The Never-never

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We left you many, many miles back with Wendy and Chloe in South Australia. Since then we've driven pretty much as far west as it's possible to go; we've survived extremes of hot and cold, car issues, and insect attack, but we're here and very much looking forward to spending the christmas/NY period with Chris' folks and the Thomases.

From the Adelaide hills we drove north to the Flinders ranges, which we've had recommended to us by countless gray nomads, but we'd missed as we passed by 6 months previously, due to our enthusiasm to get away from the cool south to the tropical north. We spent almost 3 days driving, exploring and returning from the hills and were, well, underwhelmed. This was partially because of the stifling weather, 39 degrees; partially because we've seen a lot of the best of Australia and it wasn't in the same league and partially because you could, literally, not stand still in our camp site without ants covering you from toe to knees.

Undeterred we pressed onwards to the Eyre (pronounced 'air'😉 peninsular. We'd already replaced the tires and got a diagnosis of leaking head gasket in the engine -meaning sudden death for the car at some unspecified and unknowable point in the future - on leaving Adelaide and suddenly, about 30km outside Wyhalla where we'd stopped for lunch the car refused to restart. On discovering our plight a couple of gray nomads identified the problem as a dead battery, jump started us and sent us on our way into town. Four pm on a Sunday afternoon is not a good time to go battery shopping in small town Oz, especially when turning off the engine means you can't restart it; but with more luck, and help, than judgment we stumbled on someone who not only would sell us what we needed, but directed us to the relevant and cheapest, checked we were installing it properly and disposed of our old one. Let no-one tell you Australians are anything but kind and helpful.

We then spent a couple of days looking round the peninsular, with nothing much to report, other than the beautiful and pelican filled Coffin Bay, but there was a constant low level tension in both of us that would not pass until we had safely crossed the Nullarbor in our decrepit car. So we headed off sooner than we may have planned and spent almost two entire days driving from Ceduna to the nearest town to the west, 950 miles away, Noresman.

Constantly driving for two days was less stressful than you may imagine, we took breaks every hour or so, and because there was no time frame and nowhere, as such, to be we were able to relax and enjoy the slow progression from civilisation through three-less desert (Nullabor is Latin, Nullus Aborium - no trees), back to civization again, although the town of Norseman on the other side, which is the first place wiith reasonably priced fuel, food, water and drink is only civilization in a technical sense.
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The south of Western Australia is famously pretty, having a similar temperate climate to most of the populated areas on Eastern Australia but with different ecology due to the huge distance from the rest of the country, it is also considerably less populated. We spent a couple of days in Esperance and Albany on the south coast, enjoying swimming and the national parks in the area. Chris got asked by an Australian if there were any dangerous creaturers in the sea, apparently it's not just the foreigners who are scared of the animals over here.

Next we headed to Denmark which is a lovely little hippyish town, then on the tall timber country. The tall timber in question is jarrah, karri and marri which are all beautiful, very hard woods which are often very straight too and were therefore cut down in huge swathes (the Western Australian forestry department have been and still are in bed with logging industry, it's a surprise there's any wood left). The national park areas around Pemberton were lovely, we did lots of walking and swimming in the rivers. We also climbed a couple of fire lookout trees, including the tallest in the world at 61 metres, metal pegs were stuck into the tree to climb to a shelter at the top which was used to look for bush fires before the use of planes (and occasionally now when planes can't fly).

While we were in Pemberton we were hearing a lot about controlled burns that had gotten out of hand and burned large areas in the Margaret river region, a big wine growing area in the south west and our next destination. Fires are becoming an increasing concern for everyone at this time of year and we are careful to get the latest updates on the radio and in tourist information centres. Arriving in Margaret river there wasn't huge evidence of the fires until we headed over to Prevelly by the sea. The fire had destroyed several buildings in the area as we knew but what really surprised us was that the fire had gotten right into the town, houses in the middle of the town had melted gutters and the trees surrounding the church were all completely chard. I think we were both aware of how much of a concern fire is to people who live out of town but it was a shock to discover how it can affect people in towns too.

Margaret river itself was a lovely town but with one of the big drawbacks of many Australian towns, the main road goes right though town. When the road doesn't go through the town most of the businesses shut down, so you have to choose noisy road or no town?

By this time we were both getting a little fed up of being in the car. Sleeping in the car is great in terms of cost saving while seeing as much as possible however, it can be difficult finding suitable places to sleep, and living (and cooking) outside we are at the mercy of the weather, heat, rain and wind are equally difficult to deal with. To add to the annoyance the amount of flies in WA has been beyond imagining, they seem to have a love of trying to crawl into our every orifice and driven us from some of the most beautiful beaches and picnic-spots on several occasions. We already had our next wwoof booked in for 3 days later so we decided to spend some money on activities that involved being inside as a treat.

Our first treat was to get pizzas for dinner then take them to the sea at Prevelly to watch the sunset and wind surfers while eating pizza in the car, who said romance was dead? Then the next day we headed to Busselton. The jetty there is one of the longest in the world at nearly 2km, they have made an underwater observatory to see the coral and fish on and around the jetty pillars. It was a little strange being herded around by the guide but he was actually very knowledgeable and the view was pretty cool. Most importantly there were no flies.

Our final night in the car was easily the worst we have ever had. The area around Margaret river is fairly posh and those areas hate free camping so we ended up trying to sleep in a scenic lookout car park. Just after we headed to bed some teenagers arrived to drink and play music, we thought about moving but all of our stuff is in the front so it would have taken a while plus we didn't know where would be better. We managed to sleep for a bit only to be awoken several more times in the night by a variety of people arriving and leaving loudly. Although I'm glad to say no one was actually trying to bother us, most people just don't think about the impact they have on others.

All in all we were extremely relieved to arrive at Dennis's for our next wwoof. He is an interesting man who built all of the buildings on his property including a straw bale house and has similar interests to us. However, the wwoof turned out to be short lived as we are now his neighbours, house sitting for a couple next door. So for the next ten days we have 3 chooks, 1 dog and a whole house to look after. So far it's been lovely having space to ourselves with internet, a shower and a kitchen, it feels like a house any number of our friends would live in so it's very amorphous, I think we'll be happy here. There was only one minor incident involving an open gate, an ant bite and 2 escaped chickens. It only took us 4 hours to get the cockerel back....

Chris & Alice



our photos

http://s169.photobucket.com/albums/u222/tannhauser21/Oz/

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