Advertisement
Published: December 19th 2012
Oh Lord, Won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porches. I must make amends.
December 8 our Mercedes land yacht is anchored in the caravan park at Peaceful Bay on the Southern Ocean. The sound of surf breaking can be heard coming from a beach where the white sand has been pushed by wind and tide from the restless Southern Ocean into burms along its edge producing a garden of succulent green saw grass contrasting the brilliant blue sea with the white of breaking waves and the tan of exposed iron stained Canadian shield granite poking through the sand.
This view is a few short steps from our campsite. We have an awning out the side under which we have attached a windowed fly bag. Theoretically the flies can’t get in and we can sit in peace watching them buzzing around the fly screen windows. When outside this fly tent, Rolande has adopted the tradition of wearing a black fly bag over her hat resembling a Moslem Burka. The minute we arrived here our own personal tribe of flies adopted us. I’ve seen signs proclaiming Australia as a wonderful place because thirty trillion flies couldn’t
be wrong. I don’t think Australian flies have any predators unlike our Canadian flies who must contend with fly eating birds and a million species of spiders who easily capture zillions of flies in their beautifully made webs. I’m sure these same tribe of flies enthusiastically accompanied us on our bicycle ride this morning,. There are at least three species of flies; the tiny ones that like to crawl into your ears and nose having a drink at your tear duct as they wander by, the slightly larger ones with white speckles on their heads who have big feet which tickle and then there are the large green marsh flies who like to take more than the loose flakes of your epidermis. Because they seem so fearless and plentiful I can only assume flies have no natural enemies. I can imagine the conversation if a Canadian fly came for a visit with an Australia fly. Australian: Yes I have three million offspring and I don’t have to watch them at all, there isn’t anything here to harm them. Canadian: (rather embarrassed) I only have fifty thousand offspring and I have to watch them like a hawk. We have thousands of
killer birds they call swallows and dozens of species of spiders casting webs in all directions. And then she bursts into tears, the poor little darlings hardly have a chance.
This morning we rode our bicycles east on the Bibbulmun track, a walking path extending from Albany to Perth.. Aside from the flies the place is a gem. I don’t think we have had better camping. The proprietor tells us the place will remain empty until Christmas week and then stay full until the end of February. Apparently February is the month the Gray Haired Nomads come out and so I suppose we look a bit out of place at this time.
We have decided to stay here for a day or two to reflect on the last two months of our journey around Australia. We left Sydney on the cruise ship Vollendam on Oct 21 following a wonderful three weeks visiting in Greenwell Point, the Clarence Valley and poking around Sydney. Our original plan of driving north across the top was kyboshed by advice from Australians who told us it would be a very bad idea to travel through the north in December. After investigating the costs
of driving, finding the fuel costs alone would pay for the two of us to travel in a luxury ship to the same places we wanted to see with an added bonus of seeing the Komodo dragons of Indonesia, we decided it would be sensible to enjoy the luxury. Yes and I did enjoy the trip so much so that I could feel the belly fat dangling over my stuffed Tilley shorts when I got off the boat in Fremantle.
Twenty-five years ago, in Comox, we had met and befriended Tim and Chris Jackson, Exchange school teachers from Perth. We hadn’t been in contact with them since 1988 but when we asked our friends in Sydney if they had any information about them. They looked them up for us. When we called it was as if we had said good bye only yesterday. They were there to meet us at the dock in Fremantle when the Vollendam arrived.
Our plan of buying a camper van and traveling across the south of Australia was welcomed with enthusiasm by Chris and Tim who drove us all over the country looking at campers. They took us to a giant four-wheel drive
camping show in Perth where we bought what Tim and Chris called the essentials of camping. It seems Australians are camping mad and spend every spare moment in the bush or on the beach fishing. We had heard about decommissioned-ambulances but I didn’t think there was any way I could pull one apart and re-fit it as a camper van but on our travels we saw a car yard with two ambulances for sale. We stopped to take a look and when I saw the five cylinder turbo-charged diesel and only 140,000 km on the clock I was smitten. The problem was a million bits of red tape before we could take it on the road so we went back to trying to find a suitable van. Chris called me one day to tell me she had found a 2003 ambulance with all the red tape done and Tim assured me he would help me fit out the van. Tim is a very talented fabricator who has every tool known to man and so we jumped in, bought the van, proceeded to tear all the masses of blinking lights, miles of wires, strobe light power supply panels, giant iron mounting
brackets, beautiful stainless steel trays, oxygen supply tubes, suction pumps and parts of the fiberglass interior. And then we became well know in Bunnings, the giant building supply store down the road. We bought a vanity cabinet, a stainless steel sink, plumbing fittings and all kinds of stuff you need to refit an ambulance. Thanks to Tim, his knowledge of camping and his ability to make anything, a week later we had a working camper van.
