Australia 2003-4

There is a joke that Aussies only like their three B's: Beaches, Beer and Barbies. It is partly true, as every picnic area and Caravan Park has at least one public BBQ and the beaches are great, but we never encountered over indulgence in the national drink. We did enjoy the Perth area beaches on New Year's Day. We joined lots of other families on a sandy beach to swim in the waves and even found a spot to try out our boogie boards again.

Lancelin Windsurfers

Some of the best beaches in WA are north of Perth so we headed up there to have a look. Our first stop out of Perth was Lancelin, the perfect place for a picnic. The wind was strong off the shore and the bay was full of windsurfers and sailboarders. We stayed a long time watching them whip across the waters. The sailboarders looked especially daring as their kites allowed them to jump into the air over the waves.

Just a bit further up the coast is the fishing village of Cervantes. We had to retrace our steps back to the main highway to reach it but if you had a 4WD you could drive right along the coast. We put up our small 2 person tent that we brought with us from Canada for the first time in Cervantes. The wind was still blowing so strongly we were afraid our higher 6 person tent would take sail or be bent in half. It was cozy but worked well. The drawing card at Cervantes, besides fishing, is the Pinnacles, a short distance away in the middle of a yellow sand desert. One of the best times to view them is at sunset when the light changes their colour. We couldn't get over how many of these strange pointed rock protrusions there were. They looked like a city of people wandered into the desert and were turned to stone for their sins. An unpaved track meanders for 3.5 km through the sandstone pillars, some reaching 5 M in height.

Yellow Pinnacles

Jeanne with Len of Hutt

The next day we headed farther north to Kalbarri, a small town on the coast with nearby gorges to explore in a National Park. On the way I started reading about the Province of Hutt, just a short 35 km detour off our route. An Aussie farmer got so incensed with government policies that in 1971 he declared his 75 Km square property along the Hutt River an independent state. We went to visit Prince Len of Hutt and were welcomed warmly. Four other people who made the visit to his principality joined us, so he took us on the full tour. First of all he stamped our passports with his official seal and issued us visas for the duration of our stay. For $250 we could become citizens of Hutt for five years, but we decided Canadian citizenship was enough. We did buy some of his well designed stamps and toured his museum of mementos presented to him over the years. He opened his private chapel to show us the paintings of biblical scenes with the people, excluding Jesus and God, modeled on his family members and friends. He still seems to be enjoying his role and with three sons helping to run the farm, the country is in no danger of disappearing soon.

Rock Lobster or crayfish are one of the main catches along the coast so we had to try it our. We bought cooked crayfish on our way to Kalbarri, so we had a great dinner that night at the Caravan Park. The meat tasted the same as lobster except there are no big front claws. The body shell is very spiny but it is softer than lobster so it was easier to get at the meat.

We were reminded once again the next day that Oz is a hot country. We drove into the Kalbarri National Park to do an 8 km Loop walk in one of the gorges around the meandering Murchison River. The day started out well as we hiked along the cliff tops beside the river under overcast skies. At the half way mark we descended to the river just as the skies started to clear. It was a nice walk as well beside the river, but we could have done without the end section. By that time the sun was beating down and we were walking across boiling hot sandbars with no shade. We were glad to reach the gorge cliffs again where at least there was a little shade. We were totally out of water by the time we got back to the car but thank goodness for the emergency supply of water we had stored for our trip to Alice Springs. We never needed it then but it was certainly welcome now. The moral of this tale is to start walking a lot earlier in the morning if you are going to hike in the heat. It was still a good hike to do.

Back at our campsite, it was time for a cooling swim in the mouth of the Murchison River where it meets the ocean right in the town. There were even colourful fish to see right inshore.

Ray managed to put his personal signature on Priscilla. He backed up too close to a tree at our campsite, so Priscilla has one more dent to add to her collection. At least it just affected the panel behind the back driver's side door and not the door itself. In fact, Ray says you can hardly notice it in most lights.

That night we celebrated with a typical Aussie coastal meal. Findlay's Fish BBQ serves great fish dinners cooked on an open Barbie. You order your meal then wait on long picnic benches for your meal to be cooked to order. There was so much food I doggie bagged the remainder for lunch the next day.

Shark Bay, on a peninsula off the west coast north of Perth, has been granted World Heritage status for four reasons. There are vast sea grass beds, the endangered dugongs, huge sea cows feed in the grasses, super saline waters allow stromatolites to grow and there are kilometers of beaches formed of compressed, broken shells. There are lots of sharks along the bay, but none that threatened us.

