West Coast Road Trip Part 4: Big Moon Over the Highway

Before I began road tripping in Australia, I relished the idea of driving on long stretches of highway through the empty outback, the road in front of me like a shimmering oil slick streaking towards the horizon. I couldn’t wait to be in that enormous landscape, a tiny person in a tiny car with nothing but sand as far as the eye could see.

That was until I drove north towards Port Hedland on the North West Coastal Highway. I nearly expired from boredom. Don’t ask me why, because I managed the road from Port Augusta to Coober Pedy without a problem and it was even longer and more monotonous than this one. Perhaps because by the time we were approaching Port Hedland we’d already been on the road for eight days? Maybe one week of red earth and stunted trees is the most I can handle. I was almost hoping a kangaroo would dive nose first in front of the car just to give me something to do.

We were maybe about 30km away from the next rest stop and I couldn’t wait to get off the road and lie down for the night. Behind me in the mirror I could see the sun was setting. Ahead there was nothing but road and red, and a curious, glowing pink mound. Some kind of man-made construction, I thought, for its curved top was far too smooth to be natural. But then it began to rise up from the ground, gradually, like a hot air balloon, and I realised it was the moon, enormous and pink. I have never seen anything like it before in my life, although Dave told me that the moon often appears magnified when it’s low on the horizon.

Moments ago I had been so weary of the landscape, thinking that there was no more pleasure left for me in outback driving. Now, watching the moon rise and deflate and change in hue from pink to yellow, I felt as though I could stay on that road forever. Too soon we reached the rest stop and the moon went back to normal, a hard white disc in the sky.

West Coast Road Trip Part 3: Breakdown in Coral Bay

We were half way up the west coast when our campervan broke down. We tried to start it up one morning and it just wouldn’t go. Luckily it happened in Coral Bay where I had a good phone signal and there was a mechanic only half an hour away.

He looked inside the engine and whistled. There were two wires attached to the battery with alligator clips. “Look at that! The positive wire has been touching the metal casing. It’s welded itself on. That’s how you burn a car to the ground.”

But that wasn’t what was preventing the campervan from starting. The mechanic was stumped. He fished around inside the engine pulling out wires and looking for fuses. Eventually he left with assurances that he would be back once he’d got hold of a wiring diagram for our vehicle.

We had been planning on spending a few hours snorkelling on the Ningaloo Reef but now we had the whole day at our disposal. Boy am I glad we had that extra time. It was amazing, like being inside a giant aquarium.

We swam through clouds of tiny, iridescent blue fish that floated up from coral towers. Pancake flat neon yellow fish, spiky lionfish and metallic green parrot fish flitted in and out of the reef, oblivious as we drifted on the surface of the water above them.

In places the coral bloomed from the seabed like huge stone lettuces. Sometimes it was piled up like stacks of petrified firewood, or bulged into cratered domes like brains suspended in formaldehyde. Fish of all shapes, sizes and colours darted through their curious playground, wriggling into holes and diving under arches.

We returned to the caravan park salt crusted and exhilarated shortly before the mechanic reappeared. This time he was able to find what was wrong with the engine and fix it.

The next day we could continue with our adventure.

West Coast Road Trip Part 2: Dolphins at Monkey Mia

The next morning we got up early and snuck quietly out of the parking bay where we had spent the night. That is, we got out as quietly as we could in our ancient, growling campervan.

We refuelled and headed back to Geraldton, lesson learnt. After that, we always made sure we had plenty of fuel and water and I regularly texted my parents to update them on our itinerary.

The following night we stayed in a 24 hour rest stop at the side of the highway. These rest stops are the best kind of free camping you can get on the west coast: you don’t have to stray off course to get to them, nor do you need a four wheel drive to access them. There are public toilets there and plenty of people around for company.

We made it to Monkey Mia on our third day on the road. This is a beach resort where dolphins swim up to the shore three times a day to be fed by the rangers. The beach was also visited by pelicans and emus.

West Coast Road Trip Part 1: Lost on the Road to Mt Magnet

It was night time, we were lost on a red dirt road out in the middle of nowhere and we were almost out of petrol and water.

