West Coast Walkabout


Advertisement
Published: June 15th 2011
Edit Blog Post

A couple of days recovering from my epic journey across Australia and I was ready to get out and see a bit more of this immense country. Unfortunately Perth did not woo me. After the bright lights, excitement and happy memories of Sydney, the most isolated capital in the world felt eerily quiet and uninspiring. I did get the train out to Freemantle one day, which I thought had a nicer vibe - and better looking cafes. But after visiting the markets and walking along the Swan River and up to King's Park I was happy to escape the cities. My stay in Perth had a been productive one and I left with a job offer at a pub in Carnarvon. Rather than shooting up there in one 12 hour stint on the Greyhound bus I decided to meander there in 6 days on an Easyrider tour.

At seven on Tuesday morning I was picked up by an Aussie guy called Greg and his big, slightly battered, yellow bus. This colourful Antipodean omen was reassuring and welcome - I have many fond memories from a previous road trip in a big yellow truck crewed by enthusiastic and slightly deranged Aussies!
Weird rocks in the Pinnacles DesertWeird rocks in the Pinnacles DesertWeird rocks in the Pinnacles Desert

This one starts to make you believe the Aboriginal theories behind the rock formations!
We cruised around Perth picking up Irish and French chicks, a holidaying Marine from Devon and an insular pair of girls from Hong Kong, then Greg swung the big yellow bus North and we left the suburbs behind us.

Our first stop was not such a positive experience. I was already acquainted with the windsurfing mecca of Lancelin thanks to a friend who had stayed there for many months. What he failed to warn me was that the local bakery are such isolated heathens that they make tea with hot frothy milk. I've not had such a disturbing experience since my first trip abroad to Paris ten years ago. Luckily a decade of travel has prepared me for such situations and rather than breaking down in tears like I did when I was 18, I calmly walked back into the bakery and explained to the surly assistant that she had made something quite unpalatable and that only an imbecile would make such a revolting concoction from the queen of bevarages.

Safely removed from Lancelin with a potable cuppa and my face still intact, our destination that morning was the Pinnacles Desert. The Pinnacles are an expanse of standing
Pinnacles DesertPinnacles DesertPinnacles Desert

Why are you making me pose infront of a phallic shaped rock Greg?!
stones in a desert of yellow sand. There are several theories about how these wind sculpted pillars of rock came to be poking out of the sand in the middle of nowhere. The scientific community propose that they are the fossilised remains of a forest, buried for millions of years and then exposed when the dunes shifted thousands of years ago. The more poetic, and rather disturbing theory comes from the Aboriginal community who believe the stones are the fingers of boys buried in the sands when they strayed into the area on walkabout. The area is considered a bad place, understandably given this legend, by Aboriginal people. For tourists though, it is an awesome playground for composing silly photos and a challenging each other to find the rudest looking column.

After the Pinnacles Desert we stopped at a beach for lunch and I watched the seaweedy breakers pummel the sand while some braver members of our group submerged themselves in the crazy waves. We had a lot of bitumen to eat up before we reached our hostel for the night so in the afternoon Greg downed Redbull while the rest of us snoozed in the back. Occasionally he would shout at us until we stirred and he could inform us about some random sight on the side of the road. If the sight was particularly unusual then he would swing the bus into a parking bay and let us take photos.
One bizarre stop was for not just 'a', but 'the' leaning tree. Up the west coast a lot of trees lean, but this one is the limbo champion of the leaning tree world. The trees all grow away from the prevailing onshore wind, which blows salt off the ocean onto the leaves. By growing at an angle they can try to protect their foliage from the worst of this salty wind.
At sunset we pulled in next to the Pink Lakes. These are salt lakes that contain beta carotene, a mineral that makes carrots orange, cosmetics red, and lakes a delicate pink. One of the lakes was dry and looked like a field coated in a thick layer of ice and snow. We walked out onto the lake and our feet left footprints in the salt just like they would in the snow, I kept expecting it to be cold it looked so similar! My first uninterrupted WA sunset was spectacular and confirmed my decision to move across the country was a good one.

