I got into the habit of writing about trips because my dad liked to read about them. He died last year, but I've kept the habit. And I have a few mates who like me to email them.
Here is the first bit of the drive I just did:
Week 1 – the first two stops.
NASA is going to want to talk to my wife Lisa one day, I reckon. The time will come when they will want to set up a colony on Mars and her advice will be invaluable. We took enough stuff to set up a colony on the west coast.
I’ve watched Lisa pack for many holidays over the years. It happens in stages. There is the first pass where things that are actually useful and needed get laid out. They sit there for a while and are gradually added to with things that probably won’t be needed. Then stuff gets put into bags. If there is any space left – even a teeny tiny one – she swoops on other things that were just lying around the house minding their own business and they get bunged in a bag. If there is any space in my bag (and there always is), it gets filled, too. When I opened my bag in Perth, I found a rug and a cushion that Mimi (the 9 year old) wanted to bring – she has her mother’s genes. I also found a large bag of cables for connecting and recharging gadgets, some of which I am sure we have not owned for years. Curiously, it seems we brought three hot water bottles. New ones. And we brought nine towels. The van came with four towels, so that’s thirteen towels, enough to open a sauna.
The next time we travel overseas and I get asked at customs whether I packed my own bag, I’m going say, ‘No.’
We went straight from the airport to the van hire place in Perth. We’re travelling with another family. They’ve got two kids, too, but far less luggage. Still, when they run out of towels, they’ll be sorry. Our van is some sort of Toyota – a Hiace, I think – with a blister on top where the kids will sleep. It’s the sort of van electricians use. Or the sort you might see zipping around the city delivering parcels. By the time we got all our stuff inside, it looked like a courier van. When we unpacked it looked like the inside of a big suitcase. I could see Lisa thinking, ‘Boy, I would love a suitcase this big.’
Brett got upgraded by the van hire mob. His van is one of those big boxy ones – the size they use for delivering large household appliances. The young bloke at the van hire place felt bad that he couldn’t upgrade both of us, so he agreed readily when I observed that Brett’s van looked a bit dorky compared with our zippy little parcel van. It also beeps, very loudly, when he reverses. And in caravan parks lots of people spend lots of time standing round doing nothing in particular, so a beeping delivery van is keenly watched. On the first night, when Brett was reversing, I stood watching (not helping) with another bloke who wandered up. ‘Loudest beep I’ve ever heard.’ He said. ‘Yeah, looks pretty dorky, too.’ I added.
We spent the first two nights at Cervantes, about 250klm north of Perth. The overnight temperature got down to 1 degree both nights. And we left Sydney to escape the cold. Pity the hot water bottles were buried somewhere. I suspect they won’t be found till we drop off the van in three weeks’ time.
Cervantes has about 500 people. I think the only reason it exists is that the Stromatolites and the Pinnacles are nearby. The visit to the Stromatolites on day two was much anticipated by everyone except me – I had seen them before. But I hadn’t seen the Pinnacles. Lisa said to me in the morning, ‘Do you know what the Pinnacles are?’ ‘Nope’, I said. ‘But I bet they’re things that stick up out of something.’ We resolved to not find out in case it ruined the surprise. But I steeled Lisa for the fact that they probably aren’t as impressive as the Twelve Apostles given I didn’t notice them when I rode up this coast twenty years ago.
I told the kids that the Stromatolites were very exciting. I lied. Well, the notion of them is exciting, but the things themselves look like large piles of cow dung. A sign boasted that the ones in Cervantes are the fourth largest deposit in Western Australia. I reckon if I was the local mayor I would have fudged it and at least said they were the largest in the state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lake_Thetis-Stromatolites-LaRuth.jpg
There are fossils up north that have been dated at around four billion years of age (apologies to any creationists out there) that are identical to the living Stromatolites in WA. They are formed by single cell bacteria massed together. These bacteria release oxygen and are credited with raising the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere to such a degree that other forms of life could develop. So the living Stromatolites in WA of course aren’t four billion years old, but they are identical to ones that lived four billion years ago. See, I told you the idea of them is pretty exciting.
The kids weren’t excited at all. And I have to admit that I was sort of hoping that in the twenty years since I had last seen them that they might have changed in some way and become more exciting. (I admit this was wishful thinking given they haven’t changed in four billion years.)
