Western Australia

Well, I have been home for two days so I figure it's about time for me to post some form of representation of my past eight days in the land of hot winter sunlight. Our journey began somewhere near the beginning, as most journeys do. We arrived in Perth, spent a relatively sleepless night in the loudest hostel we've ever experienced, and left in the morning to pick up our campervan (Bertha...because of her large girth). We immediately drove to the coast to a town called Fremantle where we wandered around the open-air markets and spent a sufficient amount of time driving around lost through narrow alleyways that barely allowed Bertha room to pass. From then it was a straight drive down the Great Northern Highway to the Brand Highway to a small (and by small, I mean ghetto) "caravan" park in Regans Ford. It was our virgin trailer park experience, and it was truly magical...magical in the most sarcastic meaning of the word.

Up early the next morning for a two(ish)-hour drive to Nambung National Park to see the Pinnacles Desert. It consists of thousands of these limestone pillars and scientists still disagree about how they got there. Some think they used to be tree trunks and some think the salt and sand blew up from the Indian Ocean nearby and started these pillars. The desert was huge - it stretched on for several miles, and we took our time exploring by foot and then making the 4km drive that wound through the sand.

This is one of my favorite shots of the week. We hit the Pinnacles at such a good time - late morning/early afternoon when the shadows created just the right level of creepy.

This is Hangover Bay, part of the Jurien Bay Reserve and our first real glimpse of the Indian Ocean. Cold. But so clear and beautiful - the kind of beautiful that you would never think could possibly exist. We stopped here for a quick stroll, then drove several minutes to Kangaroo Point which afforded a similar view, and we had our lunch of peanut butter and banana and Nutella sandwiches and carrots with hummus ("is yummus"). Also, I think it should be noted that I'm listening to "Alice's Restaurant" while I'm writing this and it's really hard to type while Arlo Guthrie is telling his story. Just FYI.

Several hours north of Nambung was a small town called Northampton that boasted a population of 842. We parked in the caravan park just off the main road and went for a walk right as the sun was setting. There was a cacophony of squawking and we noticed a whole swarm of pink cockatoos zig-zagging through the sky. They all settled on this energy tower - it was incredible! I believe there were more birds in this shot than there were people in the entire town. The caravan park was also delightful, as there was constantly Irish/gaelic/Riverdance music playing in the bathroom, which Laura said sounded like the fairies and elves were having a dance-off.

When we went on our massive grocery excursion before leaving Perth, we purchased supplies for makeshift s'mores because our campervan came equipped with a gas stove. We were dismayed to discover that Australia does not have graham crackers, so we improvised (I just had to write that word four times because I couldn't remember if we Americans spell it with a z or an s) with some graham-cracker-like "biscuits." The marshmallows here are also strange: they're white and pink and they're supposed to be different flavors but they all taste exactly the same and they're strangely shaped and powdery. We managed to make some mean s'mores, though, with our mobile campfire.

These are stromatolites: the world's oldest living fossil. These particular ones are in Hamelin Pool (part of the Shark Bay World Heritage Site) and are 3.5 billion years old. It was so crazy to imagine everything they have seen in their lifetime. Oh. And for those of you who don't know what stromatolites are (which I'm guessing is every person who is reading this...unless you're Laura or the friendly volunteer ranger woman half-napping on the bench next to the boardwalk), the are colonies of cyanobacteria that clump together and create these sort of puzzle shapes in the water. When they die off, new layers grow on the top, so the oldest layers are at the bottom. Overall this stop was a bit of a letdown because after all the hype surrounding these fossils we thought they would be a huge tourist attraction. Quite the opposite, actually. They were down an unpaved road with a lack of adequate signage. We had to go into the historical Hamelin Telegraph Station-turned tea room to ask how to get to the stromatolites. And this was after we bypassed a "petrol" station with 1/4 tank of gas because we thought that there would be a place for us to get gas...you know, because it can be assumed that stromatolites would bring in quite the crowd. We were horribly mistaken. We wound up with less than an 1/8 tank about 35kms from the nearest fuel station...which, naturally, was the one we had passed. So we had to backtrack driving well under the 110km/hr speed limit so we would make it without, you know, dying. When we finally made it to the station I doubt we had enough gas to drive another kilometer. It was petrifying.

This was at Shell Beach, which is comprised entirely of countless millions of dime-sized cockle shells. Evidently the layer is about 25-30 feet deep! According to the website, there are "many photo albums across the world of persons throwing these snow-white shells." Yes. Here's one more for ya.

I looked up the exact length of this beach: 60 kms. And the reason there are so many shells is because the waters are hypersalinated (ideal for these creatures) and the bivalve shellfish have no predators so they multiply in massive quantities. It was pretty breathtaking, and by far one of our favorite stops.

After departing Shell Beach (somewhat reluctantly), we stopped at Eagle Bluff which had a spectacular view of the Shark Bay sea grass beds - the largest in the world, and a key reason that Shark Bay is a World Heritage Site. This tiny island is now a sanctuary for endangered sea birds, and apparently many a manatee and dugong (manatee-like creature) and shark come to feed on/in/near (and any other preposition imaginable) the sea grass.

We spent that night in the small town of Denham. It was by far our favorite coastal town, located on the shore of Shark Bay. We watched the sun set from this pier where these two adorable elderly men were fishing for squid. Before this, though, we spent a couple much-needed hours of relaxation on the beach reading and writing in our journals and taking pictures after a long day of driving.

