26:24.42S 114:27.50E
That evening we cooked in the outdoor kitchen near the tent instead of the big camp kitchen and I’m glad we did because we met numerous really interesting people from WA; one lady travelled the world’s universities in her role as an adviser to students on dissertation presentation and a chap had helped a friend sail from the UK to the Canaries. So lovely to chat with strangers in out of the way places and with shared interests.
During the night I had to attend to the wants of nature and was ably assisted by the brilliant white path showing up as grey in contrast to the black rocks. On the way back the starlit sky was well defined, there being little in the way of light pollution, the tiny solar powered light stalks were not a problem just making the path whiter in places. Orion and the Southern Cross and a moving satellite, a nice collection to take back into my sleeping bag with me. Soon we would be viewing the heavens from Zoonie’s moving hull I thought.
With the tent packed away we sat on our comfy folding chairs and sipped tea while the early morning sun warmed our backs. Then as we drove slowly through the campsite, past the lovely old restored homestead, we were rewarded with the sight of three roos, contentedly nibbling the local bushes and casting just a cursory, unafraid glance in our direction. Another place we were reluctant to leave.
Compared to the thriving organic market garden area around Carnarvon where we saw crops of bananas, maize, greens, pumpkins, oranges and apples under the tender care of the Carnarvon Growers Association, the road to Denham can only be described as a mono feature landscape of low lying spinifex bushes growing over sedimentary rock, so that when we turned a final bend we were delighted to see Sal Darago moored off the small town and our meeting was definitely on.
We had booked into the Denham Seaside Caravan Park for two nights and I was tickled to discover the plot the lady allocated us was ‘A’ in the camp area, nearest to the town, about ten paces from where Jeremy and Kathy had tied up their dinghy to a no parking sign and in direct visual sight of Sal Darago through the dunes!!
We had a good chat and a valuable exchange of info with Jeremy and Kathy at a Hotel Bar in town. They reminded us to send off a form for entry into Cocos and Jeremy had been having a chat with Jerome in La Reunion when his phone was cut off but a stop over there sounded feasible. The four of us are assisted by the fact we are coming from WA where the interstate borders have been closed for months and there is no CV here. But if the WA government loses its current high court battle to keep its borders closed and CV starts to raise its ugly head here then that could change; so we are spurred on to leave sooner rather than later.
We watched as our friends motored gently away back to their home and looked forward to seeing them the next day for coffee in the camp kitchen provided the weather didn’t change overnight.
We could hardly stay at this prime seafront location without taking a walk along the beach to the distant headland, and a peep around the bend to see more of the same. Families were enjoying the clean and peaceful shoreline as the sun again promised a beautiful meeting with the horizon and we were warmed by our encounter with our English friends, the four of us so far away from home. A perfect day was rounded off when I beat Rob at Dominoes 3’s and 5’s which we played on our mattress inside the tent before spreading out the sleeping bags.
Where and when will we Four Meet Again?
Although we plan to leave Australia at similar times, Jeremy and Kathy, who are now moored off Carnarvon with the intention of making an appointment with Border Force to clear out at the end of August will have a distance of only around 100 miles less than us to Cocos, 1200 miles away, when we set off from Fremantle. It would be nice to think we will meet up there but our yachts may find different weather conditions on route and if one of us is in Cocos with a good weather window to jump onto the conveyor belt ride across the centre of the Indian Ocean they will not be waiting for the other boat. But we will meet again sometime and somewhere I am sure.
So we enjoyed chatting for an hour over coffee and dark fruit cake before waving them off once more and embarking on our own tour of the area for the rest of the day.
First stop was Eagles’ Bluff where despite our not seeing any passing Sharks, Turtles, Dolphins or Dugongs the views were lovely on the warm and still day. On the road back to Denham we spotted the Emu and visited Ocean Park Aquarium which was a sound venture using fresh seawater pumped straight from Shark Bay. Our enthusiastic guide was very upbeat and keen and most of the creatures in there are on brief loan from the nearby sea, just for the likes of us to view and learn about.
At Monkey Mia back in the early 1960’s a woman started to feed the local dolphins on her way back from fishing trips with her husband. This has become a local attraction where people can arrive at the Reserve around 7.30 am each day, (we heard the exodus leaving our camp early that morning) pay the $15 entrance fee and join the crowd standing in the shallows hoping the dolphins will arrive for their titbits, so the viewers can get a close up view. A while back it was found that the survival rate of the baby dolphins was dropping and so now the parents who venture in close to the crowd and cannot be with their young in this short time are given no more than 10% of their daily intake of food, thus keeping them in hunting mode. Since then the numbers have improved.
