Day 6 Perth to Kalgarri

Day 6 Perth to Kalbarri

I awoke at 5:45 – it’s 3 hours earlier here than Sydney – and went out to find coffee. Even though we were right in the city centre, it took some finding… I eventually found a Vietnamese French café, full of construction workers, that had been open since 5:30.  By the time I got the coffee, it was well past 6 and several other places had opened….never mind!

Sylvia from WA Tours arrived to collect us at 7 – in her 4WD Land Rover; we collected John and Judith, a couple from Edinburgh here for their son’s wedding – still a week away – and set off through the northern suburbs of Perth, past eucalyptus groves and flowering banksies and acacias, nearly at the end of their flowering season.  We missed the best of the wildflowers by about two weeks, it seems. Sylvia enjoys leading wildflower tours most of all – and told us all about the glories we had missed.

Our first stop was for coffee at a café on the beach at Lancelin.  There was much excitement because later in the day the patron was to be interviewed for a television programme called ‘Our Town’.  The ‘town’ was tiny – I imagine they were interviewing nearly everyone – nevertheless, it was a pleasant stop and our first view of the turquoise blue sea set off by glistening white sand dunes – a bit like the south shore of Long Island might have been in the 1940s or 50s.

Our next stop was to explore the Pinnacles Desert – a curious area of yellow sand and scrub punctuated by 180,000 (Yes, someone counted) strange calcified rock structures. No one knows exactly how or when they were formed – it could have been as recent as 6000 or as long as 30,000 years ago.  They stick out of the sand, surrounded by the tracks of kangaroo and emu (We did see an emu wandering through.), some with stripes of pink laterite, some with patches of black lichen – and some crumbling like honeycomb from climatic effects.

The coastal scenery changed to scrubland as well – sandy soil from there north to nearly Kalbarri, first yellow, then gradually redder as we neared the areas heavy with iron ore.  The colours of the sheep’s coats changed too – from a dirty brown to a lighter, almost reddish colour.

We all looked out for kangaroo – but only John saw any other than those lying by the roadside, having been hit by someone else’s 4x4.

After the Pinnacles we drove for ages – well something like an hour and a half – but our next stop was Dongara the aim being to eat at a place called the little starfish – a tiny seaside shack restaurant that made it into the guide book – unfortunately it was closed for a special function so we had to find a place that wasn’t in the book but turned out to be pretty cool even though three men were busy tying a sheep carcass to a steel pole for a roast – it was vaguely reminiscent of a scene I once saw in a Greek island in the 80s. In fact the whole place reeks of a world long gone and a kind of naive innocence the rest of the western world has long since lost and dearly misses. I have to admit – I didn’t really have great hopes for Australia as being a destination. I imagined it would be very similar to Europe and America and in a sense it is. But in another it is totally different. There is a feeling of frontier just gone and most of the places have a history stretching back just 100 years or so and most things are quite fresh and hopeful. You can tell in another hundred years or maybe even less it will have all gone and if they are lucky they will bemoan what they have lost. Even so, at the moment – whatever it is they still have it and it is quite refreshing to experience.

From Dongara we headed off to the Hutt lagoon a lake made strikingly pink by natural algae. It is so pink it looks as if they poured gallons of food colour into it. But it isn’t – it is totally natural and so high in beta carotene that they mine it for export. It would seem from Sylvia’s descriptions that most of Australia is being mined for the various resources that it is rich in and they are busy shipping it overseas as quick as they can pull it out. Travelling around like this looking at one natural wonder after another begins to remind me of our trip around Egypt. At first it is awe inspiring then after a while the awe subsides into the everyday and you get quite glad when the end of the day arrives and you get to your hotel room so you can shower and chill a little bit and reflect on what it is that you have seen. To be honest what we have seen is humbling.