Chapter 9: My ass fell off about 2000km back on the highway

OH! MY! GOD! It’s about 6 days after my last peckings on this word processor. My ass is soooooo numb, that I can’t feel it, in fact I haven’t felt it in about the last 4 days. I think it dropped off about 2000 km ago. It was proba bly gangrous. In total we have travelled about 3500 km in 7 days, Perth to Broome. There is so much to see, but one forgets – at least until the 7^th hour in the bus – just how big Australia is: roughly the size of the USA. So, while this little trip has had its moments, the ratio of pain to gain has been rather high! To wit: another odious tour guide leader named Rob (this one I’ve nicknamed Repulsive Rob) who talks incessantly about how many female clients various other tour leaders of his acquaintance have managed to bed while running the trips. He’s vile, vile, vile. But, anyway let’s focus on the highlights. At Monkey Mia, a dolphin swam up and rubbed my leg as I stood knee deep in the water at the beach and she seemed to be smiling at me. Then the next day at Coral Bay in the evening we went quad biking down the beach at sunset to see a loggerhead turtle nest hatching. That was amazing, something I’ve wanted to see all my life. There were 42 eggs in total, but a wind-blown sand drift had buried the nest so deep that the baby loggerhead turtles couldn’t dig through to the surface. So the ranger dug them out, explaining that in the natural world they would have died but that the turtle conservationists felt that something needed to be done to restore the odds for the turtle, given the rarity of these turtles now, to counter the depredations of man. These include continued hunting, habitat destruction of key turtle nesting sites, introduction of alien animals (such as foxes in Australia) which plunder turtle egg nests when the rangers don’t find and protect them, and also the dumping of plastic bags in the oceans which turtles, fatally, will eat thinking them to be jelly fish. The little turtles were perfectly formed, not much bigger than an Oreo cookie with flippers. But it was a perfectly formed little turtle. They grow to the size of a meter and half in length and can weigh up to 200kg, and after spending some 30 years reaching sexual maturity in the open seas they will come back to exactly the same beach they were born on to nest.

I was desperately keen to dive on the world famous Ningaloo Reef just off the coast of Coral Bay (which experts say is superior to the Great Barrier Reef) but we only had one day there and on that day all the dives were booked up, sadly. And so, I didn’t get to see the whale sharks either; I was there a couple of weeks too early. But I’ve decided to come back to do this part properly; more on this later.

Later, at Karajini National Park (after hours and hours of driving) we did the most spectacular gorge walk called the Miracle Mile. The rock there is sedimentary, but quite hard due to severe compression when it formed about 2.5 billion years ago. It is blood red due to the iron ore in the rock, but is too old to contain any fossils. An uplift from the ocean floor left amazingly regular horizontal fractures in the rock, such that parts of the canyon system look like the ruins of ancient temples. There were parts of the canyon system that we had to swim through pea green water with our belongings perched in plastic bags on our heads, but the high point was when we basically had to free form rock climb (no ropes) along fairly sheer canyon walls (albeit with lots of little ledges, shelves, footholds, etc). The tour guides warned people that it was really difficult, but when we got down into it, past the point of no return, I was surprised at just how dangerous it really was. But I was astounded that they guided our group down into it, since our group constituted of 22 people, the majority of whom are young, overweight, silly British girls who CHOW DOWN on chocolate, chips, pop at every gas station stop, scream at EVERY bug no matter how small, wear full make-up every day, and complain about anything involving physical activity. But it was quite thrilling because for a lot of people in the group it was the first time they’d ever done something so adventuresome, and they were thrilled to discover indeed that they could do it. Many would have pulled out, were it not for the fact that very early on their was a rock chimney which we shimmied down, which was effectively a point of no return. When they came back they were so enthused by what they had seen, but also by what they had done. It made me realize that people can do much, much more than they think they can, and the same applies, I guess, to me.

The trip was also significant for the following reason. Initially, I was very upset with myself for mucking up this portion of my trip, by bypassing Perth (where there are apparently great things to do like diving with seals), by spending a lot of money pointlessly changing my flights to see certain flights and then failing to actually see them (like Ningaloo Reef and the whale sharks), and by taking this tour, which has imprisoned me on a hot cramped bus with these silly people. Finally, after working myself into a total frenzy of irritation and angst and general grumpy-moodiness, I just had to accept that this trip was not going to be what I wanted it to be, and that I was not going to see all the things that I wanted to see on the West Coast. And I let it go. For those of you who don’t know me, this was really hard to do. And when I did let go in this way, I felt an amazing lifting sense of release and I started at the same time to really enjoy the company of the people on my tour, though unfortunately our guide still remained Repulsive Rob. Now we are on the road to Broome, which will be an enforced rest stop for me of at least 5 days before I fly to Brisbane and from then up the Queensland coast to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. I will write more later.