As an added bonus I lost ten pounds working ten hour days in thirty degree temps under a lot of stress to get the job done before Tim and family departed for London to welcome another grandchild. We gave Tim and his daughter Samantha, who was studying for exams for second year of medicine while I bashed away on the ambulance, a day of rest before they departed for London, and headed off on our journey. It was too much fun hanging around with the Jackson’s and we couldn’t have been any better prepared to waddle through the Australian countryside.
We traveled north to Cervantes and The Pinnacles. We soon found out our air-conditioning wasn’t working. Later I found out I must
have cut a few wires too many when decommissioning the ambulance. Our first night we camped in a Farmers paddock after seeing a caravan park where everyone was cheek to jowl. The moon went down at two AM and when I got up at three AM the sky was black glass filled with a firmament of stars, the Milky Way leading down from Orion to the brilliant kite of the Southern Cross. Memories of dark skies and the closeness of the heavens while at sea came flooding back. It was easy to imagine the back spot where south was by aligning ninety degrees from the Pointer Stars with the axis of the Cross to find true south.
The Pinnacles is a park filled with calcium-carbonate shafts sticking out. I was amused when I read the theories of how they came about in the well laid out discovery center. Both Rolande and I knew exactly what they were the minute we saw them because we had anchored in patches of the dam things all over the Pacific. Obviously they were ancient bommies or coral heads, which had survived buried in sand as the land rose out of the sea. Apparently
the sand hills covering them had only recently moved on exposing the appendages of a long forgotten coral reef.
After a lovely visit and a good stay at the caravan park in Cervantes we headed south back through Perth and on to Manjimup to enjoy the hospitality of Tim and Robyn Harrington. The one person who had kept in touch with us from Perth over the years was Robyn’s mom, Glenys. We were looking forward to visiting Glenys but when we tried to locate her we found Robin and Tim who we had met and visited on our previous trip to Australia. Robin gave us the unfortunate news of her mother’s dementia but wanted us to visit them in Manjimup. We felt terribly fortunate to have such wonderful friends. Tim found a bloke to look at my air conditioning system and gave us the keys to his beautiful house in a land I had only dreamed of. He has five acres deep in the Kari and gum forests of South Western Australia where the air is filled with the deep peppery smell of the gum trees and a cornucopia of deep, haunting bird songs. I was in heaven for
four days living the true Australian life of wood fires, lamb barbeques, and good wine. We stayed four days moving on temporarily for a few days visiting the Margaret River peninsula from one lighthouse to the other. Things were a bit pricey but camping and riding our bicycles around the wonderful towns and beaches were priceless. I especially liked Busselton and the cool clear air flowing in from the Indian Ocean.
If I ever get an expensive house and need an expensive dining room table to go along with it, like thirty thousand dollars worth, I know where to go. The furniture builder we visited at the craft shop said his tables were built to last eight hundred years, fabricated from solid slabs of deep rose-colored Kari and Black But with inlaid brass and burl.
We passed through Manjimup to say farewell to Tim and Robin finding ourselves amongst the giant Kari and Eucalyptus trees the area is so famous for. Twenty-eight years earlier we scaled the giant Gloucester tree to the lookout sixty meters up, this time I gave it a miss in favor of the treetop walk to the same elevation on a non-intrusive engineering marvel
giving the walker the perspective of a bird flying through the canopy sixty meters above the forest floor.
Our next stop was Walpole to take the Wow Eco-cruise, so highly recommended. We stayed at the caravan park exploring on our bicycles through forests, transiting golf courses, across boardwalks leading to beautiful wooden bridges made of hardwoods bleached white by the brilliant white of the Australian sun.
I too would recommend the eco tour put on by Garry Muir of Walpole even if there wasn’t a boat to go with it. The guy was so entertaining he could have entertained thousands in a theater; he really didn’t need a boat. He instructed us on the importance of Walpole, how it was the belly button of the world. The secretary of Tolstoy had lived in the building where we were camping. Only a few years earlier a chest filled with Tolstoy’s correspondences was found and Garry had written a book. He had us rolling on the floor with laughter as he described himself as a Canadian Conservation officer in Canada where he was paid to protect foxes after telling us how they were controlling the Fox problem in Australia with
"1080" a poison found in a common shrub. The poison from one leaf can kill several people but indigenous animals are resistant so they put the poison in sausages and leave them around for the Foxes and feral cats. The absence of barking dogs and slinking domestic cats is quite noticeable in Western Australia.
