The wonders of the west

Five o’clock in the morning and my alarm sounds. After a week and a half on the road with numerous nights of disrupted sleep, my body jolts awake with dismay and I quickly press the snooze button. My mind, however, doesn’t let me ignore the wake-up call and it’s with some reluctance that I haul myself out of bed and jump into the shower.

It was Friday morning, the last morning of our ten-day self-drive exploration of Western Australia’s Coral Coast and the last thing I wanted to do was to wake up at crazy o’clock and get back into the car. The Pinnacles awaited, however, a natural phenomenon of limestone formations in the Nambung National Park, just outside the seaside town of Cervantes. We’d been told that sunset and sunrise were the best times to be there, and since we’d missed the sunset deadline the day before, sunrise was our only other option, as we’d dismissed the totally acceptable alternative of just waking up at a normal hour and driving over as boring. Rugged up against the morning cold, we arrived at the site just before first light and could barely see the outlines of the hundreds of limestone formations that lined the “Pinnacles Drive”, the stone-lined driving path for cars to safely cruise through the natural wonder. We were the only car there, with the exception of a camper van that had arrived just before us and moved to a different location not long after we arrived. I got out of the car, zipped up my fleece to try to keep the chilly morning air out, and started moving around, trying to find the best vantage point for that perfect sunrise photo.

As it started to become light I found myself moving off the marked trail and into the pristine areas of the desert. As I climbed the sandy incline, the sight that unfolded in front of me rendered me speechless. Hundreds and thousands of the limestone formations in all shapes and sizes, a massive white sand dune in the distance, and random vegetation all around. Totally alone, I wandered around the area, camera almost forgotten, moving deeper and deeper into the desert, simply overwhelmed by what I was seeing. As the sun started to rise, and its rays touched the desert sands and highlighted the grooves in the limestone formations, I just stood there looking around in wonder.

That last morning was the perfect culmination of our time in Western Australia. In the ten days we’d spent on the road, we’d driven from Perth up as far as Exmouth, and back again, a total distance of over 1,500km with more than forty hours of driving time. We’d driven through hundreds of kilometres of ever-changing landscapes, marvelled at the different types of uniquely Australian flora, stared in wonder at the deep blue coastlines and kept a sharp eye out for potential wildlife sightings with the hope that we’d make it back with the rental car intact, and not be one of the many to contribute to the roadkill at the side of the road.

We arrived in Perth on a Wednesday morning, collected our car and started the seven hour drive up the coast to reach our first destination, Kalbarri. As we’d pre-booked all out accommodation, we didn’t have the luxury of waking up each morning and deciding where we would go, instead, each morning, as we packed our bags to move to the next destination, we calculated the driving time and attempted to time our rest stops to include as many interesting stops on the way as we could.

With the long drives and endless stretches of highway between roadhouses or attractions, at times there was nothing to do for hours on end. We kept ourselves occupied by creating inventive sounds for each warning sign we came across, looked out for road trains, the 30 plus metre behemoths of the highway, and marked their sightings accordingly with the deep-throated “road train” refrain. We bluetoothed our way through the limited, mainly outdated music selections on our phones, singing along to classic Australian ‘80s and ‘90s tracks, with amazingly appropriate lyrics for the surroundings we found ourselves in. Midnight Oil’s “Truganini”, with the opening phrase, “There’s a road train going nowhere,” was sung with gusto at the roadhouses where we shared parking spots with the massive monsters, and John Farnham, Crowded House, Cold Chisel and Jimmy Barnes filled in the music blanks along the way, with a touch of Israeli rock and some more modern offerings thrown in to keep things interesting.

On the first day we headed up to Kalbarri, stopping at the stunning beaches in Joondalup for lunch on the way, simply because we liked the name of the place. The drive to Kalbarri was long, one of the longest drives we did in one day, made even longer by random stops including the first stop, barely half an hour out of Perth at a Woolworths supermarket, to stock up on food for our mostly self-catered adventure. As the girl I was travelling with, Chana, kept kosher, she was preparing to cook all her own food during our trip, and logistically it made sense for me to do the same, especially as eating out in Australia is incredibly expensive. With the abundance of kosher and gluten-free options available at supermarkets all the way up the coast, we were definitely not lacking in the food department and almost every day was marked with a stop or two at a Woolworths, IGA or a random petrol station or two to stock up on food and snacks.