The next morning we trekked to Monkey Mia Reserve. The word "mia" (pronounced "my-uh") is an aboriginal term meaning "home," and apparently the "Monkey" part came from the fact that the earliest settlers came by boat and brought monkeys with them. This reserve is famous for the docile dolphins that have grown accustomed to human contact and swim up to the shore within feet of tourists to be fed by the park rangers. I had never seen a dolphin before this day, and it was the perfect introduction. I didn't get to feed one, but they were so close and such beautiful animals that I didn't care. As we were heading toward the parking lot after the feeding, we heard a man say, "Excuse me!" and we turned around. "I'm sorry," he said, "but did you spend last night in the Shark Bay Campervan Park in the Maui campervan?" We nodded and he said, "You left your power cord." Dear. Lord. First of all, what are the odds that he would run into us? And secondly, kudos to him for recognizing us. We definitely would not have recognized anyone else in that park. He saved our trip, for sure.

This day's driving was brutal - nine hours - but so worth it because we managed to get twice as far as we had anticipated, allowing us an entire day in Coral Bay to explore the Ningaloo Reef and to sign up for a snorkeling trip with a whaleshark! We met a lovely couple from Melbourne at this lookout who had a pair of binoculars and spotted whale spouts far off in the distance, and they let us take a look and talked to us for quite some time about our studies and how we liked Melbourne. They were charming. And we were exhausted, so we went to bed soon after sunset.

My underwater pictures are forthcoming because I have to go through this whole Stone Age process called manually developing my film (who does that anymore?) because I used a disposable camera. But. I do have this shot of the whaleshark we swam with, who Laura has named Albus. He was over 30 feet long and was so gentle and friendly and curious and hung around our boat for way longer than any of the guides expected him to. They said he was the best whaleshark they've seen all season, and I guess he was the first they'd seen in about a week. We were lucky, because to find the shark the tour company launched a small plane that located the shark's position. It can be a bit of a waiting game, because since they are wild animals they're not necessarily in the same area they were the last time. Luckily the plane found Albus after only about a half hour, and we all had a good hour total in the water with him before calling it a day. On our way back to the shore we also saw a sea snake which Laura says is one of the deadliest creatures in the sea, and I had my very first whale-sighting: a pod of humpbacks circled around our boat for about 45 minutes!

It was glorious to have a day of no driving, but we knew that meant we'd have even further to drive the next day if we were ever going to make it back down to Perth for our flight back to Melbourne. After several hot and grueling hours behind (and beside) the wheel, we made it down to Kalbarri National Park which we had bypassed intentionally on the way up because we wanted something to look forward to going back south. We made it to Rainbow Jungle - the largest free-flight aviary in the world - before the sun fell. It was the perfect way to end a tense day of car travel. From the aviary we stopped at Jacques Beach across the street, then parked Bertha at a caravan park, then watched yet another (and unbeknownst to us, our last) sunset from the beach. We got sufficiently lost multiple times in the maze that was the Murchison River Caravan Park on our way to and from the bathroom, but luckily the confusion was short-lived.

Before leaving Kalbarri altogether we had to stop for a quick (500-meter) walk along the top of the red sandstone cliffs of the Murchison River Gorge to Nature's Window, a breathtaking lookout point. We had to drive 25ks along an unpaved bevelled road driving at about 20km/hr. Slow going, but worth it. And it had been fairly cloudy and misty as we drove in, but right as we neared the lookout (several minutes after this picture was taken) the clouds parted and the sun emerged and angels sang. True story.

This park put the gorge in gorgeous. I can't get over the striated rocks! The colors! Again, this is before the sun came out and the glare from the clouds was messing with the light balance on my camera, but it was fine. Little did I know that my batteries would throw in their collective towels before we left Kalbarri...

I feel the need to include endless pictures of the gorge because it was so incredible. We had every intention of stopping at another lookout point closer to the highway on our way out, but as we were driving back down the 25kms of sand, a torrential downpour started with wind that blew the raindrops perfectly parallel to the ground. I had the windshield wipers on hyperspeed but we had to pull over at the edge of the main road until we could see enough to keep driving. Stupidly I parked the van at an angle, and realized almost too late that we might be sinking in the sand. Indeed we were. I hit the gas but the tires only sputtered. Reversing proved more fruitful, and we managed to narrowly escape a death-by-Australian-rainstorm.

Last one. I promise. This is Nature's Window, and you can actually see blue sky - the very last blue sky of the week. The drive back to Perth after this was quite bipolar: apocalyptic rain and wind so hard we thought we would lose control of the car that alternated with the occasional burst of sunlight that created tons of rainbows in the last two days of the trip. We saw more rainbows that living kangaroos, with a ratio of about 8:2. Dead kangaroos were another story, though. In five minutes of driving I counted 14 lying along the side of the road. They come out at dusk and Laura and I refused to drive anywhere near the end of daylight because we were terrified of hitting one.

We returned Bertha to her owners in what turned out to be quite the tearful goodbye. True to our bum-like travels, we walked from the car rental place to the airport. That's right. We walked. And got there so early that we had to wait two hours before we could even check in...at which point we had to wait two more hours to board our flight. We arrived back in Melbourne at 1am and I was in bed by 2:30. Thus ended the most incredible trip of my life. I would also like to mention that Laura left for home this morning and I miss her so much already. It's so strange that she's not here, that the home we've all created for ourselves in Australia is crumbling.