Kalbarri, Western Australia
Trip Start
Oct 12, 2005
1
14
118
Trip End
Mar 23, 2006
Kalbarri, Australia
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
The trip lasted 4 days (I'm writing it all up on my return to Perth and broadband internet) and was good but very full and somewhat exhausing. Fortunately I have a couple of quiet days now & then I spend 2 days on a train to Adelaide so much opportunity for relaxation!
Following a somewhat antisocial 6am alarm call Helen (fortunately a morning person, but even so!) dropped me in central Perth just after 7am to meet the tour bus. Operated by Western Xposure [sic], the tour is an all-inclusive, youth-hostels-and-everyone-does-the-cooking jaunt up the West coast from Perth to Monkey Mia and back. The single guide has a long day, getting up about 6am with the group, driving the bus, running the various activities in the day and not getting off duty until about 8:30pm after dinner. In spite of this the two guides we had (changed bus half way through) were pretty cheerful.
There were 17 on the tour: 5 Japanese girls, 2 Irish girls, a Danish bloke, a Belgian bloke, a Greek girl, an American lady (older than the rest of us and in some ways the sort of person who gives Americans a bad name. She talked in a penetrating & strident voice for almost the entirety of the 4 days!), 3 German girls including one whose unfortunate bout of cystitis occupied the interest of much of the bus as various remedies were inflicted on her (vinegar, cranberry juice and lots of water seemed to do the trick) and 3 English people including me. No great friendships seemed to be formed, but the group got on pretty well given the circumstances!
Anyway, day 1 was a journey over the 591km (370 miles) from Perth north to Kalbarri. A long way, but looking at a map it is clear that this is just a tiny fraction of the distance up Australia's west coast. I am starting to get some idea of the scale of the place.
We stopped every couple of hours and if there was nothing on the agenda we stopped at a roadhouse for food, fuel and toilet breaks. Roadhouses are fine to stop at briefly but you wouldn't want to spend too long there. Imagine spending your life in a petrol station 100 miles from anywhere and you get the general idea!
The first proper stop was the Pinnacles desert. Set in a National Park (Australia seems to have hundreds of these and they cover an enormous area - several times that of the UK), the Pinnacles are limestone protrusions up from a sandy desert floor. To be honest they look better in photographs, and the area over which they are spread is rather smaller than the photos suggest. Still, it was worth seeing, and walking among rock columns over yellow sand, under bright sunshine, with 16 strangers and a camera is not the sort of thing I do every day!
Lunch set the pattern of Mike the guide (a Prince William look-alike, though a little older) producing bread, meat and various salad things and the group collectively chopping, putting out in bowls and making sandwiches, which everybody seemed to scoff in double-quick time! That day we were at Jurien Bay, which doesn't have much to recommend it except convenience at the time, but it is apparently very rich on the local lobster fishing industry!
Then it was back in the bus to drive up to Geraldton, the second city of Western Australia, with a population of the huge figure of about 30,000 (In comparison to the Perth area's population of about 1.5 million!). Just outside Geraldton are some huge sand dunes down which we sand-boarded, sitting on snow-braod type boards and tobogganning down the hill. I nearly wimped out altogether, seeing the height of the dunes and the fact that slides seem to be unpredicably fast or slow but braved the smaller slope & a slower board in the end. A bigger challenge was climbing the dune again... the board made a good climbing aid when shoved into the soft sand.
And so to Kalbarri and dinner. The view as the road rounded the headland above the little town in late afternoon would be worth millions if the place were more accessible. As it is, we just gawped as the bus came down to the coast & river mouth. The backpacker's was in the town & had an ensuite bathroom in the dorm! Dinner was group-cooked satay chicken, which was OK but I'm not a huge satay fan.
Venturing out after dinner I looked at the enormous sky of stars: Venus and Mars in the sky, and even the milky way fainly cloudy behind - something I'd never seen before, having always lived in comparatively light places!
