Dolphins, Dugongs and other such things

When last I dragged my lazy arse in front of a keyboard, the story was last September and my adventures out of Denham. It ended as I hopped over the Peron peninsula for a night in Monkey Mia. Note that that's pronounced "my-a" not "mee-a" - the latter seems more reasonable, but the locals laugh at you unfailingly if you use it.

Anyways, Monkey Mia has become something of a "must do" on the WA backpacker scene, as the local dolphins swim right close into shore (ie in as far as thigh-depth) on a daily basis to gawp at the tourists and get fed some fish. The tourists, unsurprisingly, gawp back, a well as taking umpteen dozen photos of the cheeky cetaceans. It's about as close as you can get to a dolphin without actually being out there swimming with one. I would experience this the following morning, prior to my departure from the resort (for that's all Monkey Mia itself is, a resort - hence why I had spent much of my time in Denham, the actual township of the area), but my focus the day of my arrival was elsewhere: on a catamaran.

Yes, I was going to indulge my love of sailing, and head out to see one of the other varieties of critter for which Shark Bay is famous: the Dugong. Also known as the "sea-cow" and related to the Caribbean's Manatee, the Dugong is a large, herbivorous sea mammal which feeds on sea grass. Due to its dependence on one food source and slow breeding pattern, it's now getting ever more endangered, and this was my first chance to ever see one. I was going out on the Shotover, an ex-ocean-racing catamaran (yes, I am obsessed with racing boats) which was spending its retirement in WA, helping the biologists there study the ecology of these creatures (and making some money on the side from taking tourists out to see them).

And it was a beautiful day - clear blue skies, golden sunshine, turquoise waters, and a whole heap of sightings of dugongs, aided by the polarising sunglasses the crew lent us. I took quite a few pictures although, without a polarising lens for the camera, most of them turned out looking just like brown blobs on the surface of the water - I know what they are, though! On top of this wildlife-spotting trip, I also did a sunset sailing trip on the same boat, which was more about the performance of the boat and less about spotting anything. Oh, and of course it gave me the chance to indulge my passion for ridiculous quantities of sunset photos.

After all of that sea-borne excitement, and the antics of the rest of my time in Shark Bay, I made myself some pasta, had a couple of beers at the bar and then called it an early night. I had to be up bright and early the next day to get down and see the dolphins come in, as well as checking out of my dorm and meeting up with the Easyrider when it arrived. Yes, having stood in the water while dolphins swam a foot or so away from me, and then marvelled once again at just how big a pelican's beak is, it was time to load back onto the Yellow Bus and head off up the coast.

This would be where the loss of my notes again comes back to haunt me, as I can scarcely remember anyone from that bus trip, or even the driver. The trip itself was largely uneventful, being composed of the usual long, mildly dull stretches along Aussie highways with nothing much to look at. My MP3 player got a fair workout again, as I was perched up chatting with the driver, and the trip only started getting memorable once we passed Carnarvon and popped into a bottle-shop. Alcohol on public transport vehicles (including tour vehicles) is strictly prohibited in Australia, but one of the factors in WA is the sheer distance - if you know the nearest police point is at least 4 hours' drive away, it can tend to embolden you. So we had a few cold beers on the final drive down towards our night's stop at Coral Bay, where we stopped down by the beach on arrival to settle in for the sunset over the Indian Ocean.

Once that was out of the way, we got ourselves booked into our accommodation, the Ningaloo Club backpackers. This is actually quite a nice setup, and much larger than would seem to be necessary for a village the size of Coral Bay (honestly, it's tiny - it's scarcely even a one-horse town on its own, unless that horse was a Shetland Pony). The secret there is that Coral Bay has turned into another of those "must do" places for backpackers on the West Coast, due to its snorkelling and diving opportunities, and other options such as quad-biking, plus the fact that even in winter it's usually pretty warm, so many backpackers start topping up their tan there...

In any case, I was hopping off the bus again there for a few days, so that seems a logical point to stop the narrative again. Until next time, fare thee well...

Y'know, they just look like rocks to me...

G'day again. Yes, it's time for a little more bloggage. So, back to Kalbarri, where I'm about to meet my new bus.