Our first night was spent in Kalbarri. Easyrider had negotiated an awesome deal at a local restaurant and we got a massive fresh seafood feast for half price. Totally stuffed we reclined around a fire pit and got to know our fellow passengers better. The next morning we drove out to Kalbarri National Park, dominated by a spectacular gorge. We hiked down into the gorge through walls of yellow, red and orange rocks, and settled by the river at the bottom. Once again I let the braver members of the group jump in the water, a brief toe dip having informed me of just how freezing it was. After exploring the bottom of the gorge we hiked back up to the top of the escarpment to an impossibly perfect viewpoint called Natures Window. Here the rocks have eroded into ledges, overhangs and frames, perfect for tourists to take posed snapshots at...so that's what we did!

Once again we had a long afternoon of driving ahead of us, peppered with sightseeing breaks as we drew closer to Shark Bay. Our first stop at Hamelin Pools was not aesthetically breathtaking, but to think about what we saw is mind boggling. Hamelin Pools is home to one of the few living colonies of stromatolites. These are rocky mounds of cyanobacteria, hardly exciting until you consider that these organisms first appeared on earth 3.5 billion years ago, and are still surviving today! Thanks to these blue-green bacteria we have enough oxygen in the atmosphere to support our existence, so it was nice to have the opportunity to give thanks to them for their hard work.

Just around the corner from the stromatolites is Shell Beach. As the name would suggest this beach has a lot of shells, in fact it is entirely made up of small white shells, piles and piles of them up to four metres deep and stretching in a long white arc around a dead calm bay of ultra salty water. As the light faded in another impossibly sunburnt sky we played frisbee in the sea to escape the dreaded Australian flies.

The next day we got to see just why Shark Bay is a World Heritage site, getting up close to the immense biodiversity of the area. Our first
DolphinsDolphinsDolphins

Francois Peron NP, Shark Bay
destination of the day was the aquarium where an extremely knowledgable guide introduced us to big fish, sharks, turtles and all the smaller, less eyecatching creatures that lurk in the water ready to inject immobilising poison into uninformed tourists. After watching the sharks in their outdoor pool attack their breakfast with gusto we climbed into a monster 4x4 truck for a drive through the sand dunes of Francois Peron National Park.
We stopped up next to a beautiful beach just in time to spot a pod of dolphins playing in the ocean just offshore. Unfortunately we couldn't strip fast enough and by the time we had snorkelled out the dolphins had moved on. Even if they had stayed the water was so cold I'd have probably turned into an iceberg watching them. The brevity of our snorkel meant our guide had a chance to get his fishing rod out and catch each member of our group a fresh squid for dinner! I've only ever seen squid on David Attenborough documentaries and deep fried in rings, so I was intrigued to watch as they sprayed their black ink over the rocks as they were brought in on the line and to
Drastic measuresDrastic measuresDrastic measures

the sarong fly burqha!
see their pearlescent bodies laid out on the sand. Even more entertaining was watching Audrey and Greg learning how to gut and clean squid that evening, although the final result was delicious.

We had a picnic lunch in a postcard perfect location amongst the dunes. What the postcard photographer fails to focus in on is the swarms of little black flies that plague many parts of Australia. Smaller than a bluebottle, larger than a midge; the Australian fly is a dedicated and persistent explorer of the human anatomy. If there is an orifice exposed they will be sure to home in on it and no amount of swatting will distract them from their goal. Open your mouth to talk and you'll swallow a couple. Breath in and they'll lodge in your nostrils. They'll crawl under your sunglasses and suck the moisture from your eyeballs or explore your inner ear canal with equal relish. So sitting on a bench with a sandwich in your hand is not going to be a pleasant experience with these buggers around. Drastic measures were required and in the end we resorted to make shift burqas. I reckon Islam just adopted these coveralls as a religious symbol after they were plagued by Australian flies! With sarongs and towels draped over our heads we could finally eat in peace.
After lunch we walked out to a clifftop lookout and searched the ocean for wildlife. Thank god we had a guide with us or I'd have never spotted anything...probably because I still had my sarong over my head! Our guide pointed out dolphins and several species of sharks and rays all swimming around in the water below us. It was an awesome day out followed by an incredible sunset. Sitting on the sand right outside our hostel I watched the sky turn blood red. A couple strolling along the beach came to apologise for wandering into my shot and I explained they'd actually improved it, at which point they asked me to send them the photos!

