Is that a Kookaburra or an Emu?

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The idea of coming to a remote and secluded resort on the near deserted Eighty Mile (actually 140 Mile) Beach at what was supposed to be the tail end of our trip was to get some total relaxation before going back to the not so relaxed vibe of suburbia. Our beloved Qantas put paid to the bit about this being the last bit of the trip by cancelling our flight, and the new COVID outbreak means that we’ll now be doing a lot of relaxing when we get home .... because we won’t be allowed to leave the house. However we’re not letting any of that minor detail derail our plans for our time here. I spend the morning reading a book on our deck. I have to remember to read it slowly. This isn’t just because I’m a slow learner and this might help me to follow the plot a bit better; I downloaded it before we came here and there’s no wifi at the resort, so if I finish it I won’t have anything else to read. Unlike the only other wifi-less hotel we’ve been to in the last decade, our beloved Hotel Kununurra, it isn’t because technology hasn’t reached the town’s pub yet; a sign at reception says it’s because they want us to concentrate on connecting with each other rather than the rest of the universe. I wonder if anyone ever comes here by themselves. Unfortunately if you try really hard you can still get a weak phone signal. It's not strong enough to talk to anyone, but good enough to find out late yesterday that my footy team had lost to a mob they should have been able to beat with their eyes closed. I reacted with a petulant display of stomping on my club cap. Issy then thought she’d do me a favour by tossing it off the deck into the scrub. I spend half the morning trying to find it, after all they might still win next week.

The other notable thing about spending the morning reading a book on the deck is the deafening sounds of the birds and the waves. These are of course very good deafening sounds. There certainly seem to be a lot of birds here. It‘s apparently a so-called "declared Ramsar area" (we read that Ramsar is an international convention aimed at protecting and conserving important inland and marine wetland habitats). We like good bird sounds as much as the next person, but that’s about where our avian knowledge stops, and I think we’d struggle to pick an emu from a kookaburra. The birds all seem quite tame, and one of them briefly perches on the back of my chair while I’m sitting in it. I’d hoped it was trying to be friendly but the deposits of birds**t on the backs of all the chairs suggest that it might have had another purpose in mind.

As was the case in Broome, all the staff here seem to be from either South America or Europe. I think most of them are backpackers who’ve had their visas extended, but that said, if you wanted to dodge officers from the immigration department, this would seem to be as good and remote a place as any to try. Our waiter last night told us that he was from Grenada in Spain. We told him that we loved Granada, and particularly its iconic and world famous Alhambra Palace. He said he’s lived in Granada most of his life but only went to the Alhambra for the first time a couple of years ago, when his Italian girlfriend came to visit him. Huh? What? I guess we can’t talk; we’ve never been to Uluru, although that said the Alhambra's IN Granada; Uluru’s a couple of thousand kilometres from Melbourne. I tried a bit of my rudimentary Spanish on him, and at the end of dinner he told me to tell the Argentinian cashier, in Spanish, that we were on table 14. I hope "catorce" is the Spanish word for 14, but if it’s not at least we might have got a free meal. I’ve been trying to learn Spanish for more than five years now, but I don’t think my brain does languages. I tried to ask the Spanish waiter at the wet t-shirt competition hotel in Broome a few days ago, in Spanish, where he was from. He stared at me blankly. Issy only knows about two words of Spanish, but when he showed us to our table and Issy said "gracias" to him, his eyes lit up. This is very discouraging.

Issy's decided to take our relaxation mantra to a new level, so I head off to lunch by myself. The tide's made its way back from Africa. It's windy enough to put whitecaps on the waves, but not windy enough to discourage the beachgoers; the hammocks on the sand all seem to be fully occupied. It is however a bit too windy to put up the umbrellas around the pool, and a few brave (?) souls are frying themselves in the sun. They don’t look quite beetroot red enough to be English tourists, but I suppose it’s possible they just got here.

The resort was apparently first built in 1993, and some storyboards next to the restaurant show us what it looked like then. It looks a lot different now, thanks largely it seems to 2001’s Category 5 tropical cyclone "Rosita" which was apparently one of the most powerful storms to cross the Kimberley coast in the last 100 years. Most of the buildings here were timber, and Rosita made short work of them; if the photos are anything to go by all that was left afterwards was a pile of rubble. It was quickly rebuilt, and I think Rosita and her mates would have a bit more trouble with the very solid looking steel frames that look to be holding up everything here now. A lot of the accommodation here is glamping tents. It looks like most of these are dismantled and their awnings removed at the end of the season, and they're only reassembled when the cyclone danger has passed.

We go for a long afternoon walk along the beach. The tide has again gone off to Africa leaving behind what must surely be one of the best beach cricket fields on the planet. The red and orange cliffs that back the beach are spectacular. I take a quick detour into a cave that seems to have been created by a collapse of part of one of them; I hope to take an award winning happy-snap with Issy in the foreground; well it would have been award winning if my beloved hadn't been screaming and waving her arms at me to get out of it before any more of the cliff collapses. Where's her sense of adventure? There’s no shortage of wildlife either. A mother eagle (well it might be an eagle; we're fairly sure it isn’t an emu) has built a large nest on a rock on top of one of the cliffs and is squawking loudly while dad looks on quietly from another peak nearby. Dad doesn’t look like he’s about to attack us but we keep a wary eye open just in case. There's no shortage either of starfish, hermit crabs, other much bigger crabs that look like they could take an arm off with a single snap of a claw, and entire massive rock surfaces covered in limpet shells. It’s a regular zoo out here.

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Photos

Eighty Mile Beach
A bit Bungle Bungle like

Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Beautiful
Great colors.

[DaveandIssy]

80 Mile Beach
Was indeed beautiful!