Covering 12 September to 14 September 2019.
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a typical flowery roadside verge
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| a three wagon land train rumbling past |
Our Google mapping software informed us to “continue
for 175kms and at the roundabout, go straight on”. Not that unusual with these distances. There are quite a number of land trains on
the roads, these are trucks with multiple trailers behind. Usually two or three trailers but we did see
one towing four full size ones and some signs by the roadside saying maximum
size 60 metres (185 feet). Goodness
knows what the distance is for an emergency stop or how big they can be in the
real outback across ‘the big red’. We
were overtaken by a two trailer one when driving a little below the speed
limit. It took a long time for it to get
past. One of the reasons these monsters
work here is that generally the place is flat, very flat and certainly flatter
than Norfolk. Another is the lack of
bends in the roads which remain straight for huge distances. We’re in one of
the oldest landscapes on earth and this ancient land has eroded to flatness
over tens if not hundreds of millions of years.
The harder rocks which have worn down more slowly show up as ranges of
hills or mountains apparently popping up occasionally from the plains. It’s the varied geology and these individual
ranges that help to provide some of the huge diversity of plant life here. That's because they’ve been isolated, rather like islands in an ocean and life has
evolved differently and filled every niche possible. I’ll try to stop writing so much about the
vegetation, I can hear some of you yawning from here.
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a Willy Wagtail
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Just one other plant thing although there will be photos of them. This is spring and everything should be
sprung but in at least three tourist offices and a flower tour guide we spoke
to we’ve been told that it’s a very bad year for flowers. There had been a little winter rain in June,
virtually none in July and August and then unseasonably hot weather. We had nothing to compare it with so while we
know it’s bad we’ve seen some great sights.
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a Cowslip Orchid -
the most frequently seen orchid for us
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Cats-paw
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Fringed Lily
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| Yellow Feather Flower - the reddish ones have been pollinated |
At one out of the way place off the main road called
Canna, we had a look round and although it wasn’t a ghost town, it was well on
its way. The railway station had closed
years ago, the school had too and so had the village shop which sat there with
fading notices still in the window. Come
to think of it, this sounds remarkably like a typical English village but
hotter. However, somebody still cared
enough to make sure that leaflets were available to let visitors know where the
orchids and Mallee Fowl nest were. Not
wildly exciting you might think but the Mallee Fowl is a bird about the
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Blue-tongued Skink -
sticks out a tongue and hisses if you get too close |
size of
a small turkey which builds a huge mound of a nest and the heat of it incubates
the eggs. No sitting on eggs for Mr and
Mrs Mallee. They test the temperature of
the mound with the tip of their beaks and adjust the mound accordingly. Once the chicks hatch they’re completely on
their own and have to fend for themselves so unsurprisingly, there isn’t a
great success rate for Mallee chicks.
We found out later in the trip that Mallee eggs are poisonous and the
Aborigines had a method for getting around this. They’d get an egg, make a small hole in it
with a stick and stir the contents, pop it on a fire and when the stick didn’t
wobble, it was cooked. The contents then
had to be shared between four people and that meant the poison was reduced to
the point where it was digestible.
On what turned out to not be a unique experience, we
were walking around one bush style wide open site and came across a kangaroo. This one had a joey peeping out of her pouch. Kangaroos are normally early morning and evening creatures who rest up during
the day but when habituated to humans they can be seen on campsites at any time
of day, taking virtually no notice of all those multi coloured bipeds gathered
together.
With so much emptiness, tourist attractions are
somewhat limited but you have to give credit for imagination with some of the
suggestions. Near a place called
Badgingarra, (still N of Perth) we just had to be amused when one highlight was
to visit the wind turbines and “see them generating electricity”, another is to
tour the grain silos which have murals painted on them. We declined both.
In my last blog I mentioned that I would have 'more on that story' later about driving on gravel roads. Well I downloaded the full terms and conditions, all six small font pages and had a read. What it actually says is "Vehicles must not be used on any unsealed roads ............" "only exception to this is to commercial campgrounds and major tourist attractions". My italics. As pretty well any piece of rusty farm machinery is considered a tourist attraction here we have at least carte-offwhite to decide what a major tourist destination is.
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at Leeman
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| bush fire north of Cervantes |
Inland we’ve been registering up to 35C (95f) but
once we got to the coast the heat dropped to warm/comfortable with a sea
breeze. So we got to the coast with a
campsite right on the edge of the beach lapped by the Indian Ocean at Cervantes.
All the streets here have Spanish names
and the town sign is a silhouette of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Clearly some strong Iberian influence here
you might think but it turns out that the town was named after a US whaler
called the Cervantes which was sunk offshore in the mid 1850s.
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