The Passion of the Shells, Back to Perth

We woke up to a lovely day. This is always a bit unpleasant after you have driven miles and miles to a nature spot to be rained upon. Nevertheless, we soldiered on.

And now, some art appreciation, as brought to you by the wife and decorator of our cozy little weekend cottage. Ahem.



The mirror reflects our appearance, but the sea-shells reflect our origins. Here, Mindy has attempted to convey the incredible stretch of evolutionary time. Gastropod shells confront homo sapiens here; this is what we have come from, and this is where we are going.



Yellow is a color not commonly associated with the sea, but it is associated with the rise - and set - of the sun. Has Mindy's arrangement of shells here an expression of her own trepidation about the aging process? Does she seek solace in the eternal, physically perfect shape of the nautilus at the center, as a poignant reminder of what she has lost, and what she must face in the near future?



Here Mindy expresses her opinion on the essential emptiness of life, the vast void that is the Indian ocean - a stretch of sea, leading to nowhere in particular. Kalbarri leans out to the wind, and so does Mindy's soul - she wishes to explore, to step across the oceans into the mysterious and perfumed lands of Asia, Indonesia (beyond the churning waters) , but yet her responsibility and her culture holds her back. The sea grasses wave at her, as if they are saying goodbye to someone who has no intention of actually going. Will she plunge into the sea, someday? Is that what this masterwork is attempting to convey?



Oysters are closeted, closed-up creatures, and this floral-style arrangement produced from their shells is a profound expression of the ennui and sexual dissatisfaction of the Australian married woman. They are clamped up and dry, now, but once were moist and....oh god i can't go on make it stop make it stop oh god oh god

We stopped to chat with our proprietor in the driveway as we packed our stuff up. He was attempting to control his son's recalcitrant and violently adorable Lhaso Apso puppy, with little to no success. "So what does your son do?" I asked. He had mentioned the other day that his son was, rather ambigously, in the "outback." Whatever that meant.

"Oh, he works in the mines, way up north, for Rio Tinto. He's a chemical engineer. Pulling down plenty of money. My other son does that too. Five weeks on, make a pretty penny and store er' up, head on back. I did that too when I was starting out."

I had envisioned Working in the Mines as something involving hard hats and impoverished West Virginians with missing teeth, so this was a bit of a surprise to me. "Good lord, maybe I should work in a mine," I said.

Lyn chimed in to mention that even clerical workers In the Mines make somewhat ungodly amounts of money. Apparently there is a vast Australian mining secret that has been hitherto unrevealed to my American brethern.

"They've got five mines just about to open up near here, along the coast," he added. "Geraldton and Kalbarri are just going to explode, you'll see about that. Smart young people should go on up to the mines for three years or so, save er' all up, and buy real estate. I bought this spread for 200,000 and now I can turn it over for 500,000 - yes, real estate's the way to go in WA, one hundred percent. Won't ever go down, but up, and up, and up. The kids these days just want to buy a fancy car and a fancy house, but they should just invest, invest in real estate.."

I internally boggled, as I seemed to recall everyone in the state of California making the exact same claim about two years and then regretting it about as much as anyone has regretted anything. I asked Lyn about it in the car, as we headed to the sea cliffs, and she filled me in. "Western Austalians all seem to believe real estate is incapable of going down."

"Do they ever watch the news? Did they somehow manage to overlook that whole real estate bubble kerfuffle?" I said, all agog. (Great word).


The ocean goes on a bit out here.

Then I remembered: they're Australian. They don't have to pay a lick of attention to our USA affairs if they don't particularly care to do so. Just like us, Aussies take extreme pride in their self reliance, independence, and personal ability to make a dollar or two, particularly in the form of turning over houses.



We turned off to the sea cliffs, which were behaving wonderfully in the absence of driving rain and wind. The cliffs are indeed astoundingly beautiful, and I've never been to a place where one experienced such a visceral sense of being at the literal edge of the earth, the place where land stops and segues (for a terribly long distance) into sea. The sea far below had turned glass clear again, and little brown Australian kestrels wheeled below the outlook. There were no whales. The lighting was fantastic: the sight of the cliffs in the morning made all the rain and ennui of the day before entirely worth it.



"I'm going to invest in real estate," I told Lyn, pointing to the top of the natural bridge. "Going to open a Hungry Jack's and a drive-in motel right there. Make a bazillion dollars and die inordinately happy."



"Yeah, you do that," she said.

Here, have some informative signs. Don't say I never did nothing for you.







We made a last-ditch attempt to catch the pelican feeding that supposedly occurs every morning at exactly 8:45 on Kalbarri beach. There was an older man, doubtless a member of the Old Bastards club, holding a bucket of herring. There were lots of families standing around the Pelican Feeding Official Viewing Ground, eagerly anticipating the arrival of the 5 foot tall winged beasties.