After two days we trundled off finding ourselves in Peaceful Bay and from there we traveled east to Albany, one trailer camp after another. The wonderful thing about this is we meet the most interesting people. Many Australians have large families. Sometimes four children burst out of the ute the second it stops with their assortment of balls, sticks to hit rocks with, sometimes bull whips, which at eight years old they proudly tell you they bought with their own money and of course they can make it crack with a mighty noise to frighten huge Angus bulls and little Angus people. I love watching the endless energy fill these kids lives with so much unadulterated joy.
In Albany I backed the van out of a tight parking spot and smashed into a short pylon. Damn! I have been know to do this in
the past. Because I don’t have a reversing camera Rolande now gets out of the van whenever I put it in reverse. The bumper was hanging low when we returned to the caravan park but thank god we had bought a heavy splitting maul to pound the tent pegs in because in no time I had the bumper off and like any normal panel beater I went to work on the mounting brackets. The bumper looks almost normal now and even has a nice little scoop to hold the bicycles on better.
Albany is a delightful place with a deepsea port and incredible beaches. We witnessed a wedding at Twilight beach at twelve noon on the twelfth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year. Twilight beach has a fairy tale feel with giant thrusting rocks sheltering the whitest beach punctuated with stately green Norfolk pines and shades of crystal blue water restlessly rearranging the sand at the water's edge. Throw in a wedding party, with fluttering flags, the men and women dressed as princes and princesses with a decorated 1937 Bentley to add some color and it was pretty special moment.
We also visited a memory
I had of the natural bridge where the unhindered waves of the southern ocean have eroded around and under giant granite stones exposing a natural bridge with the sea crashing beneath.
The next night we stayed in Esperance, another seaside town with lovely beaches and then to Cape La Grande National Park staying at Lucky Bay. On the way we went by Stonehenge, an exact replication of the original Stonehenge and Frenchman’s peak, eight hundred meters of bare rock with a giant hole in the top. They say Lucky bay has the whitest most pure silica sand anywhere and I can believe it. We comfortably camped cheek to jowl next to the camp hostess Milly who made us extremely comfortable and we loved the place. A short bicycle ride took us to the granite majestic rocky outlook on one side of our camp and on the other a short ride to the white beach. We found the pure silica sand was like concrete and wonderful to ride bicycles on so we rode our bicycles the three kilometers down the beach to Flinder's memorial. I’ll never forget gliding over the white sand, the wind scented of the sea gently pushing
us, black oyster catchers with brilliant orange beaks watching us as we fly by and imagining the billions of potential microprocessors the pure silicon we are riding on represent.
The next day we visited Stonehenge. The lady told us her husband was an engineer who wanted to leave something permanent. Ten meter blocks of granite aligned to capture the southern summer solstice was very impressive and I’m sure if there are people around in five thousand years they will scratch their heads and wonder why.
We worried about the Nullarbor plain, fifteen hundred kilometers of nothing but forty degree C desert. To start we took Tim and Chris’s advice and stayed the first night on a seventeen thousand acre sheep station. It was a lovely cool afternoon the last few weeks of rain had turned the place into a green paradise and so I took a hike to the top of Pleasant mountain. The monument at the top stated it was 576.0 meters high and the view, a flat sea of green for as far as the eye could see, confirmed it. I chatted with a small herd of sheep who answered with their blaaas but got no
response when I said hello to the curious Kangaroos who stared at me as I wandered back to the van.
The highway across the Nullarbor, unlike other roads we have been on, is remarkably flat and straight. We set the cruise control at 100 k and watched the trees shorten as we moved east. It seems the plain has steps and about halfway across the highway takes an abrupt left turn and goes up a hill to the next step at Eucala. We pulled over and savoured the ocean view. There was a Caravan park next door. We set up our camp on the edge of the slope with the ocean view in front. The next day we rode our bicycles to the beautiful beach and explored the old telegraph station, which in 1910 matched the station in Sydney. It is now mostly buried in sand dunes.
We loved the Caravan park with powered sites at $20/night with a swimming pool and views to die for. Even the price of diesel was good at $1.86 compared to $1.99 just down the road. We fueled up, set the cruise control, stopping a few times to look where the sea
is eroding the Great Australian Bite making the most incredible view of flat plain, rugged cliff, blue sea and the white teeth of breaking waves along the base.
We arrived in Ceduna to a friendly fruit fly inspector who thanked us for eating all our fruit before we arrived. At last we are getting some warm weather. 38 deg C
Merry Christmas to all and Best Wishes for a Happy and Prosperous 2013
We plan to spend Christmas on a Race Horse Farm in Adelaide
Best Wishes Angus and Rolande
Advertisement
Tot: 0.097s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 10; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0561s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Norm Theberge
non-member comment
Hi Angus and Rolande
What a trip you two am sure glad to hear that everything is going well and you are enjoying every minute of it and so you should looks fantastic While at it Best of season to you and yours > Keep up the good work Angus . Take care Rolande and Angus have a good one Cheers your cuz Morm