But the walkway out to the Stromatolites really was exciting. It was a black industrial grid laid on concealed hardwood bearers. I had never seen the stuff before. Brett was pretty impressed, too. And he’s an architect. He said it was carbon fibre. I reckon Cervantes should advertise itself as having the flashest tidal walkway in WA and then just add, ‘Oh, and we’ve got some Stromatolites, too.’
The Pinnacles were worth seeing – even the kids enjoyed running round them. I was right that they were things that stick up. Much smaller than the Twelve Apostles, but far more numerous. There were hundreds of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pinnacles_(Western_Australia)
I wanderered round the van park at Cervantes before we left the next morning. It’s one of those ones where lots of people have vans set up as weekenders. There are some very solid, fixed annexes, some garden sheds, carports for boats. Camping is very much the grown-up equivalent of cubby houses. People try to duplicate their homes. But there must come a tipping point where people’s weekenders are more expansive and better equipped than their homes. I wonder if it feels like they are camping when they’re at home?
We left Cervantes and called into Geraldton to do some food shopping on the way to Kalbarri. There are two roads that go north from Perth. One goes straight up the middle, and the other one follows the coast. We’re on the coast road, but it’s still 100klms or so inland in places. Gee, it’s scrubby county to drive through. Lots of grey green scrub interspersed with patches of greeny grey scrub. It ranges from knee high to chest height. A few scrappy trees get to a couple of meters and then obviously figure there’s not much point going any higher. I thought when I was driving that what this coast needs is a mountain range, then I realized they probably had one and found it was made of stuff they could mine and flog.
Some rivers wouldn’t go astray, either. The lack of rivers is the most obvious difference between a drive up the east and west coasts. The east coast explorers had it easy. They would have hit a river every 70klm or so when heading north from Sydney. Inland explorers, or ones in the west, were the ones who died of thirst. It would have been ironic if any of those soft east coast explorers drowned crossing one of the rivers they hit. I bet there were loads of explorers apart from William Dampier and Dirk Hartog who found the west coast long before James Cook set foot on the east coast. I can imagine their excitement when the saw land, and their disappointment when they set foot on shore. ‘Bugger this.’ They would said. ‘Back on the boat boys.’
Kalbarri is about 250klm further up the coast. It’s got about four times as many residents as Cervantes – maybe 2,000 - so I’m guessing it’s got at least times as much stuff to do. It is very much a tourist town. It even has a river. Not a long one, but it’s something.
This is another town that survives on tourists. It’s a pretty place with a couple of caravan parks. They’re full of families – many of them from Perth. It’s school holidays over here. Curiously, we haven’t seen many grey nomads yet.
I wandered down to the van park office in the morning to see what local stuff there was to do and found a brochure for a Canoe Safari.
http://www.kalbarriboathire.com/canoe.htm
It worked out at $200 per family or four, but sounded pretty good, so we booked in and lobbed at the appointed time at the hire place for a briefing from Col, our guide.
Col had the easy, relaxed manner of a comedian confident in his material.
‘There are no crocs in the river….. The sharks ate them.’
Boom tish.
‘If you tip over in the river, just stand up.’
He had to do a life jacket demonstration, too. We were wearing ones the same as they have on planes.
‘If you end up in the river, slip the jacket over your head like this. Fasten it around your waist. Then pull on this toggle and the jacket will inflate. If you need to add more air, blow in this tube. Then walk to the edge of the river.’
It was pretty shallow.
He did make a point of telling the kids to not pick up any snakes and said that Bindi Irwin’s fondness for picking up snakes wasn’t great role model stuff.
Then Col drove us up river for half an hour on sandy tracks in his big 4WD bus thing towing a trailer with canoes. So we got the half hour ‘4WD bush tour’ thrown in. He dropped us on the bank of the very pretty Murchison River, and then scarpered downstream. We canoed about 4klms and there was Col on the riverbank with the barbeque going. He had cooked up a pile of sausages and onions and even buttered rolls. So we ate and drank, and then headed back down the river. Another 4klms downstream, Col met us with jam donuts of all things. Then it was another 2klm paddle and we were done. So we got the off-road tour, the canoe bit, a BBQ, jam donuts and Col’s comedy routine all for $200.
It was still bloody cold and that night a big storm hit us. It was the same one that smashed Perth. At 2am I was lying snug in the campervan breathing the fetid air filtered through four bodies and very happy I wasn’t in a tent. Then I heard a flapping noise just outside. ‘Bugger. The bloody annex.’ I forgot I had it up. So there I was at 2am wrestling a wet annex and stuffing it under the van. I was pretty wet myself then, so I wandered around to see if anybody else needed a hand.