You think you're so great, seagull. I bet you do.

Except the pelicans didn't show, the jerks. You'd think free fish would be enough to do it. As it was, we spent about five minutes dejectedly watching silver gulls squabble over fish, straining our eyes for the sight of a big white pelican soaring over the horizon. Nada mas.

"Back to Perth, then?" Lyn said.

"Seems that way," I said. We headed out of town.

I drove for a short while, which was all right actually, mainly because there was no one on the road who I could demonstrate my tenous grasp on left-right dynamics to. I kept on turning on the windshield wiper instead of the blinker. Stupid down under. The ride back to Geraldton was fairly benign: we passed by the Pink Lake again, which had not declined in pinkness one iota, and the trees were still bent over, and the green pleasantness of spring was still in the air. I went in to buy a Diet Coke at the Northampton roadhouse and was flirted with somewhat pathetically by the counter boy.

"Are you from around here?" he said, hopefully. Perhaps he was imagining a romantic date at the Fish BBQ, or something.

"No, no, I'm afraid not," I replied. No one is, you poor, dear sod, I thought, as I walked out the door.



We stopped at the Dome in Geraldton for lunch, in lieu of paying an inordinate amount of money for nouveau lunch Cuisine.

Dome really deserves its own paragraph, as it is Australia's exact equivalant to Starbucks. For the zoology types, Dome has successfully filled Starbucks ecological niche - Starbucks was unable to make it in Australia, despite the company's doubtless dogged attempts to put down roots in Oz. And Dome is indeed nice. The shops are attractively designed, with a lot of wood and a distinctly Gallic gilded interior. The coffee is good and plentiful, once you figure out how to negotiate Australia's bizarrely obtuse method of ordering. Insofar as I could ever work out, a Flat White is coffee with some milk in it. Don't ask me how this differs from a latte.

The food is all right, cooked to order, and will do in a pinch, which is more then one can say about anything edible Starbucks dishes out. Finally, Dome's parent company possesses the inordinate wealth required to plonk down shop's in exceptionally primo real estate. Geraldton's branch was situated right on the beach, where we could watch the breakers thump in benath a sparkling blue sky.



I had a perfectly serviceable Greek salad....



And Lyn had some microwave-quality cannelloni. Well, you're always in dangerous territory with cannelloni, says I. They're not to be trusted, as Italian foodstuffs go.



We drove on to a nice little beach outside town, con lighthouse. It is the only steel British made lighthouse of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Thought you might care to know. The sigh on the beach warned of rip tides, man eating sharks, deadly jellyfish, and sea snakes, in case you might consider taking a little dip. Oh, Australia.


Geraldton has some big ass cargo ships comin' through. The guidebook said this is in fact one of the primary attractions for locals on weekends. Everybody turn out to see the big ass boat come in! Bring the little nippers! Well, okay, then.

The ride from then on back was through fairly featureless outback, punctuated by the occasional kangaroo corpse and unspeakably terrifying Road Train. Road trains, if you don't know, are pretty much exactly what they sound like. As we got within spitting distance of Perth, in the Swan River Valley, we discovered that it had got quite cold in our absence. It's always a bit of a cognitive dissonance thing when you're indisputably in Australia, yet still freezing your butt off. We entered the bizarrely American style suburbs, and were pretty much home free.



LOOK A WHALESHARK IN SUNGLASSES OH THE HILARITY

Another moment of cognitive dissonance for American tourists here. Australians, especially in WA, love freeways, suburbs, and big box megastores just as much as we do, and construct them in pretty much the same way and in the same locations. This leads you to moments of dozing off in the car or whatever, looking out the window and thinking, "Oh, San Jose! There's the Ikea!" then being confronted by a dead kangaroo or a roundabout or someone in an unspeakable school uniform to jar you back to your senses. It's weird, is what I'm saying.



For dinner, Mike had thoughtfully picked up some uber-delicious Aussie lamb chops. He served this with an equally delicious mustard-shallot-honey sauce, which I need to have the recipe for post haste. I hope you're reading this, Mike.



And we had some asparagus wrapped in CUSTOM MADE bacon. Yum.

In Which We Get Rained On

When we woke up, it was raining sideways.

I believe this kind of rain in coastal regions, especially in isolated bits of Western Australia that no one really thinks about much, is referred to as a "gale". If anything could qualify as a gale, it would have been what we saw clattering outside the walls of our rent-a-cottage. This, needless to say, bode poorly for our planned day of vigorous outdoors activities. As it turns out, there is in fact just about jack all to do in Kalbarri when it is raining sideways outside. But we didn't know that just yet, and were feeling vibrant and optimistic regardless.