To our left, red lights glowed in the dark like scattered garnets on a velvet cloth. The flickering light told us they were not streetlights but flames. The series of small fires in the neighbouring field were too close together and there were too many of them to be campfires. It was eerie. All we needed now was to hear a report on the radio that a madman with a hook for a hand had escaped from a nearby lunatic asylum and we would know that it was all over.

It was only day one of our road trip. How did it all go so horribly wrong?

What happened is this: in my zeal to save money, when we stopped to refuel at a highway roadhouse I only half filled the tank. The petrol here was 15 cents a litre dearer than in Perth and I began to panic when I saw the rate at which the numbers on the petrol pump were flapping up.

“We’ll just refill properly in Geraldton tomorrow,” I said.

Another one of my great money saving ideas was to only camp in free campsites. We consulted our guide to camping in WA and found one a short way along the Mt Magnet road.

Taking the turnoff just outside Geraldton, we passed a sign warning that there was little drinking water available north of here. “We’ll get water in town tomorrow too,” I said.

The thing is, in Australia, what looks like a very short distance on a map is actually a very big distance on the road. We drove more than 60 km before we found what we thought was the turnoff for the campsite, a rutted red dirt road that crossed the train tracks and disappeared into the darkness.

The campervan juddered and shuddered over the uneven surface taking us further and further away from the main road.

There was no mobile reception and it occurred to me that no one would ever think of looking for us so far from the highway if we broke down now. Or if we ran out of fuel.

“How many kilometres have we done now?” I asked Dave.

“520” he said. “Do you know how many we were on when we stopped for gas?”

“350”

We were both silent for a moment while we did some calculations, because you see, the fuel gauge on the campervan didn’t work. We reckoned we could go 400km on a full tank and the plan was to reset the counter to zero every time we filled up. But since I had only partially refilled the tank last time we stopped…”I think we can go 150km on what I put in,” I said.

“And we’ve already gone 170km since then,” Dave shot back.

Uh oh.

We decided to get back onto the Mt Magnet Road and to try to get to the next town, which was 20km away.

We made it all right but, wouldn’t you know it? Both of the town’s petrol stations were closed for the night.

Loneliness

Sorry for my long absence from the blogosphere. I’ve been travelling on the west coast of Australia where a good internet connection is hard to come by. I’ve still been writing posts, I just haven’t had the opportunity to upload them till now so they’ll be appearing over the coming week.

Don’t feel bad for me when you read this one, because I wrote it two weeks ago and of course everything has changed since then.

Yesterday I left the tomato farm. The time I was there passed so quickly. I wish I had appreciated the stability more, maybe taken a few moments every evening to be thankful for my own bed, the regularity of the working hours and the nice people that surrounded me.

In seven months in Australia the longest I’ve stayed in one place was seven weeks. There were the six weeks on the tomato farm and the rest of my time has been a patchwork of two weeks here, ten days there. Stability has definitely been lacking.

I feel so lonely to be hitting the road again on my own, leaving friends behind. I spent the day in Adelaide today brimming with tears. I watched a video installation in the art gallery for half an hour just to be in the company of other people, focusing on the same thing.

I’m not homesick, but I miss the comfort of being able to stay in one place with loved ones close by. I miss being able to meet friends for tea in Edinburgh at a moment’s notice and then decide to spend the whole weekend together just because we could. I’m sad because I can’t imagine I’ll ever have that again in the future.

When I left Melbourne to go to Tasmania I felt the same way, lonely and lost, and I wrote about it in my notebook. A few days later I was in the Barossa Valley working on a vineyard with a great group of people. When I reread my notes from Tasmania I couldn’t believe that I’d ever felt like that. The loneliness passes so quickly.

Tomorrow I’ll be in Perth and I’ll be meeting friends so I know I’ll be fine.

Praying Mantis

Forget the spiders, forget the snakes. The praying mantis I found in the bathroom the other day has got to be the single most terrifying creature I have encountered in Australia so far.