No, not literally the bus. I haven't taken to greeting motor vehicles. It just gets to the point, once you've travelled with backpacker companies for a while, that you realise that "a bus" is actually an acceptable collective form, at times, for backpackers. A gaggle of geese, a school of fish, a pride of lions, a bus of backpackers. So, the next Easyrider hit town, and I noticed two things. Firstly, there was a very high Scandinavian content. Secondly, the driver was female.

Now, this latter shouldn't be all that surprising, what with equal opportunities and that, but it's sadly true that it's not too often that you get female drivers. Where companies have separate drivers and guides (e.g. Shamrocker in Ireland) they seem a little more frequent, but otherwise they're in a distinct minority. Might be to do with the demands of the lifestyle (away from home for quite a while, dealing with rowdy and arsey backpackers), I don't know. At any rate, it means you do notice it when there's a lass in charge up front. And this new driver, in true Australian style, was called Kylie.

No, I'm not making it up, that really was her name - it's actually not that uncommon over here. It also appeared to be her driver-name, which is slightly unusual, but I guess if you're the only female driver there's no need to have some kind of distinguishing moniker in the way that might be needed if you were, say, a Dave or a John. (We actually found out later that she'd nearly been assigned another driver-name, but I'll get to that in a bit...)

Anyways, back to the rest of the bus. As I said, high Scandinavian content (2 Swedish lads, 2 Norwegian lasses and a Dane, out of about 15 on the bus), and also a girl called Jane, whose accent it took me a little while to place, until I suddenly realised that I was hearing the dulcet tones of Belfast - you'd think it would be impossible to forget what a Northern Irish accent sounds like, but it would appear I came close. At any rate, apart from getting to know the people I would be spending many hours on a bus with the next day, my ulterior motive for making myself known was to wangle my way into the trip to Finlay's again, for more fish. Yes, I know, I'd only had it 3 days earlier, but it was SO GOOD, and the rest of the dining options in Kalbarri weren't exactly blowing my mind (to the point where I'd cooked for myself the last couple of nights).

This lot were actually slightly more outgoing and lively than my previous group (okay, they were more up for having a few beers!), so we ended up sitting around the little campfire in Finlay's courtyard (it was actually a touch chilly that evening), finishing off our respective alcohol supplies. All good fun. Still, it was a relatively early night for us all, as we had a fairly early departure the next morning. Seeing as how we were going up to Kalbarri National Park...

Yes, I had several hours experience of deja vu, going back round by the Z-bend, the Loop and Nature's Window, however this time it was enlivened by people doing abseiling down near the Z-Bend. Whilst travelling with Scoobs, he hd mentioned the possibility to the bus, but not really done much of a hard-sell. Kylie, or 'Kyles' as she was often referred to, was obviously a very different beast, having basically persuaded everybody who came in on her bus to do it! This left only me, Kev and Jeanette (back on the bus at the same time) and a German girl whose name I can't recall for the life of me not wandering off cliffs. I have to admit that I would have been tempted, but I wasn't sure what doing a 20-metre or so descent would be like when my only previous experience was the 71-metre lunacy I did at Knysna in South Africa. So I went for a wander down by the river below the descent site, and chatted with the German lass, who'd been working on a horse-farm for a bit - one of those times when I think, maybe my whole travelling experience is just a bit too tame. I don't do enough things that are really different. Until I think of the prospect of getting up at 5:30am and going to shovel horse-shit. And then I decide I'm quite happy doing things the way I do...

So, after people had lowered themselves off cliffs to various accompaniments (some squealers, some deathly silent, some whooping with joy, etc), the most memorable provided by two VERY Scouse girls, it was back on the bus and heading off up north. And this was just one of those classic examples of Australian outback driving. Scenery that makes you go "wow" for all of about 10 minutes as you first drive through it, but which has got kind of monotonous when repeated for about 3 hours, as you head along a road with no marked turn-offs until you reach the road-house which is pretty much the only settlement for many, many kilometres around. There's a certain wild beauty to the countryside, but you do struggle at times to stay awake, and road-house food is of the "if in doubt, deep fry it" tradition, which is good for hangovers but very bad for the figure.