We stopped at a nearby beach to look at the water, which could only really be described as "severely pissed off". I am not in the camp that believes in a deeply woo-woo fashion that water can transmit (or care about) the emotions of humanity, but after regarding that water for a while, I was willing to entertain the possibility that it can get *mad*. Anyone who went out in that mess, be it in a boat, a ferry, or on a surfboard, could only be described as clinically insane. But this is the Australian psyche we're discussing here, and we would indeed see a couple of dogged mental patients waiting on wave after wave that never actually came.



We proceeded down the track into the national park, which was also soggy, although the rain had at least reduced itself to "morose drizzle" status. A sign on the way in informed us that the road to Nature's Window, Kalbarri's most iconic site, was closed and would be until the soil dried out and it was rendered safe for vehicular use again, which would doubtless be a while. Hiking was also right out. I spent a few of my tween and teenage years quite ardently engaged in outdoors sports in rocky, gorge infested regions like this one, and Lesson Numero Uno in that department is "If it is pissing down rain, don't go hiking in a slippery, flash-flood prone gorge." So we didn't do that either.



What we did do was batten down the hatches and go and politely observe the open overlooks. These were, thankfully, given a bit of an atmospheric boost by the lingering mist in the air and the crystal-clear droplets hanging from the pines and shrubs nearby. It was in fact quite pleasant, and I wished the weather was good enough to allow me to do some really soul-satisfying scrambling around on the nearby boulders.







Here, have an interpretative sign. Or two.

I left Lyn to read a nearby sign and scrambled tentatively down the walking path, where I encountered a couple of elderly Australian ladies down a flight of stairs. "You're not here alone, are you?" one asked carefully, and I assured her I was not.

(Elderly women in foreign countries, and in fact, everywhere, are eternally very concerned about me. This may be attributed to the fact that I am small, blonde, and distinctly waifish looking, which seems to set off their internal little old lady concern mechanisms with roaring intensity. When I am in places like India and China, elderly women often seize me sternly by the arm and walk me across busy streets, which is among the more humiliating experiences known to a young person in possession of full mental and physical faculties. But enough about me).

They walked up and began chatting with Lyn, and I soon joined them. They were pointing at a group of people in brightly-colored windbreakers, standing in the gorge below us. "We're in that tourist group, but we thought better of scrambling over the river," one said. "Didn't seem like a good idea.

"Oh, lovely," I said. "Where are you from?"

"Well, we're from Melbourne. The tour is all right, but we hadn't known that it would be all young people, when we booked it."

"Yes, quite young people, university types. They were out until five in the morning last night, at the pub. Don't know how they're managing the hike."

"They all looked like hell this morning. Like a truck had hit them. I don't know how they're managing at all."

They grew thoughtful and silent, and Lyn and I looked at them with abject horror and pity.



Consider it. You are a nice old thing from Melbourne who has decided to take a lovely packaged tour up the Western Australian coast. You find a nice looking outfit, and perhaps not being among the most internet savvy of creatures, fail to notice that it caters to a younger crowd, shall we say, in fact the kind of crowd that enjoys things like beer pong, ironic t-shirts, and getting tattoos on their asses. You get on the bus and realize that you have about 50 years on everyone else, including the guide and the driver, and you have already paid up and got someone to watch your Lhasa Apso, and you are just going to have make the best of it, horrible rock-rap music on the bus speakers and technicolored 6:00 AM barf in the hotel corridors and all. Which these commendable women were obviously trying their very best to do. I hope they made it back to Melbourne alive, that's all.

The other thing to consider is that these Young People were out until five in the morning in Kalbarri which boasts, as I perhaps previously mentioned, just about two pubs, one of which is the avowed territory of the Old Bastards club. Logic indicates that kids may be among the most incredibly persistent drinkers on earth. Either that, or I made a gigantic tactical error in going to bed at 9:30 instead of slipping out to Get Down with the spry and winsome residents of Kalbarri. Huh, hmm.


Stand of gum trees in the gorge.

As Lyn and I considered the horror of our companions position, we noticed three kangaroos bouncing majestically through the mist, along the floor of the canyon. "Seeing kangaroos never gets old," I commented, and everyone nodded in agreement.

"Looks like our group is coming back," one of the old ladies said, a bit depressively. "And there's John. Always has to be up front, that one." The windbreakers were now moving towards us.

"Oh man, I think the rain is picking up," I said. "We'd better move along. Lovely to meet you two." We beat a swift retreat to the car.

Well, that accounted for the national park, at least in these conditions. The rain showed no sign whatsoever of letting up, so we decided that it was high time to make for Kalbarri's sole indoor attraction of note. "Let's go see ourselves a sullen and wet parrot or two," Lyn said. There may have been a bit of an edge in her voice.

The Rainbow Jungle proclaims itself to be the top parrot-breeding outfit in WA, which it probably is. It's a nice enough place, featuring a series of semi enclosed gardens and grounds with a dizzying array of parrots. It is probably even nicer when it is not raining a whole lot.