Kalbarri was gorgeous. We spent two nights there, giving us a full day to explore the national park and the coastline. We arrived at the entry to the Kalbarri national park and were greeted by a ranger wearing a hat with rolled-up fly netting. Unfortunately for the ranger, we were given a rude introduction to the fly problem that had taken over the more north-western parts of WA (apparently caused by the recent cyclone that had swept through the area), as he choked on a fly while explaining the cause of the infestation and where we should go to purchase the essential fly netting. Not entirely sure how to help him, and noticing that we were blocking the entrance, we moved on, giving him the privacy to deal with the swallowed, fly, hoping that he would be ok.

Our morning was spent checking out the gorge from many different angles, and making our way to Nature’s Window, a beautiful rock formation overlooking the gorge. After heading back to town and purchasing the clearly extremely essential fly netting for our heads, we made our way to the coastline and spent the rest of the day moving from lookout to lookout, exclaiming at the beauty of the cliffs and furiously snapping away at the gorgeous sunset viewed over Chinaman’s Bluff, one of the many gorgeous sunsets we were to see over the next few days.

As the next day was Friday, and my friend observed Shabbat, it was a relatively short day as we had to make it to our next destination, Monkey Mia, before sundown and the start of the Shabbat. We went to Rainbow Jungle, a short drive from our accommodation in Kalbarri, to check out the gorgeous birds and then headed out onto the road, stopping at numerous locations before arriving at our final destination. Monkey Mia is situated in the world heritage area of Shark Bay and there were some gorgeous places to visit along the way, including Hamelin Pool to see the large stromatolite colony, and the incredible and very aptly named Shell Beach, with its turquoise waters and stunning white shoreline made up of millions of tiny white shells. The sunset at Monkey Mia that night was one of the most beautiful I have ever witnessed, with fiery skies that kept on changing, the colours becoming more brilliant and intense as the time went on, until they eventually faded into an inky blackness.

Monkey Mia is known for its native dolphin population and the numerous types of sea life in the area. Every morning wild dolphins congregate along the shorelines and spectators are selected to feed the five specific dolphins that receive a tiny part of their daily food intake from the staff at Monkey Mia. The resort is extremely vigilant at ensuring that the wild dolphins remain wild. Touching is strictly prohibited for staff and onlookers alike and the miniscule amounts of food provided ensure that the dolphins are forced to retain all of their survival skills. It was a spectacular sight watching the dolphins come into the shore early in the morning, frolicking with their families and interacting with the staff who they were clearly familiar with.

I was able to see the dolphins up close again later on in the day as I took back-to-back afternoon animal-viewing and sunset cruises. With polarising sunglasses to minimize the sun’s glare on the water, and unusually calm waters with decent visibility, we saw numerous turtles popping their heads out of the water and swimming under the boat. Dolphins came to frolic around the boat, and we saw a leopard shark lazily swimming around the perimeter of the boat. The sunset cruise was equally stunning, with the shock sighting of not one, but three massive manta rays, a definite highlight.

The next day, with a long drive ahead of us from Monkey Mia up to Coral Bay, we didn’t have much time to stop and sightsee, and, as we were informed by the bemused locals we asked at the roadhouses on the way, apparently there wasn’t really much to see anyway. We stopped at a beautiful small lagoon on the road from Monkey Mia and then drove all the way to Carnarvon, a town whose name sounds very Yoda-like when pronounced with a slightly Irish accent. In Carnarvon we were accosted by the worst of the fly plagues we were to encounter during our trip, as we made our way down one-mile jetty, Carnarvon’s feature tourist attraction. We quickly realized that the lunch we had planned on eating at the end of the jetty was not going to happen unless we wanted to feast on flies at the same time and resigned ourselves to eating lunch in the car, moving on to park the car in a pretty location to compensate for being forced indoors to eat.

We spent three days in the Ningaloo Reef world heritage area of Coral Bay and Exmouth, one night in Coral Bay and another two in Exmouth, the farthest point north that we reached in WA. We snorkelled off a boat in Coral Bay the first day and in the stunning crisp waters of Turquoise Bay in Exmouth on the third. In between snorkels, as we moved from Coral Bay to Exmouth, we drove up the coast, visiting World War Two memorial sites, scaring sheep on the sides of roads, visiting lighthouses, shipwrecks and gorges, and staring open mouthed at the gorgeous colours, wildlife, and the massive collection of random termite mounds dotting the landscape.