The next morning I was doing some washing up in the communal kitchen. There was another bloke beside me and there was talk everywhere of the storm. I said to him ‘It’s good that us blokes do the washing and cooking when we’re camping, isn’t it.’ He agreed. Then I said, ‘Y’know, last night when I was out in the storm and giving a few people a bit of a hand, I didn’t see one woman outside pitching in.’ He agreed. I asked him whether he’d be game enough to bring it up with the missus next storm, but he said probably not.
The following morning I was washing up next to a local woman. She was a farmer from a place a bit inland and she had brought the kids to the coast for a week. I asked what was farmed locally and she said wheat, canola, cattle and some sheep. I asked her whether she had crops or animals. ‘Both.’ She said. ‘We thought we’d try to lose money in every way we could.’ I laughed, but she didn’t. Part of the problem is staff. Farmers can’t afford to pay what the mines pay, and the only people who can’t get a job in the mines are the ones who are too lazy to drive up there.
Day two in Kalbarri we drove out the see the local gorges. It was 28klm on a very corrugated red dirt road. Our zippy little parcel van handled it easily, much more easily than the large appliance delivery vehicle of Brett’s.
http://www.creativespirits.info/ozwest/kalbarri/kalbarrinpriver.html
I like a good gorge. This one is a weathered red gash that drops to a feeble river – the upper reaches of the Murchison. It’s when you see these weathered gorges cut into the flat land that you realize how old this country is.
We know we’re getting further away from the big smoke because more drivers are waving. Well, not so much waving, as lifting a finger off the steering wheel. It’s a tricky thing. You can’t stick a finger up too quickly, or too vertically, lest it be misinterpreted. Equally, if you get carried away with the greeting and it’s not returned, you feel a bit silly. So the movement needs to be obvious enough to be noticed, but subtle enough so that it could also be an involuntary twitch. I’ve got it down pat. There are a few people who take their whole hand off the wheel and wave. They’d be European tourists. Behind that wave they’d be thinking, ‘Thank God. Another person.’
Next stop, Denham.
Here is the first bit of the drive I just did:
Week 1 – the first two stops.
NASA is going to want to talk to my wife Lisa one day, I reckon. The time will come when they will want to set up a colony on Mars and her advice will be invaluable. We took enough stuff to set up a colony on the west coast.
I’ve watched Lisa pack for many holidays over the years. It happens in stages. There is the first pass where things that are actually useful and needed get laid out. They sit there for a while and are gradually added to with things that probably won’t be needed. Then stuff gets put into bags. If there is any space left – even a teeny tiny one – she swoops on other things that were just lying around the house minding their own business and they get bunged in a bag. If there is any space in my bag (and there always is), it gets filled, too. When I opened my bag in Perth, I found a rug and a cushion that Mimi (the 9 year old) wanted to bring – she has her mother’s genes. I also found a large bag of cables for connecting and recharging gadgets, some of which I am sure we have not owned for years. Curiously, it seems we brought three hot water bottles. New ones. And we brought nine towels. The van came with four towels, so that’s thirteen towels, enough to open a sauna.
The next time we travel overseas and I get asked at customs whether I packed my own bag, I’m going say, ‘No.’
We went straight from the airport to the van hire place in Perth. We’re travelling with another family. They’ve got two kids, too, but far less luggage. Still, when they run out of towels, they’ll be sorry. Our van is some sort of Toyota – a Hiace, I think – with a blister on top where the kids will sleep. It’s the sort of van electricians use. Or the sort you might see zipping around the city delivering parcels. By the time we got all our stuff inside, it looked like a courier van. When we unpacked it looked like the inside of a big suitcase. I could see Lisa thinking, ‘Boy, I would love a suitcase this big.’
Brett got upgraded by the van hire mob. His van is one of those big boxy ones – the size they use for delivering large household appliances. The young bloke at the van hire place felt bad that he couldn’t upgrade both of us, so he agreed readily when I observed that Brett’s van looked a bit dorky compared with our zippy little parcel van. It also beeps, very loudly, when he reverses. And in caravan parks lots of people spend lots of time standing round doing nothing in particular, so a beeping delivery van is keenly watched. On the first night, when Brett was reversing, I stood watching (not helping) with another bloke who wandered up. ‘Loudest beep I’ve ever heard.’ He said. ‘Yeah, looks pretty dorky, too.’ I added.