I thought it was a broken leaf lying on the floor and was about to pick it up when it rotated its heart shaped head towards me. Oh, the horror! What I had thought was the stem of a leaf was one of the mantis’ twiggy spriggy legs. I walked round it and its head swivelled to follow me. It was aware that I was there and it was watching me. Another insect, realising that a human was nearby, would have scuttled off into a dark corner of the room by now. It gave me the creeps.

I coaxed it into a bucket and nudged the bucket out the front door with my foot. I got the bucket right to the far end of the veranda then I kicked it over and ran like hell back to the house. The next morning the mantis was sitting by the front door like a faithful dog. It counted us out of the house with a shake of its head.

What really got to me was that it seemed so horribly intelligent. Insects are already superior to humans in many ways: they have three times as many legs, can carry a thousand times their own weight on their backs and can survive nuclear bombs. If their brains were just a little bigger they’d be good contenders to take over the world. I wondered if it was plotting something.

Somewhere deep in my memory two long disused synapses sparked: didn’t praying mantises bite off people’s heads?! Just for a moment I forgot that our praying mantis was the size of a hair pin and that I could crush it easily under the heel of my boot if I wanted to. All I had in my head was this vision of a giant carnivorous insect with slavering jaws which I couldn’t quite connect to any real experience or science lesson or wildlife documentary. It was a moment of cold panic, until I realised that I was thinking of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the one where Xander has a crush on a beautiful new teacher who turns out to be a praying mantis type monster in human disguise.

Well, I felt a little foolish I can tell you, but also relieved. The praying mantis looked fairly revolting to me but at least it was probably harmless. And it didn’t stick around for very long; that evening when we got home from work it was gone.

Best Australian Blogs 2012 Competition

Just a short post today to let you know that I entered my blog into the the Best Australian Blogs 2012 Competition, which is run by Sydney Writers’ Centre. You can support me by voting for my blog, Helen Caldwell: Living, working and travelling in Australia, in the People’s Choice round.

If you’re on twitter, the hash-tag for the competition is #bestblogs2012.

Thank you for your help!

Friday Fun: Five Australian Foodstuffs

Pikelets: We had pikelets (mini pancakes) at smoko (break time) yesterday, which is what sparked this whole post off. Back in Edinburgh we used to sell pikelets in the supermarket where I worked. I thought they were French, like crêpes.

“We’re all out of blinis I’m afraid, but perhaps you’d like some pee-ke-lays to go with your smoked salmon?”

But no, they’re Aussie, so pike-lets it is, then. They don’t sound half so glamorous now.

Meat pies: Before I came out here three different Australians told me independently “You have got to try an Aussie meat pie.” So I did, and this is what I thought: Meh. Don’t get me wrong, they’re tasty all right, but come on, it’s meat stuffed in a pastry case. We can do that in the UK too, you know. Then I heard a rumour that the quality of the meat pie depends on the brand. Maybe if I try a few different brands I might find a pie that blows me away? I’m prepared to give it a shot.

Kangaroo: Did you know that kookaburras eat kangaroo? It’s true. I was having a barbeque with some friends in a national park in Victoria and just as I raised my sandwich to my lips, a kookaburra swooped past my face and swiped the kangaroo sausage right out from between the bread slices.

Crocodile: One of the textbooks I worked with when I was teaching English as a foreign language had a chapter devoted to international food. It said that Australians eat crocodile. I didn’t believe it for a second. I thought that crocodiles were endangered. But then I got here and discovered that you can buy crocodile burgers at gourmet burger stands. I’ll try one someday. It’s about time crocodiles were put back into their rightful place in the food chain.

Anzac biscuits: For today’s smoko we had Anzac biscuits baked by the farmer’s wife. She told me that they are so named (ANZAC stands for Australian New Zealand Army Corps) because they used to be sent out to soldiers fighting in the war. The rolled oat biscuits kept well which made them ideal for transporting abroad. They didn’t last very long at smoko; less than five minutes I would say.

Liked this post? Vote for my blog, Helen Caldwell: Living, working and travelling in Australia, in the People’s Choice round of the Best Australian Blogs 2012 Competition. Thank you!