Hamelin Pool, at the beginning of the peninsula, is the home to one of the largest colonies of stromatolites in the world. They look like a bunch of stumpy rocks in the water but they are in fact living microorganisms. They exude oxygen and were one of the earliest life forms on earth. The high salinity in the Bay kills off any predators they might have and the adjacent shell beaches contribute calcium bicarbonate, an essential element to their growth. Thank goodness there were informative signs on the boardwalk around the stromatolites for we would have said "nice rocks" and walked on, missing the significance of the colony.

rare stromatolites at Hamelin Pool

blocks carved from hardened shell

The shell on the beach is packed so hard that local residents once cut blocks of shells to use in house construction. The shell beach is now protected but we saw a church built of shell blocks in the nearby town of Denham.

At the tip of the peninsula is the resort village of Monkey Mia where dolphins come to visit the tourists. We went to visit for the day and this time we were lucky. We arrived at 9 AM to be told that the dolphins were in shore but had not been fed yet. We quickly parked the car and rushed to join a crowd of people wading in the shallow waters at the shoreline. There were about six dolphins just inches from our feet; mostly females with their babies. The staff at the resort gave a running commentary on the dolphins while protecting us from them and vice versa. You are not allowed to touch them for fear of transmitting diseases, but if you are lucky you can feed a dolphin. After about 20 minutes of swimming in the shallows, the mother dolphins are given fresh fish as a reward. People are chosen at random from the crowd to hand a fish tail first to a dolphin. Young children are the most likely to be singled out for this coveted job. The babies are not fed because they must be trained by the mothers to fend for themselves. After the feeding, the dolphins go back to sea but they may return twice more in the morning.

While waiting for a return visit we watched an excellent video made by National Geographic on the wild side of dolphins. We saw that dolphins are not all cute and social sea mammals. They can and do hunt other fish and animals in packs and have been known to kill for sport. Flipper has a mean streak!

Jeanne gets to feed a dolphin, carefully

We were relaxing by the beach when I realized that people had gathered at the shore again. The dolphins had returned! We hurried down and this time, with a smaller crowd, I got to feed one of the six dolphins that turned up! Ray was my official photographer. We had one more turn to see the dolphins and we had a lovely swim on the white sand beach. It was a most satisfying day.

Our last destination on the West Coast was Coral Bay at the southern end of the Ningaloo Reef, WA\rquote s answer to Queenslands Great Barrier Reef. Fellow campers where we stayed that night told us that they had just returned from Coral Bay. They left prematurely after two days of torrential rains. We were in luck. We did drive through some rain the next day and we had to ford some flooded sections of the highway, but by the time we reached Coral Bay the sunny weather had returned and Coral Bay did not disappoint. The reef is just offshore, in places less than 30 M away, so you can just wade into the warm waters with your snorkeling gear and gaze at lots of colourful fish. We found the best spots on the beach and even saw a turtle and a stingray.

Quad bike trip at Coral Bay

We talked to one woman who enthused about a Quad Trek to some of the beaches only accessible by 4WD. We managed to get on a trip that afternoon and had a great time. The Quads are motor scooters with four big fat tires providing stability. You can ride a Honda model alone or ride tandem on a Bombardier. We each had our own bike. Our guide Rob led us out slowly across a hard packed trail next to the small airstrip and across the softer sand dunes. It quickly became evident that one woman with her 10 year old daughter on back was in trouble. She was terrified and kept veering off the path in a panic. Rob solved the problem by giving Ray his Quad and driving the tandem with the mother and daughter on back. They were very happy and relieved with this arrangement.

Our first stop was an area at Coral Bridge called the Aquarium. The Reef encloses a small relatively shallow area with waters so clear and protected that the fish swim in a living aquarium. I swam right in the middle of a large school of silvery fish. It was magical.

On the bikes again we took off again across the dunes to a beach called the Lagoon. There were a few other 4WD vehicles there, mostly fishing for the day. We were there to swim. Rob cautioned us about the stronger current in the lagoon but we were promised bigger fish and perhaps turtles. Ray and I swam together to the far end and sure enough, we followed a turtle for a short while as it surfaced and made its way lazily through the water. We did see lots of other fish as well, some quite a good size.

Rob instructed us to "let her rip" on the way back but not to go above 60 km/hr as the motors laboured at those speeds. He led the way and we all roared along keeping up. Ray said he reached 70 km/hr on Rob's more powerful machine but I only got to 65 and pulled back a bit. It was a great area for those quad bikes.

Back at our campsite we proceeded to pull everything out of our car. Two days before I pulled out a bag of rolls to make sandwiches for lunch and discovered there was a hole bitten through the bag and a bite taken out of one roll. We thought a bird had gotten into the car so we threw the one bun away, double bagged it and put it back in the car. Just before going on our quad bike trip we discovered that we had a mouse passenger in the car. Two buns had chunks out of them and there were mouse droppings. The car got a well deserved cleaning out but we couldn't find the mouse.

sign at remnants of Rabbit Proof Fence

That night we put everything a mouse might nibble in our eskie and the next day we moved on, back south and east of Perth to Kalgoorlie-Boulder (Kal), a gold mining town. We stopped along the road to take a photo of the last remnants of the Rabbit Proof Fence, made familiar to us by the excellent Aussie film of the same name. The fence was started in 1903 to keep those pesky rabbits, an introduced animal to Oz, away from farmers crops. The rabbit population has dropped sufficiently that the fences are no longer needed. The problem now is an overabundance of Emus and I guess the fence doesn't deter them as most of the fences were dismantled in 2001. There is only one section remaining a little east of Kal.