We spent the first two nights at Cervantes, about 250klm north of Perth. The overnight temperature got down to 1 degree both nights. And we left Sydney to escape the cold. Pity the hot water bottles were buried somewhere. I suspect they won’t be found till we drop off the van in three weeks’ time.
Cervantes has about 500 people. I think the only reason it exists is that the Stromatolites and the Pinnacles are nearby. The visit to the Stromatolites on day two was much anticipated by everyone except me – I had seen them before. But I hadn’t seen the Pinnacles. Lisa said to me in the morning, ‘Do you know what the Pinnacles are?’ ‘Nope’, I said. ‘But I bet they’re things that stick up out of something.’ We resolved to not find out in case it ruined the surprise. But I steeled Lisa for the fact that they probably aren’t as impressive as the Twelve Apostles given I didn’t notice them when I rode up this coast twenty years ago.
I told the kids that the Stromatolites were very exciting. I lied. Well, the notion of them is exciting, but the things themselves look like large piles of cow dung. A sign boasted that the ones in Cervantes are the fourth largest deposit in Western Australia. I reckon if I was the local mayor I would have fudged it and at least said they were the largest in the state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lake_Thetis-Stromatolites-LaRuth.jpg
There are fossils up north that have been dated at around four billion years of age (apologies to any creationists out there) that are identical to the living Stromatolites in WA. They are formed by single cell bacteria massed together. These bacteria release oxygen and are credited with raising the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere to such a degree that other forms of life could develop. So the living Stromatolites in WA of course aren’t four billion years old, but they are identical to ones that lived four billion years ago. See, I told you the idea of them is pretty exciting.
The kids weren’t excited at all. And I have to admit that I was sort of hoping that in the twenty years since I had last seen them that they might have changed in some way and become more exciting. (I admit this was wishful thinking given they haven’t changed in four billion years.)
But the walkway out to the Stromatolites really was exciting. It was a black industrial grid laid on concealed hardwood bearers. I had never seen the stuff before. Brett was pretty impressed, too. And he’s an architect. He said it was carbon fibre. I reckon Cervantes should advertise itself as having the flashest tidal walkway in WA and then just add, ‘Oh, and we’ve got some Stromatolites, too.’
The Pinnacles were worth seeing – even the kids enjoyed running round them. I was right that they were things that stick up. Much smaller than the Twelve Apostles, but far more numerous. There were hundreds of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pinnacles_(Western_Australia)
I wanderered round the van park at Cervantes before we left the next morning. It’s one of those ones where lots of people have vans set up as weekenders. There are some very solid, fixed annexes, some garden sheds, carports for boats. Camping is very much the grown-up equivalent of cubby houses. People try to duplicate their homes. But there must come a tipping point where people’s weekenders are more expansive and better equipped than their homes. I wonder if it feels like they are camping when they’re at home?
We left Cervantes and called into Geraldton to do some food shopping on the way to Kalbarri. There are two roads that go north from Perth. One goes straight up the middle, and the other one follows the coast. We’re on the coast road, but it’s still 100klms or so inland in places. Gee, it’s scrubby county to drive through. Lots of grey green scrub interspersed with patches of greeny grey scrub. It ranges from knee high to chest height. A few scrappy trees get to a couple of meters and then obviously figure there’s not much point going any higher. I thought when I was driving that what this coast needs is a mountain range, then I realized they probably had one and found it was made of stuff they could mine and flog.
Some rivers wouldn’t go astray, either. The lack of rivers is the most obvious difference between a drive up the east and west coasts. The east coast explorers had it easy. They would have hit a river every 70klm or so when heading north from Sydney. Inland explorers, or ones in the west, were the ones who died of thirst. It would have been ironic if any of those soft east coast explorers drowned crossing one of the rivers they hit. I bet there were loads of explorers apart from William Dampier and Dirk Hartog who found the west coast long before James Cook set foot on the east coast. I can imagine their excitement when the saw land, and their disappointment when they set foot on shore. ‘Bugger this.’ They would said. ‘Back on the boat boys.’
Kalbarri is about 250klm further up the coast. It’s got about four times as many residents as Cervantes – maybe 2,000 - so I’m guessing it’s got at least times as much stuff to do. It is very much a tourist town. It even has a river. Not a long one, but it’s something.
