Blog #7

This edition of the blog is dedicated to The World’s Greatest Man, R.I.P. There is a valid reason for this despite blatant adoration. Keep reading.

Regular readers of my various columns, minutes and other stuff I write will acknowledge that Warnie is (was) the greatest human to ever walk on this Earth and in this blog I’m going to reveal a fact that I only became aware of during this trip. 

Did you know (no, you didn’t) that there is a huge area of Queensland & South Australia that has been named the Warnie Volcanic Province (WVP) after the discovery of a massive Jurassic Era volcanoes there. Yes, it was named after Shane Warne and more accurately it was named after the Warnie East Well that was first to discover the area.

How fantastic is that? Warnie is still saving lives everyday with the Shane Warne Legacy Health Check.

Currently Jack and I are in Perth, nice park here right next to a pond which has allowed me to finally get some decent photos of my favourite duck. If only I had discovered it I would have named it the Australian Shane Duck.

 These beautiful birds spend a lot of time preening themselves and if you looked as good as they do then why not?

Male.

Female

Cute duck eh?

Today we went into Perth city for a look around. Discovered Murray Street which must be where the super-rich hang out. Lois Vuitton, Chanelle, Christian Dior, Rolex, Cartier, Leica and the best gadget shop I’ve seen in ages.

Lots of Bentleys, Porches etc. parked here and once I had bought my camera filter that I was looking for and spent my paltry $90 weeks decided to head back to the van, leaving the drool-smeared shop windows to the better healed clientele.

A little bit of excitement today as I witnessed a pedestrian getting cleaned up by a bicyclist in the middle of the city. Actually the rider came off worst with a few scrapes etc. I caught the action on my dash cam as I was parked by the road. Once I worked out they were OK I sent them a video copy of the crash which turned out to be a mistake on my part as these 2 snowflakes were messaging each other all day (with me included) making sure they were OK and “reaching out” to each other. Other comments were “Oh, how am I going to tell my wife?” And “I’m going home for a hot bath and a Nurofen”  you’d think it was carnage on the road. I just thought it was funny. Wanna see the video? I thought so.

Today we are jumping on a ferry to Rottnest Island which is how early Dutch explorers pronounced Rat’s Nest, after the tiny cousins of the kangaroos that live there that we call quokkas . Yes, more kangaroo-based wildlife. Most overseas visitors don’t realise that we have so many. Wallabies, wallaroos, potaroos, Pygmy-a-roos, rock wallabies, tree-climbing roos, smashed-by-road-train-roos etc. 

I’m looking forward to meeting up with these little fellas, apparently they can fit on a hamburger bun no problem!

Anyway, I don’t really care if Dick Van Dyke can’t tell the difference between a rat and a kangaroo, these little scavengers are cute as a button.

Rottnest Island.

Speaking of Dutch explorers, they not only brought their mis-identifications to our country but also our worst serial killer on the ship Batavia which was wrecked on the Abrolhos Islands just off the WA coast. Jeronimus Cornelisz was a truly nasty piece of work and he killed hundreds of his own people on this tiny island. You can Google the whole story and I think there is a movie about it called Batavia. Not a bad claim to fame from a country that plunged itself into depression over a bloody tulip!

I called him “our worst serial killer” because we welcome all immigrants to our country with open arms. We’re very inclusive here.

Monday and I finally caught up with my cousin Margaret and her husband Jeff in Bunbury. Jackie met with her cousin Sue in Perth on Saturday so we’ve been keeping our family ties alive.

Tuesday will see us head outback again with our first stop being Paynes Find (pop. 26), then on to Meekatharra, a notorious community in the middle of WA. What is it notorious for? Most Aussies can guess but we’ll leave judgement until we have a look for ourselves. We’re going to stay in a remote aboriginal community a bit to the north. 

This skink may be small but given time he’ll grow into a full-sized croc and he’ll rip your bloody arm off!

Ibis or more commonly known a “Bin Chicken’.

Australian Wood Duck

Shelduck trying to catch the morning sun.

Egret.

If this is a skink then it’s the biggest I’ve seen.

You can’t tell me that this Quokka hasn’t had his photo taken before.

More oyster catchers. How hard could it be? Oysters are notoriously slow runners.

Lots of lizards on Rotto, beautiful winter’s day at about 24°C has brought them out to get some sun. Most of them are laying around on the road. Saw a snake too, I think it was a brown (for the O/S readers the brown snake is deadly, definitely in the top 10 in the world).

Here is a black swan shaping up to attack me. For some reason I am an attraction to aggressive swans. I learnt my lesson a long time ago, never, ever mess with ‘em and if they get too aggressive there is only one way to get out alive… marry her.

Swans aren’t always aggressive, here’s proof.

