from travels about the planet
Spent the night at a hostel in Launceston, Tasmania’s second-largest city. Just enough time to pick up a fellow traveller and stock up on supplies before the big hike. It isn’t a huge city, but it had a nice park to snoop around while we were there.
Flew into Hobart, Tasmania, for the first time, where I had a quick chance to snoop around the western suburbs before heading up the coast to visit the famed Freycinet National Park with some friends. Being farther south than the rest of Australia, we were able to enjoy very long days with late sunsets thanks to Daylight Saving Time and our greater distance from the Equator. I don’t think we even started looking for campgrounds until about 8 pm.
Freycinet National Park was very beautiful, with turquoise waters and bright orange lichen-covered rocks. We hiked a number of trails in the area to enjoy the views.
The next day we headed out for a hike down to Wineglass Bay and took the obligatory dip.
Yes, I’ve finally made my way back to Perth — after a choppy flight from Bangkok. Choppy enough for half the crowd on the plane to burst into applause when we finally touched down. Perth can get pretty windy at times and it was a real roller coaster coming in.
The weather here right now is perfect: just like those cool dry Canadian summer days of yore. Perth’s having an unusually cool summer this year. Hasn’t hit 40C (104F) yet (according to the taxi driver who took me home from the airport)!
After a year of hunkering down and keeping my nose to the grindstone, it’s time for another break. I have to say I’ve been feeling a bit gypped over the past few weeks. The temperatures here in Perth still seem to be hovering around our winter norms, even though it is supposed to be summer. And now I’m heading for the frozen tundra of North America. Oh well… at least I’ll have three days to sizzle in the tropics en route. Bangkok always seems to be in the nineties.
After 27 takeoffs and landings, I have finally found my way back to where I started my journey on August 1st: Perth, Australia. The air and streets seem super clean, the humidity is very low, the sun is very bright, and the people drive annoyingly slow and stay in nice, neat traffic lanes. I’m having to get used to life with Western toilets and toilet paper again. And I’m still not used to drinking tap water without having to purify it first. On the other hand, it sure seems quiet around here — without the hustle and bustle of Cairo, Delhi, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore. It will take some getting used to!
Like most Hawaiian Islands, the Big Island has a very wet windward coast on the east and a very dry leeward coast in the west. The rain forests on the windward coasts are usually really fascinating and full of hippies (or “ferals”, as they are known in Australia), but the constant rain and dampness can eventually start to wear you down. The dry, leeward coasts offer much warmer and sunnier weather with much calmer surf. Of course, the heat in these places can start to wear you down just as quickly.
It seems most visitors to places like the Hawaiian and Fiji Islands are primarily interested in hanging out on a beach, so these dry coasts seem to attract most tourists and tourist resorts. I can’t say I’m much for hanging out on beaches personally, but it’s nice to do a bit of everything while you’re travelling. And besides, there are some places in these areas that are good for snorkelling, and that is something I do like to do.
So there amongst the $500-a-night resorts, including a multi-million dollar Hilton (dubbed “Disneyland” by the locals), I checked into my $20-a-night cabin with ocean views overlooking Hapuna Beach State Park. Okay, it was pretty basic, and it looked like it hadn’t really had any maintenance since it was built in the 1970’s — but it did the trick and was a short walk from a fabulous beach. After being visited by a few spiders, geckos, mosquitoes, ant colonies and mice in my cabin, I just decided to pitch my freestanding tent on the floor so I could sleep in peace. I’ve been used to such nighttime visitors since I first arrived in Fiji.
Hapuna Beach State Park was a good base to use for swimming and some decent snorkelling along some reefs near the southern end of the cove. But the really nice snorkelling was a few clicks down the road behind a wealthy neighbourhood called Puako. I knew I had found a great spot when I spotted an expensive snorkelling tour operator anchored just offshore and other divers climbing out of the surf. Sure enough, it was one of the best snorkelling spots I’ve ever found, with loads of colourful tropical fish swimming into and out of deep canyons a few hundred feet offshore. The divers told me they liked it for the big underwater lava tube they could explore.
While I stayed at Hapuna Beach State Park, I also did the obligatory visit to the Hilton Waikoloa Village (aka Disneyland) — just to see how the other half lives. The answer? They live just like they do at home, with giant shopping malls right there on the beach with them. It reminded me more of King of Prussia Mall than anything else. And to think that King of Prussia is what I try to take vacations from…
At long last, I’ve found myself back in Fremantle. Home again, home again, jiggedy jig! I spent my last day hiking through Porongurup National Park, near Albany, Western Australia.
And my last night away in Walpole on the southwest coast of Western Australia — in the heart of the giant Karri forests. Of all the places I’ve visited around Australia, it is still one of the most beautiful, although a bit cold this time of year. I actually found a quarter inch of ice on my windshield in the morning and couldn’t get it off (since we don’t have ice scrapers here). I had to resort to turning the car into the morning sun and running the defroster for a while.
The past few days in Fremantle have been quite hectic, with six weeks of mail to catch up on and serious cleaning and repacking to do. With about nine hours to go before my red-eye flight to Auckland, New Zealand (via Sydney), I’m happy to say I’ve finished all my errands and made everything I’m travelling with fit into my backpack.
I will be spending the next three weeks in New Zealand and will write from there soon!
I’m spending my second night in a youth hostel in Esperance. Yesterday, I was the youngest resident (with several retirees). Today I’m the oldest. Ahhh… you’re never too old to backpack.