I felt uneasy about all of this and I would not have been amongst that crowd in the shallows. We arrived mid-afternoon, three hours after the dolphins were likely to visit and the intelligent young lad at the entrance waived the fee for us, partly because the pass we had for the National Park on the other side of the fence was not applicable in this Reserve. We wandered around, saw a few dolphins swimming languidly beyond the moored yachts, when I came across the poster about the father Emu and his chicks. This area is where emus have lived for thousands of years so understandably this father was fearful of man’s arrival and the building of the Reserve, along with its campsite and resort hotel. We all know Emu’s are temperamental and can be very dangerous so when he came into the public area with his chicks his behaviour was challenging and predictable and the staff decided he should be relocated. The result of that effort was that the Emu and his chicks died. So the staff, instead of conceding this was because of the error of intrusion in the first place, then blame the same people they have invited along here to spend their money, for feeding the Emu. When will we learn that encroaching upon and feeding wild animals in their natural habitat is never good for them whether they be dolphin, emu or anything else. Ok, beef over and at least the dolphins can escape and don’t have to turn up in the first place.
On our way back to camp we happened upon a little car park with a cliff to its left hand side and decided to go exploring. I clambered up to the top of the rise and looked down on Sal Daraga and the point we reached last evening on our beach walk. I also found some tracks, one of which is a wallaby, possibly the feller in the photo and it was fun to think it may have been looking down on us the night before.
Errata: Apologies for calling Tristan by the incorrect name of Travis in a previous blog about the gas bottle. Also using the word ‘two’ instead of ‘too’ in the Facebook intro.
From Shark Bay to the dry Lake Indoon
With Friendly Billabong Roadhouse in between – 32:00.00S 115:45.00E
Sal Darago was moving slowly away from her mooring and turning north towards Carnarvon as we left Australia’s western most publicly accessible town the next morning, our meeting a success of exchanged news and shared plans. I have included three pictures of the old buildings along the waterfront in Denham as being typical of how the town once looked before the burgeoning of tourism in the area. Around 110,000 visitors each year are seeking the dolphin experience at Monkey Mia and a seaside holiday of fishing, boating and beach combing.
Royal Navy Captain Henry Mangles Denham charted the area in 1858 but four years previous to that Lieutenant Helpman discovered extensive beds of pearl-shell oysters, so the town started as a pearling camp called Freshwater Camp. We liked the feel of the place and it was much warmer than the York Peninsula and Exmouth which are fully exposed to the chill from the Indian Ocean off the NW coast.
So back towards the North West Coastal Highway, stretching 808 miles from Port Hedland to Geraldton and we would be travelling the whole length. The highway was created immediately after the Second World War from existing roads and pastoral tracks and was moved inland between Carnarvon and Port Hedland in the years between 1966 and 1973 because of the regular and expensive damage caused by cyclones hitting the NW coast.
The highway passes through the Pilbara region and sealing it became essential to accommodate the growing volume of traffic from pastoralism, tourism and the extraction and export of iron ore. So it is no coincidence that with the improvement of the Highway into an all year route by the 1960’s roadhouses were built along its length to cater for all the needs of travellers and we visited the Billabong Roadhouse which was established in 1962.
They are now very much a part of the travel culture in this part of the world and ‘ours’ deserves a mention. The genuine smiling welcome from all three of the staff on duty was pleasant to start with and the range of ready to eat food they had on sale was as good as Woolworths or Waitrose back home and it included fresh fruit salad that we had not seen at any other roadhouse. We were in Darwin when we last noticed Kangaroo Scrotum, Roo Claws and Saltwater Crocodile heads, complete with export licences, on sale as tourist items and I wondered why people would buy such things. The pink boxer roo was tempting but we were going to have a bulging car full when we returned to Zoonie anyway, so I wasn’t going to add any more. The young lady took the picture of us in front of a wall of photos showing visitors tattoos and we bought coffee and two recommended raspberry muffins that were really good.
Back on the road we were driving into the north western tip of the Wheatbelt of WA and the pretty yellow flowering trees that lined the highway were backed with arable fields of rape (canola= Canada Oil) and barley. Crossing the Galena Bridge over the Murchison River brought us to our outermost point we reached with Wokka and the gang of keen youngsters. We were lucky, thanks to Malcolm and Christine, to be able to get this far and see all we had seen and I wondered if any of our young travelling companions would one day return to resume their adventure.
