Perth and north to Cervantes
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Spent the morning driving around Perth trying to find the only public hotspot in town, plus getting breakfast, some supplies and what not. Les is getting pretty good at driving on the left. I haven’t tried it yet and am now reluctant since he’s doing so well. But I’ll have to at some point. I don’t think he can drive all 8000 miles or whatever it is by himself.
Marion and Daniel (my wife and son for those of you who don’t know) were online when I was connected and I had the opportunity to instant message with them for a little while, which was great.
We wandered around Perth a bit. It’s a nice place. Relaxed and clean. The people are very friendly. There’s lots of parks and the Swan river comes through town in fairly dramatic fashion. Lots of people out and about shopping on a work day. Don’t know what they do for a living but apparently they get a lot of time off.
We finally left town around noon and struggled our way out of town on the “highway” which had stoplights about every 200 feet that seemed to take forever to change. The suburbs were not very interesting, looking much like suburbs everywhere. We stopped for food at a cute litle market. Seemed like a co-op or something because it was actually a series of individual stores. You had to pay seperately at each place. Kind of like going to Safeway and paying seperately for the deli vs the bakery vs the produce. Not very convenient. We bought $140 worth of food. That should hold us for awhile. Then gas, a stop at the camping store for a flashlight, then finally on the “Great Northern Highway”, which sounds more impressive than it is.
The Great Northern Highway is a two-lane blacktop carved through the scrub brush. The road is loose crushed rock glued down with black tar. We traveled through a vast open expanse. Very very few houses or other signs of civilization other than fences. We passed a Royal Australian Air Force base and got buzzed by a large 4 engine craft of some kind. We saw many sheep, cattle and horses and even an alpaca farm. It’s very much like eastern Oregon except the plants are weird. Very stubby in general and very sharp! We stopped to try to get some pictures of the landscape and every one of about 10 different variety of plants was pointy or sharp in some way as I tried to step through them to get the picture. Lesson learned. Stay on the path!
We passed through a couple of hundred kilometers of this sort of thing. We saw our first road trains (trucks with 3 trailers) looking like something out of Mad Max. Very disturbing as you come at them at a combined speed of 140 mph or more. Especially on the wrong side of the road.
The highway is about 50 miles inland. We got as far as Badgingarra by 5pm and took a left to head to the ocean for the night. This road was even more remote-feeling than the highway. There were signs warning of wildlife (roos, emus and echedna (sp?)) and sure enough we came across a herd (gaggle, flock?) of emus on the side of the road. They were quite skittish and headed off quickly but I got a few pictures of them with the digital and a few more with my analog/telephoto. Seeing them run through the tall brush was very much a Jurassic Park-like experience. A little freaky.
We ended up in Cervantes, near “The Pinnacles” national park which we are going to go see in the morning. It’s by the ocean and we took a walk along the beach. A large group of fishing boats were just offshore. It looks like it drops off very quickly. Very fine white sand beaches and warm water, just like yesterday. After Oregon beaches, it’s pretty nice. We took a few sunset pictures, nothing too inspiring, and headed back for dinner, where we discovered we had left the side of the van wide open the whole time we were gone! The very nice couple behind us suggested that this was perhaps not the best idea in the world. Don’t be fooled by how remote it is, people will clean you out. Especially farther north. We allowed that perhaps they were right and promised to do better in the future. Luckily nothing was taken. The people had been keeping an eye on it for us which we thanked them for. Twice.
Dinner was steak and corn on the cob. It’s nice having burners and a broiler vs the small camp stove we’ve been used to on our other trips. A little cramped eating in the van. We need to acquire some chairs and a camp table at the next opportunity.
First night sleeping in the camper. Monstro is a bit of a problem but we worked it out. There’s going to be a lot of moving it back and forth. The bed seems comfortable enough but I may have a different opinion in the morning.
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