Time on the road was thus passed in the usual ways - chatting with fellow passengers and/or the driver, card-games (Shithead being a partiularly popular one amongst backpackers), reading, listening to music, sleeping, writing up travel journals. The one dramatic interruption was when Kylie slammed on the brakes and we screeched to a halt. She then quickly reversed a couple of hundred yards down the highway. Some of us started wondering aloud what had gone wrong with the bus. But no, there was no problem with the bus. Kylie had just stopped because she saw a lizard.

This is another one of those things I just can't get. I mean, HOW, when driving along at 100km/h or so, does a person spot a lizard that's maybe 10cm long on the side of the road? Admittedly, the species in question, known as the Thorny Devil, is quite an attractive little beast (Kylie brought it onto the bus for us to look at), but I'd have thought its coloration also made it somewhat difficult to spot in the dust at the side of the road! And that's even before you get onto questions of "keep your eyes on the road"...

By mid-afternoon, we had covered most of the requisite distance for the day, and arrived at Shark Bay (another fun name for those of you with the most popular phobias about Australian fauna...). And here we made a couple of stops, firstly at the Hamelin Pool. This is an interationally renowned site. Never heard of it? You're obviously not into cyanobacteria, then.

Specifically, Hamelin Pool is one of the world's best sites for Stromatolites. The really eager amongst you can go off and Google the term to your hearts' content, but in a nutshell they're one of the world's oldest known lifeforms. They're very slightly similar to coral, in that the individual organisms are tiny but the effect of having them around is to produce visible elements somewhat akin to rocks. In fact, they look a lot like rocks. Really. Bit disturbing to be told that your ancestor was once something that looks like a rock. Okay, so it was billions of years ago, but still. It looks like a bloody rock! Made life very exciting for the marine biologist we had aboard, though! (apparently these stromatolites were one of the key reasons for the trip...)

After taking the necessary pictures of our rock-like distant relatives (apologies if that assertion upsets any Creationists out there!), we headed down to the beach. So far, so normal for Australia, you'd guess. Except that this beach was different. It was apparently around 110km long, and composed of shells to a depth of around 10m. That's a LOT of shells. And the ones that have been compacted together for longer turn into a fairly solid brick-like material that's actually sometimes quarried and used locally as a building material (I believe there was a restaurant in Denham made purely from the stuff, and quite picturesque it was). Anyways, there are absolutely no prizes for guessing what this place was called. That's right. Shell Beach.

Having wandered around, looked at the shells, decided not to go in the water after seeing a dead jellyfish washed up at the shoreline, and taken the obligatory group photos (which now frustrates me, as I can't remember who most of them are!), it was back on the bus, and onwards around the Bay, through the fence that crosses the narrow neck of Peron peninsula. Looking it up on the web, it appears this may be called the Eden Gate. We just called it the Dog Fence. You see, the fence cuts right across the narrow neck of the peninsula, and is designed to keep "feral" (introduced) species out of the area. The idea is to turn the peninsula into a reserve for native animals, safe from the unfortunate effects of sheep, goats, foxes, cats, etc. Well, they've got rid of most of them, but are still having problems with the cats. So, one part of the solution is that, as you pass through the cattle-grid onto the peninsula, loudspeakers play quite loud recordings of dogs barking. We thought Kyles was taking the piss about this, but you can actually hear it quite clearly if you have your head out the window as you drive through. I don't know whether this really does scare the cats that much, but the parks people seem happy with it.

I'll go on a fair bit more about the Shark Bay area in the next posting, as this one's getting a bit long, but suffice to say we arrived in Denham, the main town of the area, where Kylie proceeded to drive us around for the grand tour. This took about 5 minutes. We also found out that her colleagues attempted to rename her as "Bowser" at one point, as she apparently accidentally drove into the fuel bowser at Denham's petrol station on one of her earlier runs! Obviously, this is the kind of thing it's good to learn after you've just spent a day being driven around by a person...

