Australia Report - WA Part 1

Taking a break from watching the Olympics. Not that I am overly interested in winter sports but somehow all the excitement around me has caught on. Time to remember some of the sunny days though :-)

Day 1/19 (Oct 20, 2009): We had to get up early (5:30am) to get to the airport in time for our morning flight to Perth, WA. Darren gave us a ride again - not minding at all the 3hrs it would take out of his day. The flight itself was uneventful but long - 5hrs to cross the country from east to west. We picked up our rental car, a Nissan Patrol truck - quite a bit bigger than our Blazer - with manual transmission and the stirring wheel on the wrong side. But Jeff handled it like a Pro right from the start - except for the occasional use of the windshield wiper instead of the signal. The weather in WA was fabulous - no need for windshield wipers. Blue sky, warm and of course windy. The first day was mostly spent with getting ready for our trip, buying some essential gear for camping such as fuel and chairs and large water canisters, stocking up on food and getting a National Park Pass for WA (which we had to get downtown Perth - Jeff didn't appreciate testing his driving skills first thing in downtown Perth - good thing we had the GPS!!!!). By the time we left greater Perth going north we also hit rush hour traffic. More swearing from my driver. Luckily traffic didn't last long and soon enough we were speeding down the 4 lane highway which narrow down to 2 lanes shortly after. Jeff off course asked were to next but except for the general direction north I hadn't really made any plans for night #1 since I didn't know when we would be leaving Perth. So I just said keep driving till we find a campground. We followed route 60 for a while through nothing but bush until we turned off towards Yanchep and the ocean. I though there should be tons of campgrounds but no such luck. Even our GPS showed nothing in the area. But we did have a look at the Indian Ocean - NICE. We just kept driving until we came to a pull off along the road. From there a small, sandy track led into the bush and we thought maybe this would lead us to the ocean to camp on a wonderful white beach for the first night. We kept on driving for quite a while but the ocean wasn't getting any closer it seems (we needed to get used to the scale of the GPS - although I was positively surprised that the track showed up on our special map - it cost enough). It was all single lane track through low bush with a couple spots were people seemed to have turned off. As it was getting closer to sunset but not to the ocean we decided to just pull off at the next possible spot and set up camp for the night. We really didn't know where we were and if we would find the highway again in the morning. But hey, we were in the middle of the beautiful Australian bush with no neighbours but kangaroos and emus. It was very cool and we felt very adventurous -spoiled city people as we are. It got dark by 7pm and we crawled into our tent shortly after.

Day 2/20: Going to bed before 8pm really means waking up at 5am isn't so bad. Actually that's already sleeping in. The birds woke us before the sun was up at first light. It was a bit cool out still but otherwise promised to be another great day. We took our time with breakfast and I walked around a bit to enjoy the myriad of flowers all around us - WA is known for its flowers in the spring. Nevertheless we were on the road by 6am traveling towards Lancelin, the start of our first 4x4 adventure. Finding the sealed road again wasn't a problem. On the way we got to see our first emus in the fields along the highway. Pretty cool although not pretty birds. Other wildlife we saw on the drive were a couple kangaroos and a flock of black cockatoos. Of course we had to stop for pictures every time we saw something. So it took a little bit longer to get to Lancelin but hey, we got another 21 days in WA and today's route was relatively short. Lancelin was the start of the so called "Wedge Island Beach Run" - a 4x4 adventure I researched off the Internet (http://www.exploroz.com/TrekNotes/Default.aspx - great website for planning trips). It was supposed to be a "short" drive along the beach all the way up to Crevantes, home of the Pinnacles in Nambung National Park. Jeff and I had done some limited off-road driving in BC being used to rock and mud. Pretty, white, soft sand is a whole different story though. It didn't take long until we felt like we would get stuck trying to get onto the beach. Although the beach itself was nice and hard sand, there were some soft sand dunes to navigate to get there. And of course we didn't have a tire gauge or air compressor and the cell phone we purchased in Sydney had NO reception in this area. So we would have had no way of calling for help should we get stuck. Therefore we decided to not press our luck too much on day 2 and rather pick an inland track to get to Cervantes. There are tons of tracks in that area going north, most of them single lanes, a mix of sandy and rocky bottom. Unfortunately navigating those millions of tracks wasn't easy either without having a detailed map, which we thought we didn't need following the ocean - dah. Our GPS was a great help showing us some of the tracks but it wasn't easy to see how far they went north or if they just dropped us onto the beach again. Knowing the general direction all the time was priceless though. Nevertheless we were back tracking a few times. And the going was slow!!! The tracks took us through some wonderful bush and we stopped a couple times to look at the ocean and even go for our first little dip (water was coooold though). Lots of emus and kangaroos to take a pictures off. Not a single car or person. Saw our first bobtail - a small lizard who likes to just sit in the middle of the trail and hiss at oncoming cars rather than move out of the way. Bit suicidal animals if you ask me - we saw a lot of them during our trip through WA. Eventually we made it to Wedge Island - a small community on the coast in the middle of nowhere. Really weird though - we saw a lot of shacks but not a sole around. No humans, no dogs, nothing moved except sand and bushes being blown by the wind. If you know the movie "The Hills have Eyes" you know what we felt like. From here on we were supposed to follow a solid, hard packed 2-lane dirt road all the way to the Pinnacles. We had little problems finding the road - it was huge compared to the tracks - BUT not far from "town" the road going north was closed due to construction. We tried to ignore the signs "Absolutely No Entry - Danger" (I could always have use my German to play dumb) but when we hit heavy machinery and parts of missing road, we had to admit defeat and turn around. We tried unsuccessfully to find the old single lane track which according to our GPS and the info I had from ExploreOZ should be there - somewhere. No such luck. Fortunately, the dirt road did continue on west and we followed it towards the sealed highway. And instead of another 10-15km on hard packed dirt road to reach our destination, we had to do a nearly 80km detour to get to Nambung National Park. We arrived around 2pm with lots of time to explore the Pinnacles dessert on foot. Sandstone pillars as high as 4m formed by erosion through wind surrounded by sand in the middle of the WA bush. And it was VERY windy that day - I almost lost my hat. Although we weren't there for sunset, the colours were stunning. We were also lucky that the tour bus full of Japanese tourist just left just when we arrived. So not too many people were around to spoil the serene beauty of the place. After exploring the park we followed the highway up north to find a camp for the night. With the help of our GPS we found a quiet and simple private campground in Green Head. A short walk from there got us to the ocean where we watched our first sunset on the west coast of Australia. We had dinner in the dark - the nice thing about organized camping is that they usually have a kitchen areas with lights, tables and BBQ/gas stoves. In bed just past 8pm again.