This is another town that survives on tourists. It’s a pretty place with a couple of caravan parks. They’re full of families – many of them from Perth. It’s school holidays over here. Curiously, we haven’t seen many grey nomads yet.
I wandered down to the van park office in the morning to see what local stuff there was to do and found a brochure for a Canoe Safari.
http://www.kalbarriboathire.com/canoe.htm
It worked out at $200 per family or four, but sounded pretty good, so we booked in and lobbed at the appointed time at the hire place for a briefing from Col, our guide.
Col had the easy, relaxed manner of a comedian confident in his material.
‘There are no crocs in the river….. The sharks ate them.’
Boom tish.
‘If you tip over in the river, just stand up.’
He had to do a life jacket demonstration, too. We were wearing ones the same as they have on planes.
‘If you end up in the river, slip the jacket over your head like this. Fasten it around your waist. Then pull on this toggle and the jacket will inflate. If you need to add more air, blow in this tube. Then walk to the edge of the river.’
It was pretty shallow.
He did make a point of telling the kids to not pick up any snakes and said that Bindi Irwin’s fondness for picking up snakes wasn’t great role model stuff.
Then Col drove us up river for half an hour on sandy tracks in his big 4WD bus thing towing a trailer with canoes. So we got the half hour ‘4WD bush tour’ thrown in. He dropped us on the bank of the very pretty Murchison River, and then scarpered downstream. We canoed about 4klms and there was Col on the riverbank with the barbeque going. He had cooked up a pile of sausages and onions and even buttered rolls. So we ate and drank, and then headed back down the river. Another 4klms downstream, Col met us with jam donuts of all things. Then it was another 2klm paddle and we were done. So we got the off-road tour, the canoe bit, a BBQ, jam donuts and Col’s comedy routine all for $200.
It was still bloody cold and that night a big storm hit us. It was the same one that smashed Perth. At 2am I was lying snug in the campervan breathing the fetid air filtered through four bodies and very happy I wasn’t in a tent. Then I heard a flapping noise just outside. ‘Bugger. The bloody annex.’ I forgot I had it up. So there I was at 2am wrestling a wet annex and stuffing it under the van. I was pretty wet myself then, so I wandered around to see if anybody else needed a hand.
The next morning I was doing some washing up in the communal kitchen. There was another bloke beside me and there was talk everywhere of the storm. I said to him ‘It’s good that us blokes do the washing and cooking when we’re camping, isn’t it.’ He agreed. Then I said, ‘Y’know, last night when I was out in the storm and giving a few people a bit of a hand, I didn’t see one woman outside pitching in.’ He agreed. I asked him whether he’d be game enough to bring it up with the missus next storm, but he said probably not.
The following morning I was washing up next to a local woman. She was a farmer from a place a bit inland and she had brought the kids to the coast for a week. I asked what was farmed locally and she said wheat, canola, cattle and some sheep. I asked her whether she had crops or animals. ‘Both.’ She said. ‘We thought we’d try to lose money in every way we could.’ I laughed, but she didn’t. Part of the problem is staff. Farmers can’t afford to pay what the mines pay, and the only people who can’t get a job in the mines are the ones who are too lazy to drive up there.
Day two in Kalbarri we drove out the see the local gorges. It was 28klm on a very corrugated red dirt road. Our zippy little parcel van handled it easily, much more easily than the large appliance delivery vehicle of Brett’s.
http://www.creativespirits.info/ozwest/kalbarri/kalbarrinpriver.html
I like a good gorge. This one is a weathered red gash that drops to a feeble river – the upper reaches of the Murchison. It’s when you see these weathered gorges cut into the flat land that you realize how old this country is.
We know we’re getting further away from the big smoke because more drivers are waving. Well, not so much waving, as lifting a finger off the steering wheel. It’s a tricky thing. You can’t stick a finger up too quickly, or too vertically, lest it be misinterpreted. Equally, if you get carried away with the greeting and it’s not returned, you feel a bit silly. So the movement needs to be obvious enough to be noticed, but subtle enough so that it could also be an involuntary twitch. I’ve got it down pat. There are a few people who take their whole hand off the wheel and wave. They’d be European tourists. Behind that wave they’d be thinking, ‘Thank God. Another person.’
Next stop, Denham.
