Advertisement
Published: August 16th 2006
Despite having informed the Rainbow Lodge reception that I'd be leaving early, and been told that someone would be around to give me back my key deposit, no-one had materialised by the time I had to leave, so I was forced to depart for the Greyhound terminal $10 lighter than expected.
The Greyhound terminal actually corresponded to a small poster on a pillar of East Perth station - hardly the most assuming of locations. The coach managed to turn up an hour late - some feat given that this was the departure point - by which time there was a gaggle of other passengers waiting. The check-in process was a complete free-for-all in terms of lack of queuing, but the driver attempted to put people who were travelling together in neighbouring seats, and people travelling on their own were kept apart as much as possible. The seats are OK from a legroom point of view but their greatest virtue is that they don't recline far, so there's little risk of having the person in front of you in your lap. I had a seat to myself as far as Cervantes, i.e. for about half the journey, where I then acquired
a neighbour who seemed to want to give his crotch an airing, given the angle he was positioning his legs at.
The coach had a toilet, though the driver stressed that it should be used only in an emergency - with stops every 3 hours or so, there would be plenty of opportunities for people to make use of the facilities at assorted roadhouses along the way. There was also a TV, on which a video of "Miracle" was shown for part of the journey. I wasn't the only one on the coach wondering why a film about an unexpected ice hockey gold medal for the USA at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics was being screened for a set of predominantly Australian passengers who really couldn't have given a stuff.
Though there was air-con on the coach, the sun was still beating through the window so I spent most of the journey with the curtain closed, thus missing what little scenery there was. 8 hours later we reached Binnu, where myself and a few other passengers transferred to a minibus for the remaining 77km to Kalbarri. The minibus driver, perhaps emboldened by the roo bars on the front
of his vehicle, kept up a steady 100 kmh in the dusk half-light - we saw, but avoided, several kangaroos, though at least one bird and several rabbits were mown down.
One of the other guys from the Greyhound ended up in the same dorm in the same hostel as me, so we headed out for a fish and chip dinner together. Since he will crop up several more times in this blog, he will be given his own identity as "Ian", rather than "the guy I met in Kalbarri". Ian's from Melbourne and is doing what I'm doing, i.e. taking an open-ended "career break" in order to see the world and do some things he's always wanted to do. Though his reasons for doing this aren't quite the same as mine, he is a similar age to me (though everyone thinks he's mid-20s), had reached a similar point in his career as I had, and is not planning on working during his travels unless a particular job really grabs him. As such, he is officially the first person I've met who's on a vaguely similar trip. It pleased me immensely to find I wasn't the only one.
My first full day in Kalbarri was relaxing, with my sole activity being to wander most of the way down to Red Bluff beach, revelling in the glorious weather. Ian did a gorge hiking tour which he said was excellent, so I signed up for a kayaking trip for the following day and the gorge tour for the day after. Also going on the kayaking trip will be a Melbournite called Kat (also deserving of her proper name, as she'll appear again), who I had exchanged hellos with in Cervantes and who I actually had a conversation with here. To complete the circle, she had seen Ian at her hostel in Geraldton. As I was to find out, the west coast run was to provide repeated meetings with many people. Incestuous would be an appropriate word.
Ideally I'd wanted to do some kayaking in the gorges within Kalbarri National Park itself, but there was no such trip available in the coming few days so I chose one that went through the lower reaches of the Murchison River instead. There were 4 other customers including Kat. I was left wondering whether the one other lady, who said she had been
on the gorge tour yesterday, was the person that Ian had said needed shoving in the arse in order to get her up some inclines.
Kat and I took one kayak, with the others in a second. With the river being extremely docile and shallow, the 2 guys running the tour didn't even accompany us onto the water. Instead, they gave us instructions to head upstream until we reached a particular rock, then to come back downstream again and eventually find them on the river bank cooking up a breakfast for us. The paddling wasn't enormously strenuous, with no current or wind to help/hinder us, and the most effort required was when we ran aground on a sandbank and had to get out and push into deeper water. The scenery was nothing special, just rocks and trees, which I suppose is the downside of doing this activity outside of the main gorges.