I had been looking forward to diving in Exmouth, a site recommended to me way back in November by Sarah, the chain-smoking French diving instructor who I met on the first day of the Vipassana course I did in Nepal. She told me that diving in WA was even better than the Great Barrier Reef, with many different animals that weren’t found anywhere else, and that I should definitely try to make my way there while I was in Australia. Her recommendation was one of the reasons I chose WA as one of my Australia destinations, looking forward to seeing something different, and to diving with the sharks. Unfortunately, I discovered that I needed to do a refresher dive before they would take me under, and with the limitations of the scheduled dives heading out that day in Exmouth, there was no time for me to be able to partake. I was disappointed, but comforted by the knowledge that I still had Queensland to look forward to, and would definitely have time to get that refresher dive in before heading out to the Great Barrier Reef.

Once we left Exmouth, we had three days to head back down the coast to make it to Perth in time for Shabbat, not an easy task with the amount of driving we had to do to make our deadline. We drove all the way back to Carnarvon on the first, taking a detour out to Point Quobba to see the blowholes on the way, another recommendation from a fellow Vipassana student, my friend Katey.

The second day was by far the most bizarre of our trip as we made a stop on the incredibly long drive from Carnarvon to Cervantes in order to visit the Principality of Hutt River, a seventy-five square kilometre area of land in the middle of nowhere, claiming to be the oldest and only micronation in Australia, having seceded from Australia in 1970 as a way of avoiding the wheat quota imposed upon the owner’s land. We met the patriarch, Prince Leonard, the land owner who initiated the secession process forty five years ago, and were taken on a tour of the province by his son, who has been tasked with keep the province running. He told us the history of Hutt River, showed us examples of the national currency, passports, and presents from various nations and world leaders, and stamped both my passports with the official Province of Hutt River visa.

No trip to Australia is complete without a photo of a cute, fluffy koala and this trip was no exception. After our marathon driving session from Carnarvon to Cervantes, with yet another detour on the way in Geraldton to visit Sunset Beach (at sunset) and to pay our respects at the HMAS Sydney memorial, we woke up early the following morning for our visit to the Pinnacles, and were left with plenty of time to make the two hour journey back to Perth. We visited random lookouts, saw more stromatolytes at Lake Thetis and dropped in to say hello to the koalas in Yanchep national park. Mr Bear was a particularly accommodating koala, very obliging when requested to wake up and show his face, climbing up the branch for the sake of the photograph, before settling back down to sleep.

We arrived back in Perth with time to spare and prepared ourselves for a couple of days of well-earned rest before today’s flight to Alice Springs and the continuation of our Aussie adventures. Having unintentionally picked ANZAC Day weekend to be in the city centre of Perth, we didn’t get as much rest as planned, waking up relatively early to watch the morning parade and to partake in the ANZAC Day ceremony on the shores of the Swan River. In the afternoon we walked to the War Memorial in King’s Park, symbolically choosing to climb the Kokoda Track Memorial Walk to get there, a steep 150 step path with plaques along the way, detailing the Australian battles on the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea in 1942-3 during World War II.

WA was a definite eye opener for me. As we drove the wide open spaces and visited the breathtakingly beautiful sites along the coast, I was taken back to childhood memories of visits to equally beautiful places in Victoria, to family holidays, school hikes and Bnei Akiva camps. I relived the wonders of past experiences and at the same time created new memories, and I believe that these new experiences and my old memories have become all the more rich because of it. At the same time I was exposed to so much Australian history that I had been unaware of before, the involvement of Western Australia during WWII and earlier wars, WA’s participation in space missions with their massive dish in Carnarvon, and their help with communications during the Cuban Missile crisis with the American communications centre up in Exmouth.

Seeing the ANZAC Day march for the first time was incredibly moving and emotional, especially coming only days after Israel commemorated Yom Hazikaron (Remembrance Day) and celebrated Yom Haatzmaut (Independence Day), two days which were exceptionally hard for me, being away from Israel, my family and my fellow countrymen. I saw the respect given to Australian war veterans, and compared the ceremonies performed in both countries, and found myself beginning to really understand Australia and the Australian spirit, perhaps for the first time. It was a fitting end to my time in WA, and, as I sit in Alice Springs about to embark on a three day camping trip to Kings Canyon, the Olgas and Uluru, I’m looking forward to the next two and a half weeks, the last in the long journey I embarked upon back in October, as a chance to further enrich my understanding of this country, the country where I was born, and of the people who live here, and to finally understand where I, a proud citizen of Australian although I no longer live here, really belong.

LEST WE FORGET

יהי זכרם ברוך