The next morning we made a detour to Monkey Mia, a resort on the other side of the peninsular famous not for apes but dolphins. For some reason every morning 'wild' dolphins come swimming right into the shore for breakfast. Something to do with a woman with a bucket of fish me thinks. And the woman with the bucket of fish (or more likely whoever employs her), decided that tourists would love this sort of thing. The chance to get up close and personal with these charismatic creatures seems to be on most people's wish list. Monkey Mia seems to be Western Australia's most famous drawcard, fuelled by a ferocious advertising campaign. It was one of the few places I'd heard of before I came over here and I'd seen flyers, ads, articles all over the place about it. It turns out it is actually Western Australia's most overhyped and dissapointing attractions. At 8am about one hundred people lined the waters edge so there was no chance of us getting a good spot. Forty minutes later when the dolphins turned up everyone kept creeping further out into the water, blocking the view for everyone further down the line. We couldn't hear a word the woman with the bucket and the presentation speech was saying but she wittered on for so long that we gave up before she even got round to feeding the pod of dolphins half a fish. The dolphins were beautiful and graceful as all dolphins are, but also relatively lethargic and extremely tame. Cruising up to the submerged ankles and lazily gliding along the line behind the presentation lady. Randomly spying dolphins frolicking in the waves out at Francois Peron National Park the day before had been a far more rewarding experience.

I think Greg (our driver/tour leader) must have been disappointed by our sedate evenings so far on the trip because Friday afternoon half way between Shark Bay and Coral Bay he handed out plastic champagne glasses and several bottles of wine and told us to empty them before he'd driven us the remaining 150 kilometres! Dutifully we did as we were instructed and Coral Bay turned into a blur of drinking and playing games: pool, ping pong, Wii sports, and balloon animal competitions. To be fair the weather turned from glorious Australian summer to British Autumn storm overnight so there was little else to do. Greg was well prepared for such calamities and had been concocting his famous Goonacolada (yes it is as vile as it sounds) in the back of the bus to poison us all with if we refused to join him in a bus party! In return we drew all over his face when he passed out.

In between hangovers a few of us braved the elements to go quad biking. This turned out to easily be the best fun you can have on a grey drizzly day! I soon lost all fear and tore along at full throttle, whooping and screaming every time I hit a bump and took off. We found some monster dunes that felt like vertical cliff faces when you were perched at the top of them ready to accelerate over and out. As if quad biking in the rain hadn't drenched us to the bone and splattered us with mud enough, we stopped to go for a snorkel. The rain meant this time the water was warmer than outside so I swam around long enough to see an octopus and get totally freaked out when I spotted a freaky hideous eel peering at me.

Sunday was the end of the trip but not the end of the adventures and antics. First the bus wouldn't start so every large vehicle in town, from the garbage truck to a JCB were called in to help push and pull it to life. I had blagged a lift back down the coast as far as Carnarvon, a medium sized (by Western Australian standards it's actually probably large, by American standards it's probably miniscule) harbour town surrounded by banana and vegetable plantations. Carnarvon is to be my home for at least a few weeks, maybe a few months, as I have a bar job here...details of which are sure to follow!

My travel buddy Flat Seth came along for this trip so if you want to read about his antics and see his photos take a look at his great blog at: Flat Seth tours up the west coast of Australia


Additional photos below
Photos: 42, Displayed: 31


Advertisement

Pinnacles Desert 2Pinnacles Desert 2
Pinnacles Desert 2

Why are you making me hug this phallic rock Greg?!
Pink salt lakes Pink salt lakes
Pink salt lakes

Looking like ice covered lakes but for the fact it was 25 degrees!
First wild Australian snake...First wild Australian snake...
First wild Australian snake...

...thankfully not about to eat me!
Kalbarri National ParkKalbarri National Park
Kalbarri National Park

At the bottom of the gorge


15th June 2011

This blog brought back a lot of good memories for us
We loved the Pinnacles when we were there. Loved heading north to Dongara. You have some great sunset shots. Most excellent.

Tot: 0.125s; Tpl: 0.017s; cc: 13; qc: 30; dbt: 0.0768s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.1mb