A farmer staying here told me yesterday that there are big bucks to be made selling “Blood and Bone” fertiliser, and that’s what the kangaroo collector was probably doing with them in South Australia. He also told me how road train drivers approach livestock when they’re on the road — usually aiming to knock them on the edge and not hitting them full on (which would cause too much damage to their trucks). Ah, the joys of road kill talk…
The weather has been very stormy for most of my stay here, but it has just begun to settle down. To take refuge from the rain, I spent some time perusing the local museum. The coolest exhibit they had was the remains of Skylab, which fell here in 1979. It was really interesting to see all the bits, some of them huge, and read all the newspaper articles. I can remember everyone worrying about whether it would fall on them back in the U.S. I also remember NASA claiming that it had safely landed in the Indian Ocean — just before the people of Esperance announced that, actually, it had fallen on them. There were big things in the exhibit like the freezer, hatch door, and a giant cylinder. It’s a miracle none of it landed on anyone’s head.
The weather did manage to clear up enough for me to see the outdoor sites as well. The “Big Sur” type drive is really spectacular with many an endless beach with lots of white sand and huge rocks. The local national park has pure white beaches that seem to run for dozens of miles. There were also whales in the neighbourhood, but I didn’t personally see any.
Tomorrow, I will head for Walpole (in the thick of the Karri forests south of Perth) to spend the night before making that final 5-hour leg back to Perth on Sunday.
After my night sleeping on the state line, I got up bright and early and soldiered back to the car for another long day of driving. One of the reasons I decided to sleep at the border village was because it was actually on the South Australian side, and there was an Agricultural Inspection Station waiting for me to get into Western Australia. This was the fourth zone I’ve had to cross into, where I was expected to throw away all my produce, and I was getting a bit sick of it. The other zones were around Kununarra, the Northern Territory state line, and the lower parts of South Australia. I still had some oranges and apples I bought at Adelaide’s Central Market, so I had them all for breakfast before getting started on my journey.
This drive had a few more trees than the Nullarbor, but it also had the distinction of holding Australia’s longest straight stretch of road — the Ninety Mile Straight, which got a bit boring. I actually found it a bit dangerous because oncoming traffic seemed to appear out of nowhere. You would get tired of constantly looking in the same place for too long and find it hypnotising, so you would try to keep your eyes moving around, looking from side to side, just to stay awake. And then, pow, there would be a truck barrelling down on you.
I finally arrived in Norseman in Western Australia in the mid-afternoon, where the tourist centre greeted me with a free hot shower and a free private camping spot 22 kms south of town. It was quite nice, private, isolated, and beautiful with lots of thick bush.
From there, I made the final few hours of driving this morning to get to the southern coastal town of Esperance — which is actually only about 8 hours away from Perth.
Esperance is supposed to be beautiful, but it’s been pouring rain ever since I got here. I’ve checked into another single room at the YHA in anticipation of another nasty storm front passing through. I think it’s probably already here. Esperance is famous for having lots of big, beautiful beaches here with pure white sand. They have a bay full of islands and a local national park with some good hikes (I’ve been told). There is also a scenic drive nearby that it supposed to be like Big Sur. I’ll let you know when the weather clears.
So after a few days of freezing nights in the damp cold of Adelaide, I decided I should start making my way back to Perth—as time was running out. I thought it would be more interesting to try and camp in as many national parks as I could on the way across the Nullarbor. One park I camped in was Mount Remarkable National Park, a little but, ummm, remarkable park just outside of Port Augusta (which I had to pass back through to get around the Spencer Gulf, anyway). Mt. Remarkable had lots of nice trails I could hike, running through gorges and up to the tops of mountains. I saw an echidna there, a relative of the porcupine, doing a bit of echidna-type business along the river.
After a night in Mount Remarkable, I headed through Port Augusta and down to the southern end of the Eyre Peninsula to camp at Lincoln National Park (next to Port Lincoln, and not named after Abe). The Eyre Peninsula was quite nice with a lush green interior and nice, quiet little coastal towns that are probably a bigger attraction during the summer months. It was cold (again), but I was able to get my own campground and private beach there. I could tell a storm was brewing in the distance, but I didn’t know what was in store for me until the next day. Fortunately, I was able to find the perfect sheltered spot for my tent, so I didn’t suffer.
My original plan was to break the run across the Nullarbor Plain up into about 500-600 kilometer sections. Unfortunately, a huge nasty storm front moved through with driving rain and gale-force winds that didn’t make the idea of stopping to camp anywhere along the way a desirable one. Instead, I just headed as far west as I could, hoping to get through to the other side of the storm (which was coming from the west)
The storm made what would otherwise have been a notoriously boring drive (“Nullarbor” means “no trees” in Latin) into a beautiful drive with huge dark cloud formations, distant storms, and lots of full rainbows. The drive across the bottom of Australia runs very close to the edge of the continent, and there are numerous places you can pull off the road to watch the Southern Ocean crashing into sheer cliffs. There were also a couple of passes up onto and off of plateaus that were really spectacular to look down from.
I made it to the Western Australian / South Australian border and found a cheap cabin in the tiny “border village” for the night so I didn’t have to worry about camping in the elements. $25. Not a bad deal. It even came with a tea kettle so I can boil water and make dinner in my room. The first night I’ve slept indoors in about 5 weeks!
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