Breakfast was effectively an English fry-up but done on a barbecue, which met with my approval if not my doctor's. There was enough toast to have wallpapered most of Kalbarri. Once everyone had had their fill, we clambered back into the kayaks and headed further downstream.
Much yakking ensued, with the result that i) I didn't see any wildlife, though the others had spotted a kangaroo, and ii) Kat and I trailed in a good hundred yards or so behind the other kayak (though to be fair they did have 3 supremely fit pensioners providing propulsion). Our reward for surviving the perils of the Murchison River was a lolly each, to be consumed on the drive back into town. So a pleasant tour, but only 1 blister and no photos to show for it.
Evening brought the bad tidings that tomorrow's gorge tour had been cancelled due to lack of numbers. The bearer of this news was a German guy, name of Daniel, who I was to end up spending a fair bit of time with on the west coast, hence my mentioning of his name. He suggested signing up for an abseiling trip instead, which I pooh-poohed as I'd been hoping for something a little less likely to give me a heart attack. However the lady at reception indicated that I might be able to rent a car for $50, which seemed like my only option to see the Kalbarri gorges without having to
stay for several more days until the next tour (I should add here that Kalbarri wasn't the most happening of places so, with the Greyhound transfer only occurring 3 days per week, unnecessary time spent here was to be avoided).
I wandered along to the car hire place at first light and was told that the star item in their fleet (of 4 vehicles) was available for hire - a 1981 4WD Toyoto Landcruiser stationwagon with nearly half a million km on the clock. A $50 note exchanged hands and within seconds it was mine for the day. It came as no surprise that the gear box was shafted, neither the air-con nor the radio worked, and the fuel tank had no cap - it was just a hole in the side of the car. Despite these flaws, it was really good fun to drive (I'd never driven an SUV before) and the enormous tyres made the corrugated roads of the national park feel almost smooth.
First stop was at Nature's Window within the park. This was simply an arch similar to the arches you see in Arches National Park in Utah, but on a smaller scale. You
could frame a nice shot of the Murchison River through the Window. I also bumped into an Italian woman called Elena, who I'm naming because she too was to be a fairly constant companion on the trip up the coast. I'd been introduced to her in the hostel yesterday by a guy who had had the temerity to be smoking in the dining section, so at the time I'd simply said hi and then returned to whatever it was I'd been doing. I subsequently apologised for this lapse of manners.
The next point of interest was the Z Bend, which the curse of 4 years of living in America made me continually pronounce as the Zee Bend, despite it obviously being the Zed Bend. I was unable to see an obvious Z shape in the river, but I'm assuming it's there.
The look-outs at Ross Graham and Hawks Head then followed, at which point I had "done" Kalbarri National Park. Obviously there were a number of walking trails available to see the gorges at closer quarters, but with my car only hired for 1 day, and several coastal gorges yet to be seen, I had to forego them.
I returned to Red Bluff beach, where I found umpteen crabs sidling around under the rocks. I then climbed Red Bluff itself, before heading south to see Eagle Gorge, Pot Alley (named because once a number of crayfish pots had washed up there after a storm), Island Rock, Castle Cove, and Natural Arch. From the cliff above Natural Arch I actually spotted a breaching whale far out to sea.
Over the next day I got to know both Daniel and Elena better, and it turned out we were all heading to Denham on the Greyhound on the same day. Daniel is a bit younger than me but also works in software (though these days I would hesitate to make such a claim for myself) - he'll probably return to IT when he gets back to Germany, so his time travelling (N.B. no hyphen) is a genuine career break rather than a potential-career-change break. Elena is a lot younger than me (E - you can send me that $50 in the post), trained as a GP and practised for 1 year, but was unsure that that was the career path she wanted to go down, so her travels have
My Landcruiser
Nearly 500,000km on the clock - and a gearbox to prove itbeen partly in an attempt to figure out what she'd rather do. She spent 5 months working in a bar in the Outback, which could not have been more different to being a doctor in the Italian health service, and had only finished that a few days ago.
So Kalbarri saw the formation of this pan-European travelling unit.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.705s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 47; qc: 156; dbt: 0.5833s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.6mb