Gold!

One day, when I was staying out near Bendigo with Karoline and Peter, I took the dogs for a walk. We turned off the main road down an unpaved side track through the meadows. The sandy earth underfoot glittered in the bright Australian sunshine. When I bent down to take a closer look I saw that the whole road was flecked with gold.

Bendigo was at the centre of the 1851 gold rush, so it didn’t seem impossible to me that there could be real gold in the soil here. The dogs waited patiently while I scratched at the golden flakes with a stick. It was almost impossible to lift them whole from the ground. I managed to press a few onto the palm of my hand and walked home, carefully sheltering them from the wind. Even so, I lost a couple of the larger flakes to a rogue gust. It caught them in an unguarded moment while I stared at them, bedazzled, dreaming about what I would spend my fortune on.

When I showed them to Peter, he said they were most likely iron pyrite, otherwise known as fool’s gold. I scraped them off my hand into the pages of a notebook and forgot about them.

Just the other day I heard a report on the radio that experts are predicting that there could be millions of ounces of undiscovered gold in farmland north of Bendigo. Maybe I wasn’t so foolish after all to go scraping in the dust for a few golden flakes. I’ll be darned if I can find them now, though.

Deadly Australia

After six months in Australia I’m still not sure what can kill you and what can’t. It’s no good asking the Australians. If they want to have a bit of fun with you then those spiders you saw when you were clearing out the tool shed were poisonous. You’re lucky you got out alive. The moment it’s time to get back to work they want to know why you’re making such a fuss about them.

The thing is, just because something’s poisonous doesn’t mean that it’s deadly. But since I didn’t grow up here, I don’t know which of Australia’s many snakes and spiders fall into the latter category. As a result, I have a healthy fear of all fanged creatures.

A few days ago we had a huntsman spider in the house. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out that the bite of a huntsman spider will make you unwell but won’t kill you. It didn’t seem dangerous enough to call the farmer whose house we were staying in for help, nor harmless enough for me to want to attempt removing it myself. One of the other backpackers tried to catch it with a bucket and the cardboard inner tube of a kitchen roll but it moved so quickly she soon gave up, worried that it might hide behind a piece of furniture. Spiders that you can see are less scary than those that you can’t but that you know are there anyway. She called the farmer up to the house and – I didn’t see this bit but heard about it afterwards –he chased the spider around the living room and out the door with a broom.

That same bucket and cardboard kitchen roll tube which were ineffective against the huntsman had already been used to rid us of another unwanted creature in the house. One night I was sitting on my unmade bed when a mouse ran across the mattress. I’ve stayed in houses with mice before so I wasn’t scared. I got into bed and turned off the light. Then I began to wonder, is there rabies in Australia? It doesn’t seem nearly so important for me to Google that now as it did at 2am when the mouse was scratching around under the bed. Besides, it’s gone now. We put a piece of cheese in the cardboard roll and balanced it on a chair over the bucket. The mouse walked right into our very primitive trap. We relocated it to a field far away from the house where it might get eaten by one of the deadly poisonous snakes we have here on the farm.

That’s right. Deadly poisonous snakes. What is a good distance to keep between you and the angry, injured tiger snake that the dog has been worrying in its jaws and tossed on the grass in front of you? I thought the biggest distance I could quickly achieve without spilling my pail of tomatoes seemed about right. But even when it comes to lethal snakes the Australians are surprisingly relaxed. They hung around considerably closer to the thrashing tiger snake than I did, I think. It was hard to tell because I positioned myself so that they were directly between me and it.

At least if you do get bitten by a poisonous snake or spider, or by a rabid mouse, there is a lifesaving shot. It’s just that you might have only twenty minutes to get it. I met a backpacker here who told me he wanted to go diving with sharks. Even I know that a shark will kill you. There’s no antidote for a shark bite. I told him he was mad. Especially since at the time when I met him he was out of action due to spider bite that left him unable to walk on his swollen and painful leg. You would think that one encounter with a deadly creature would be enough for anyone. I suppose that’s something I should be grateful for: the chances of me running into a shark around the house are pretty slim.