Our home for the night was the Shark Bay YHA. Here, courtesy of the friendly owner, we scored some free BBQ'd kangaroo (yes, I am being serious), then grabbed our alcoholic beverages of choice and settled down for a game of killer pool. I think I explained the rules in an earlier post, and can't actually be bothered now, but let's just say this game had a couple of differences. Firstly, the state of the felt on the pool table meant that this had about as much in common with your average game of pool as a mini-golf course does with a professional 18-hole golf links. Various rips and folds created all manner of interesting obstacles. And secondly, I won. For the first time in my life, I won a game of killer pool. Actually, you could probably count the number of games of pool I've ever won (not including doubles where my partner has "carried" me) on both hands. So I was quite a happy bunny when I went to bed, looking forward to a few days in Shark Bay.

Yep, I was jumping off the bus again, for more mischief and mishaps, but that will wait for next time. (I'm not getting any better at writing these cliff-hangers, am I? I blame it on exposure to too many crap trailers aimed at getting anybody interested in watching Neighbours or Home & Away over here...)

Anyways, until I get the urge to write again, farewell!

Pat

Pinnacles and fresh fish

Okay, time to try and knock out another bite from the exceedingly large backlog of unprocessed blog entries, seeing as how I have some kind of enthusiasm, and have managed to find a hostel with free internet access.

So, my first days on the Easyrider started with the usual early-morning groan. One of these days, I am going to find a backpacker bus which caters to the likes of me by not departing until late morning, but, until then, I will have to deal with being roused from my slumber, and staggering onto buses whilst still half asleep, frequently (as in this case) still munching down on the last piece of toast for breakfast. Given that the bus was already fairly well-populated, I ended up in the "shotgun seat", up front with the driver. This was to be my perch for a quite a few legs of my Easyriding trip, which was good on the conversational stakes, but less so on the legroom front. I frequently ended up with my feet perched on the dashboard to stop my legs going totally to sleep.

Our driver in this case gloried in the moniker of "Scoobs". As those familiar with the backpacker bus scene (esp in Oz and NZ) will know, daft nicknames are often something of a must. And Scoobs had been at this for a while. He'd apparently left the job at least twice before, but ended up coming back because it was such good fun! And yet, this was to be, once again, his last run. So we were the first leg of the last group he would drive for. Again.

Scoobs also had the fairly enlightened view that, as we were the passengers and this was our holida, we got to pick the music. Given that I was at the front and had an MP3 player, this meant that effectively for this leg of the trip I got to pick the music. Those of you familiar with my behaviour at parties around the CD player will understand that this made me a very happy bunny indeed. And the music seemed to go down fairly well (Scoobs' only requirement was "No soppy shit...", which became the name of the playlist I set up for that morning!).

Our first stop for the day was up at the Pinnacles. These are weathered limestone outcroppings sticking out of the desert in a region up north of Perth, quite near to the town of Lancelin. And, to be honest, while they're quite interesting to look at for all of about 5 minutes, you'd probably have to be a geologist to get really excited about them for much longer. Or someone who gets very excited about suggestively-shaped rocks (of which there are quite a few amongst the hundreds). I'd seen them when I was in Perth 6 years earlier, so was even more underwhelmed than some of the others, but it was a gorgeous day (after several shitty ones weather-wise down in Perth) so I wasn't complaining about wandering around in the sun for a while.

After that, it was another of those relatively long days on the road which are so common to WA, most of which was spent chatting with Scoobs and my fellow passengers. Unfortunately, as none of them jumped off the bus that evening as I did, and as I managed to lose my diary in Darwin at the end of the West Coast trip, I can't remember any of their names! But they were very nice people...

That evening's stop was in Kalbarri, a nice little seaside town by the Kalbarri National Park, which includes a whole bunch of river gorges. That night, we got a special deal courtesy of Easyrider, of a fresh fish BBQ at an amazing outdoor place called Finlays, for the princely sum of 10 Aussie dollars (just over 4 quid) - combine that with a few beers from the bottle shop we walked past on the way, and we're talking a very pleasant first day on the road.

Having then said goodnight and goodbye to my newfound (and now forgotten) friends, I settled in for a good night's sleep (no early wake-up for me) ready for my 3 days in Kalbarri (that's how long it was before the next Easyrider bus!). And I'll write about that next time, so as to make sure that I actually finish an entry in one go for once!

Until the next time, my friends, adieu!

Pat