Dusky Moorhen

There’s a little town in the middle of nowhere called New Nocia that we pulled up at for a coffee. They have a monastery there, this is only a part of it. They actually made a documentary about the place available at SBS On Demand called ‘Mission’. It’s about an art robbery there so we’ll be looking that up later.

Here come a couple of big ones, 8.4 metres wide according to their pilot escorts. I pulled right off the road. If you watch closely you’ll see the first one flatten a white road marker.

Albany caravan park and we’re cold here now with clouds, rain and wind predicted for the rest of our stay here. In the meantime here is a shot of sunrise over Middleton Beach.

Even more photos of Hell Fire Beach. Something about this beach really grabbed me.

We’ve just been bumming around Albany for the last few days, dodging the pockets of rain and wind and it’s been OK. Quiet lunches here and there, window shopping, so pretty boring really. Albany is a nice town but a little big for my liking. We’ve had a bandicoot sniffing around under our van for the last few nights, I’ll try to get a photo of him if he comes back. For my overseas readers a bandicoot is like a large rat but in a cute way. They are marsupials (they have pouches) and eat vegetation and insects. They are one of the few Australian animals that won’t poison you or tear you to shreds.

Today we drove to Denmark (the town not the country… derrr), which is a ‘trendy’ little place that seems inhabited by hippies. Lots of ‘wellness’ and ‘healing’ shops. The whole place stinks of incense and stuff secreted from llamas. You can buy any amount of various wind chimes, rainbow flags, shawls or jams made out of paspalum weeds.

I did make a visit to one of the local pie shops that proudly advertised itself as ‘award winning’ and they weren’t kidding. I counted 164 plaques, silver goblets and plates adorning the walls along with a comprehensive list of all of their achievements at the Perth Easter Shows, including ‘Australia’s Best Pie’! Now there’s a challenge. The thing is, the latest award was dated 2018/19 so what has happened after that? When I walked in it looked like the staff was made up from past members of the Pakistani Cricket Team, so there’s a clue.

My Pie Rating? Beef and Mushy Pea Pie… 3.6 out of a possible 5. Edible but no show winner. If you’d like my opinion of the Best Pie In The World, let alone Australia (and I’m probably over-qualified to judge) then just ask me.

This bloke must have found a lot of orange paint for cheap I’d say. Even his canvas roof sides are painted orange.

One thing that has puzzled me here is the highway signs proclaiming the police are now targeting FATIGUE. How do they do that? I can understand if they pull you over and you’re dressed in your pyjamas with your Teddy Bear tucked under your arm then that might be a give away but would that stand up in court? Can they make you yawn into a breathalyser, or maybe see how many sheep you can count to?

We drove to a few of the natural coastal features around here today, a stone bridge, The Gap and the blowholes. The track to the blowholes was steep and long, downhill so I was dreading the return walk. Once we got to where the blowholes was there was a sign saying ‘The Blowholes 33 metres’ with an arrow pointing to the cliff face which looked like it was 32 metres away .It was just daring us to commit suicide I’m sure. I took one look at the sign and started the loooong trudge back up the hill.

Black Boys are everywhere on W.A.‘s south coast. The bush is thick with them. You’d pay a fortune for these at East Coast nurseries.

Middleton Beach, Albany. More rain on the way.

Lots of Black cockatoos squawking their heads off here.

Secluded beach near Cheynes Beach. 4WD needed to negotiate the sandy track to here.

Cheyenne’s Beach (pron. Chains), a tiny town near Albany. Their main claim to fame is that they haven’t had a shark fatality in the last 10 years.

A very, very wet Leeuwin Lighthouse. There is a family significance about this lighthouse, remotely.

This is the view from one of the thick windows of that lighthouse. 200 nautical miles in that direction (WSW) on 25th December 1905 one of my Great Grandfathers Even Evansen and all but one of his crewmates sank onboard the Coimbatore, after a collision with the Zanita. Official reports say that he wasn’t the captain at that time although I have other information that he was, probably not. Thick fog and heavy seas, it must have been terrifying.

The Australian Ringneck or ‘28’. It is named because its call sounds like the number 28 in French (vingt huit - vung tweet) which it really doesn’t. It doesn’t sound anything remotely French and where would they get that from?

Some poor lambs trying to get out of the rain next to Mum.

A very poor shot of an Australian Shelduck in bad light and shaky hands. You’ll just have to take my word on it that when in full plumage and sunlight this bird is spectacular. I’ll do my best to get another photo but I’ve been waiting 9 years to get this one, how disappointing.

It’s still bucketing down here in Margaret River with a full thunderstorm happening, and we’re off to Perth today. Packing up the van will be a matter of dodging the rain and sloshing around before the next deluge.

