3 times now.]

Did I mention there is NO ONE ON THESE ROADS? [Justin: Hey I was sleepy.]

We are over 1200 km from Perth. We have traveled on many many lonely flat roads past infinite roadkill wallabies and scrub brush. We've taken showers that are salty from bore water and chatted with Australians who call us "city slickers" and use the word "billabong" in context. Witth a cheers with stubbies of lagers in our coozies, we bid y'all "g'day" -- Aussie style!

Meredith