I had no idea that mining and in particular gold mining was so prevalent in Oz. Kal was one of the richest finds in Oz and is still a working site. With the price of gold currently on the rise, the town is booming and miners are in demand. We went on an excellent underground tour of a mine that ceased operations in 1952. Our guide was Kim, a woman from Vancouver married to a miner, so she was a wealth of information as well as entertaining. The original mine had 13 tunnel levels each leading to the main vein called a stope. The first level was 100 M below the surface and each successive tunnel was 100 M below the next. Only the first two levels are accessible now as the others are filled with salty ground water. The second level is only open for inspection tours to ensure the structural safety of the mine. We descended in an elevator to the first level, which is fully lit and the only level open for tours. We were shown how the mine was worked originally under unbelievable conditions. The miners seldom lived beyond their mid-twenties after breathing in quantities of rock dust. We were assured that safety is a prime consideration now but it still remains a hazardous industry. Kim demonstrated some of the tools used by the miners and at just 20 % of their capacity, the noise was enough to force you to put your fingers in your ears. The miners can make great money. Kim's husband, a driller with 20 years experience is in such great demand that the two of them work only 7 months a year. The rest of the time they visit family in Canada and Tasmania.

tour inside Kalgoorlie Mine

Kalgoorlie Super Pit

Kalgoorlie also boasts the Super Pit. Some years ago an entrepreneur bought up the remaining leases for a series of mines that were not producing enough to make them economically viable individually. Open pit mining was the answer. We stood on a viewing platform above this busy operation to watch a continual line of dump trucks fill up and drive away to a processing plant where the gold is separated from the rock. The open pit is now 3 km long, 1.4 km wide and 330 m deep. The gold extracted is only 2 - 28 gms per ton of rock but that is still enough to make the operation viable. Of course there are heaps of residue to get rid of so large tailing mounds are evident all around the area. That is one of the prices we pay for gold.

From Kalgoorlie it was back across the Nullarbor and the mouse went along for the ride. Ray bought small mousetraps in Kalgoorlie, but the mouse still avoided capture. We planned to stop over part way to stay at the Eyre Bird Observatory. We wanted to get rid of that mouse before we left the car in a carpark for more than a day. We had visions and returning to a mouse eaten car. Ray bought some bigger traps and some mouse poison for good measure. The morning we were to be driven to the Eyre Bird Observatory, Ray came into our cabin brandishing a dead mouse in one of the traps. That mouse's journey across WA was over and, knock on wood, we have seen no further mouse evidence.

We had read about the Eyre Bird Observatory on our trip west and given our newfound interest in birds, decided it sounded interesting. It was. We certainly could have spent several days there very happily. It is run by Birds Australia as a simple lodge in an old Telegraph station building south of Cocklebiddy on the Nullarbor route. If you have a 4WD with good clearance you can visit for the day, otherwise you can stay overnight for as long as you please for $82.50 the first night and $72.50 for successive nights, including full board and transport the 12 Km over sandy roads to the house. The current wardens are the most genial Ken and Karina Harris, retired Raspberry farmers from Tasmania. Ken does all the repairs and upkeep and Karina produces tasty meals. There are lots of walks to explore the area, huge white sand dunes to climb, and a long sandy beach to walk. Fishermen come for the fish and of course there are lots of birds. We managed to identify several varieties we had not seen before just sitting on the front porch. We had planned to stay just one night and leave first thing the next morning. We liked it so much we delayed our departure to accompany Ken and Karina in their 4WD to do their weekly bird count along the beach. We drove 14 km west, stopping to count shorebirds along the way. They said there were fewer birds than some trips but there were plenty for us. It was a great place to spend a relaxing few days.

Dunes at Eyre Bird Observatory

Flying Doctor can land on the road here

Back across the Nullarbor road we passed sections of the highway that had been widened to allow small planes to land. The planes are part of the famous Royal Flying Doctor Service, established to transport people from remote communities to the nearest medical facility.

We are now back in Adelaide before heading east to the state of Victoria where we plan to take the ferry to Tasmania before heading back to Sydney. Priscilla has taken us almost 21,000 km so far and there is more to come. We treated her to two new front tires when we reached Adelaide, so we are hopeful she will come through the whole trip with flying colours.

Eric and Carol Hobson are providing us with a little bit of luxury and the use of their computer. We have had a relaxing swim in their pool, good dinners and great company. Maybe we can reciprocate on one of their visits to Canada.