 Gibb River Blog #5

Mini Blog

Correction: We are headed to Albany not Albury. Bloody auto-correct. I seem to spend half of my life correcting auto-correct. I know I should be better at editing my posts, I’ll try to be better at it. Usually it is a relief for me to actually send it off then 10 minutes later Jackie pipes up with “you stuffed that up”. 

I might look into some recipes for mushroom baked beans, I’ll cook lunch tomorrow.

Thank you to Franco (my doctor) for this encouragement.

Here is a map of where we are and the next few stops. You’ll notice that we are skipping the West coast and this is because we’ve already done it (it is spectacular) but we’re interested in doing the ‘dodgy’ interior. Apparently it isn’t really friendly to tourists and you can read into that whatever you reckon and you’d probably be right. We have travelled this type of country quite a lot and we’re prepared for whatever it has to deliver to us.

 Gibb River #4,

The blog list keeps growing with now 44 readers not only from Australia but the UK, Norway and Canada too.

Jackie and I are now in Esperance Western Australia, this has long been on our list to revisit as 11 years ago we absolutely loved it but because of lousy inclement weather cut our stay short. So today this lovely town on WA’s South coast greeted us with heavy rainfall and high winds and this is predicted to stay with us for another 4 days. Not to be beaten we have already booked an additional 2 nights to bring our stop here to 6 nights. We went for a sodden drive to Cape LeGrand but really it was raining that hard we could hardly see a bloody thing.

This area of OZ is renowned for its bright white sandy beaches and crystal clear turquoise waters and even though it was cloudy, rainy and miserable here is a sample of what Hell Fire Bay beach is like.

Cloudy, rainy and pretty cold and it still looks like this. This is the coldest we’ve been so far on this trip, today was 13°C, most of the trip has been about 17°-24° so that’s like a heat wave to my cold climate cousins but cool here for us. It’s not quite winter yet and the Outback can get pretty cold at night so we are prepared for chilly temperatures.

Before you ask, no Photoshop tricks have been made on these photos, just a little cropping and contrast adjustment. 

Until I get some more photos (and the birds come out of their hiding places) I’ll post some others that I have taken on this trip.

The ‘humble’ galah.

‘Black boys, grass trees. There’s heaps of them here that in the Eastern states you would pay a fortune for.

Esperance beaches are incredible. These photos are taken in cloudy, rainy and windy weather, the sea is unsettled due to the off-shore winds.

Of course it’s not only humans that love these beaches, the great white sharks do too, 4 deaths in the last 5 years, the last one in March this year.

Tomorrow is Wednesday 18th May so we will have been on the road for 3 weeks, covered 5,700 kilometres and spent 6 days in beautiful Esperance. This is truly one of our favourite towns in Australia even though it has rained and been quite windy for most of the time. The town is clean, neat and just the right size. It’s slightly smaller in population than Ulladulla (12,000 people vs 16,000) and that suits me just fine.

We need to keep rolling and heading west so tomorrow morning we hitch up the van and depart the magnificent, pristine, blood & gore soaked beaches and heading to Bremer Bay on our way to Albury. We’ll spend 2 nights in BB, do some washing and checkout the scenery.

I had a few problems with the drone today and had had plans to do another one of my panoramas of the Esperance area but let me tell you from experience, I do not fly the drone unless the drone is fully calibrated and the conditions are close to ideal, at least not off cliff tops or in dodgy weather. It’s OK, there’s plenty of this coastline to explore yet and the drone is now in perfect condition (so it tells me).

I hope you’ve enjoyed the Esperance area as much as Jack and I have, we’ve waited 11 years to revisit it and have not been disappointed. I’m not crossing this off my list to come back to despite the crappy weather and long distance from anywhere.

Have a look at some last photos from here and then we’ll move on.

The strangely-named Hell Fire Bay. A bit rough today but no signs of Great Whites.

Lucky Bay, I think. It’s beautiful but the recent storms dumped heaps of seaweed around. Imagine it here if the sun was shining…

How annoying, I’m travelling with my new (very expensive) camera (and a few others) and I take this shot with my iPhone. 

Mum and baby feeding in the parking lot of Lucky bay delighted some tourists from the UK and France. 

New Holland Honey Eater. 

Whistling Rock at Cape Le Grande. Has the unusual ability to whistle with the wind and if you stand in the right place it catches the sound of the sea and amplifies it. Sounds like a jet aircraft.

Why does Jackie always look like she is just tolerating me?

The seas were pretty rough due to the storms lately.

Australian Pied Oyster Catcher. I did manage to get some photos of the Australian Ringneck or ‘28’ but they didn’t turn out any good. Later,,,

After about an hour trying to calibrate the IMU & the compass on the drone, I decided to finally read the instructions and it was all over in about 30 seconds. I had depleted the main battery by then and decided to just take a snap of Jack and I to prove that we hadn’t murdered each other and leave the better drone shots for later.