Oh dear, we have let too much time and too many adventures go past without due reporting. Please feel free to stop reading now and save this for later, or just read the first few paragraphs and then hit delete. Whatever you do, don’t hit delete too soon as I’m quite sure you will want to read about our big adventure!
So, for those of you with your finger on the delete button, we will move immediately into the adventure part of our story. Our biggest adventure thus far began innocently enough, with a visit to the sister of one of Dennis’s clients. Robyn, her husband, Simon, and their 3 boys live about 100 kms from Esperance on the final station before Cape Arid National Park. They treated us to some fabulous country hospitality and a great lunch – and also regaled us with stories of how irritating it was that they forever had to rescue idiotic tourists who got bogged driving into the park. You can see it coming, can’t you?? Yes, within 10 minutes of leaving their house we were well and truly bogged – up to the axle. (For those who are wondering, YES I was driving.) After the first 5 minutes of trying to drive our way out of this perilous position, Dennis and I took quite divergent approaches. I just about killed myself trying to dig the car out of the bog. Dennis got on the UHF radio and called Robyn and Simon for help. Surprise, surprise, Dennis’s approach proved effective. Eventually Simon and his father appeared and fairly quickly pulled us to more solid land (I insist at this point that the rescue was made easy by all the digging I had done earlier).
After due consideration, we decided to continue on further into Cape Arid, despite it being an extremely isolated place. We got as far as Point Malcolm, which is at the very beginning of the Great Australian Bight and set up camp. It was a bleak, windy, rocky, lonely place. Sand everywhere….in our dinner, in our hair, in our bed, in our eyes. We went for a walk on the wild, rocky beach the next morning and then decided to head inland toward the Eyre Highway and the Nullarbor Plain.
The roads were pretty bad, but rocky not sandy, so we slowly made progress and eventually made our way to Mt Ragged, which we planned to climb, and where we intended to camp. It was at this point that we realized that the band of smoke we had been watching for awhile was probably a bush fire and not all that far away. The Director of Safety (Dennis) decided it was best to keep moving and try to get ahead of the fire, so wagons ho!
On looking at the map we found that there were some ruins just off the road about 40 kms ahead and thought that might be a good place to camp. We got there and found the place to be horribly exposed and the ruins themselves were full of blow flies. As a complete aside to our own adventure, one had to feel a sense of awe for the people who dragged themselves and their supplies into this godforsaken place and somehow carved out a life for themselves and their children.
We eventually found a place to set up camp off the road a few kms from the ruins. The sky very suddenly became so dark you would think that night was falling….until you looked at your watch and realized it was 4pm. No sooner had we opened the camper when the wind started to howl, the thunder rolled and the rain began to fall. Fortunately we had had enough warning to ensure that our chairs, beer and G&T’s were inside, so needless to say we weathered the storm. When the rain finally stopped we went out to discover ash was streaming steadily from the sky. We woke the next morning to a completely blackened camper and car and the smell of wet fire. We packed up quickly and set off with a view to be out of Cape Arid and away from the fires by lunch time. The roads were supposed to be pretty easy from here, so I was “allowed” to drive again (still in the doghouse for getting bogged).
The roads were a nightmare following the storm with trees down and across the road everywhere. There was some pretty tricky driving to get round the numerous road blocks and in one instance Dennis had to get out the axe and chop a way clear. All very exciting if you ask me (but I suggest you don’t ask Dennis). We arrived exhausted, but exhilarated at the Balladonia Roadhouse on the Eyre Highway at approximately 5pm. Dennis asked the roadhouse owner if he would like a report on the condition of the road. He looked at us with some surprise and said “but that road is closed”.
OK, you can hit delete now or save for later if you’ve had enough!
So, now we are on the Nullarbor Plain….which I think should be renamed the NullarBORING Plain. The primary activity for our 3 days crossing the Nullarbor was completing the Nullarbor Links Golf Course. You will recall from previous blogs that this is the longest golf course in the world and involves hours and hours of mind-numbing driving, punctuated with playing a hole of golf across fly-infested fields of dust and scrub. Just a hoot! For those that are counting, my score was 186 “off the stick”. Somehow I managed to retain relatively good humour throughout this ordeal.
And then it was back to glorious beaches again as we hit the Eyre Peninsula of South Australia. There really is something magic about the beaches in Australia. One tends to think of Bondi or Manly when one hears “Australian beach”, but recently I heard an interview with a man who had done a survey of all Australian beaches and found that something like 25% of them could be reached by 2WD car, another 25% could be reached by 4WD car and the remaining 50% can only be reached by boat or on foot. So the majority of Aussie beaches are isolated and empty. These were the beaches we frequented in our 2 weeks on the Eyre Peninsula. We wandered down the coast staying in Streaky Bay and Sceanes Bay before settling at Coffin Bay National Park for 5 nights and then 7 nights in Lincoln National Park. We discovered little coves and perfect stretches of beach that were devoid of other humans. Even the beach where they filmed Galipoli, which you might think would be a tourist attraction, was completely ours. We did however share the water a few times with dolphins and seals – on one occasion we sat and watched as a school of about 20 dolphins fed just off the beach. It was also finally warm enough to go swimming – and the great thing about empty beaches is the opportunity for a bit of skinny dipping!! But I must warn you, when skinny dipping beware fishing boats that can pull up without much warning.
The other great excitement on this part of our journey was finally cracking onto some fishing success. We booked a fishing charter from Port Lincoln and set out for the morning with only the guide and one other passenger. First off was squidding…a first for both of us. I made the first catch of the day, but we both were successful. Ugly suckers!! Then onto fishing, where we scored whiting, flathead, trevally and then heaps and heaps of pesky little Pike that we had to throw back in. It was very exciting to feel the tug of a fish on the line – I got so caught up in the whole fishing-fever that we rushed out and bought me a fishing line (which I still haven’t used). Anyway, we caught enough fish and calamari to last for 3 meals and to ensure that our camp trailer and fridge smelled like fish for weeks.
Dennis went on to further success, catching a few fish off the beach at Memory Cove (a very special place that I might tell you about in a future blog). And speaking of Dennis, this is your last chance to hear from the man before he heads out to the Bagwana…..
Oysters, Crayfish (lobster for oveseas readers) Whiting and lots more were the fare on the Eyre Peninsula some good golf and a lot of great people we met along the way.
The stats are that we have been on the road now for 6 months, completed 25000 kms and most of the time things are going really well as I have said before. Currently we are on Kangaroo Island with Steph and Bruce, friends from Adelaide, enjoying the camping life and solving the world’s problems. More on KI later from the main bloggist I’m sure. Congatulations Stephanie on completing the worlds longest golf course.
The next few days we travel back to Adelaide then to Melbourne to see the family and off to the BAGWANA, will report on this in the next blog.
Stephanie’s planning has been terrific and taken us to some truly magnificent places, the Cape Arid (adventure) will remain in the memory for a long time. Thank you to Nick for setting up the visit with your sister and her Family on the farm.
Bye for now
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