A short distance south of Geraldton, having passed olive groves, historic settlements, dog kennels, flat paddocks of sheep, glossy black Angus cattle and crops, horse farms, more dry rivers, a big goat farm and homesteads built from adobe bricks, we turned onto the Indian Ocean Drive that hugs the coast down to Perth and were glad to get away from the volume traffic that was slowing us down to 80kph. We weren’t used to lots of traffic!
Rob was flicking through the pages of our road map to find somewhere to stay for our last night of camping, (I wonder when we will use our dear little tent again) when he discovered brief comments to the effect ’23 May 2017, very picturesque’ over number 332 Lake Indoon, which was between the Indian Ocean Drive and the Brand Highway 1; so that was decided.
There were a couple of discretely placed camper vans tucked into their own corners when we arrived to find not a drop of water in the vast and almost perfectly round lake. We pitched tent and went for a walk. Back in the thirties the lake was dry for a few years, so I optimistically hoped that sometime in the near or distant future folk would again enjoy whizzing around the flat water surface on skis, in the right direction of course.
We started our walk around the shore with its rim of tasty samphire looking greenery and then decided to walk right across. There were footprints and tyre tracks everywhere so we were hopeful we would not slip unnoticed into a mire of mud or quicksand, never to be seen again. Sunglasses, lost overboard from a boat and the sinker to a lost mooring buoy painted the picture of fun times past. Today, and partly because it is winter time, there were just a few of us braving what would be a chilly night in this lovely spot nestled in the Beekeepers’ Nature Reserve.
The next morning, our last in camp and so to be savoured, we lay in our snug bags knowing that the sun would warm us shortly and listening to the variety of birdsong. We chatted to a couple of fellow campers, one was there with his poorly wife taking a significant trip back to a favourite spot and another could not remember when there was last water in the lake. That was red rag to a bull for me and I have since read reviews about the lake that suggest it has been empty for at least two years.
Tyres on tarmac once again and excited were we at the prospect of seeing Mel at the Perth Youth Hostel, where we had booked in for two nights of nostalgia and a farewell to this part of Aussie. She was not in the office until Saturday, the next day, so off we went in hot pursuit of a decent beer at The Island Pub on Elizabeth Quay, one of our ‘locals’.
Making the Mental Transition back to our Usual Life
The Island pub seemed just the same as on our previous visit; most of the clients were clearly local professionals enjoying an end of working week drink. I would be lying if I said we just had a beer, but it did precede a nice Espresso Martini and a shared bowl of (well) loaded nachos. All part of the process of moving on, you understand.
It was good to see Mel again and chat about how her YH was ticking along ok, down only 20 visitors on the same time last year. When we were there she had 35 people staying out of a possible 230 but of course it is mid-winter and she would not expect visitors from abroad at the moment anyway. However the future looks pretty bleak too with Australia not planning to open up until there is a safe vaccine, so business is nowhere near out of the woods yet.
She had seen on the computer that we checked in to the Kimberley Travellers Lodge and were planning to visit Perth too.
We spent our whole day strolling right along the embankment built to tame the river and provide land for the skyscrapers to be built. We remembered how Walter had described the area as marshy with small lakes and how the basements of the new buildings have to be pumped out constantly, and that is what Rob and I think the pretty little cream walled ‘houses’ were; pump houses. One of the lakes still exists at the end of the esplanade, Lake Vasto named after the Italian City with which Perth is twinned through its welcoming so many migrants from Italy. Lake Vasto is a haven for birdlife; the orange-necked duck is a Mountain Duck and it was a gentle irony to see the sleeping figure finding shelter behind the monument to the immigrants where his or her ancestors would have rested in times past, before the arrival of the Europeans.
We lunched on pizza and beer at the treetop bar, The Aviary, our second local, amidst many young revellers, no more counting heads and limiting numbers, the place was happily heaving. One birthday party of young ladies were so made up I wondered if their parents would recognise them, but then there was a time when I would don green and white eye shadow, rouge and lipstick to milk my brother’s herd of cows!
Back at pretty Te Opu the sun bathed all the many lovely little niches so I couldn’t resist photographing them for you. The barley is well up and Tess is just fine.
The internet connection at the doc’s was down so I will be getting my copy of my medical report from the horse’s mouth in Albany in a few days’ time. We are receiving back almost all of our flight money by instalments at the moment, which is excellent and Mel promised us she is just awaiting the go ahead and she will refund the 10 Day Camping Trip money too.
A quick update on the question of when Lake Indoon was last ‘in water’, the photo was taken by Malcolm’s cousin who took it when he made the entry on the road map, May 2017, during a camping trip. Always nice to get an answer to a question.
So it’s all good! Our mental transition back to circumnavigators is almost complete and I will tell you about today’s practice tomorrow!