When it rains a whole lot, most parrot varieties do indeed get wet and sullen. They huddle up on their branches and lurk in their little parrot-houses and do not engage in any charming, cheeky, or talkative behavior. Instead they glare at you and suggest with their little parrot faces that you should fuck right off and leave them alone, instead of peering at them through the slats and hopefully saying "Hello, hello!" We ignored them because, well, they're parrots.

Some of the parrots do not respond in this way to weather. Some, like the Australian white cockatoo, see you coming and immediately climb enterprisingly down the wire of their cage, offering you their white and plush looking head, begging you with watery eyes to please please please pet me, just a little pet, a stroke, a fondle, a nudge?

This would be a horrible mistake because white cockatoos (like many kinds of parrot) consider human fingers a delicacy on par with Beluga caviar. Signs indicating this were plastered in obvious places all over the Rainbow Jungle, but I am entirely certain more parrot bite wounds then I am capable of imagining occur there every year, exclusively to the very stupid. This makes me happy. "Fuck you parrot," I said, merrily, as I stood just out of reach. "I know what you're up to."

Outwitting small, reasonably innocuous animals always makes me feel great.



Some lovely multicolored parrots. Don't ask me what kind. Australia has roughly a zillion different kinds of Lovely Colorful Parrot and it would take either an ornithologist or a dedicated dork to tell them apart. Being dedicated, I will doubtless sit down with a bird book and figure this out soon. But not today. Don't judge me.


The iconic Aussie Princess Parrot. Even more striking when they fly above you - incredible looking tail feathers.



Red tailed black cockatoos, regarding us with unnerving intelligence. (Parrots are weird). They're called "cockies" in Australia. Everything in Australian must have an "ie" or a "o" added to it. It's a law. Brekkie, Freo, saltie, surfy, bikie, Rotto, on and on and on.



This sign regarding Eurypterids (ie, GIANT ANCIENT SCORPIONS) made me unreasonably happy .



A GIANT METAL GARDEN EURYPTERID. YES.



Adorable lorikeet is adorable.



Just mentally add in "nom nom nom" sounds and this photo becomes twelve times better.


He's out there. And he's nuts.

The Rainbow Jungle features a nicely sized observation platform, ostensibly for whales. No whales out today insofar as we could tell, but there was one mentally ill surfer out there in the cold, sideways rain, and churning ocean. Lyn was fascinated, and we watched him reject wave after wave for about twenty minutes. You'd think one wouldn't be too picky about waves in this weather, but I guess not.

We went to the Gilgai Tavern for lunch, mainly because it seemed to be the only mid range eatery in town that was not a Fried Counter. A Fried Counter is an Australian eatery devoted entirely to deep fried things, of various makes, colors, and freshness levels. They are almost exclusively take out joints staffed by powerful looking middle aged women. They cater to an optimistic idea of good, picnic supporting weather, which we obviously did not have, and eating deep fried and soggy fish in the car didn't appeal to us much. So off to The Pub we went.

The pub was totally characterless in the way of many such Australian ventures, but at least the counter lady was nice and the menu featured a dizzying array of non-deep fried items. I ordered an entirely respectable flat white coffee and watched a violent American movie on the screen in front of me. I then consumed an entirely respectable grilled grouper, served with an equally respectable salad. Everything at the pub was entirely respectable. This couldn't be where those kids in the group had partied last night, could it have been? (There is another pub in Kalbarri which attempts to look rough and ready and outback-tough, or at least more so then this joint. That must have been the place).


After lunch, we went to the visitor's center. This was partially a hopeful but obviously doomed attempt to see if any sort of tour or touristic enterprise was running (the rain HAD reduced itself to a mere chilly drizzle). I also had decided that I needed a cuddly plush whale shark in my life, and the visitor's center just so happened to sell them. "So are the sunset boat tours running this evening?" Lyn asked the counter woman. The boat ran up the lovely Murchison River Gorge in the limpid cool of the evening, and featured a full audio tour, plush seats, and most pleasantly, a licensed bar. We had tried to book the boat tour the night before, which wasn't running then either.. "They don't want to run it, in this weather," the man had said. "They took some folks out this morning on one of the charters. Insisted they could handle the waves. Ended up barfing all over the boat. Quite a horror, eh?" (Jocular Australian downplay of loathsome events = check).

"Oh, God, no, it's not running." the woman said. "There isn't much going in Kalbarri in bad weather, I'm afraid."
"We gathered," Lyn said.
"Have you tried the Rainbow Jungle?" she said, hopefully.
"Yes," Lyn said. "We sure have."
"Lots of neat looking parrots," I said, trying to be positive. "Wet parrots." I selected a particularly personable looking whale shark from the bin.
"Oh, well, then," the woman said. She rang up my whale shark. We retreated. We had successfully exhausted every single source of rainy day entertainment in Kalbarri. Point, set, match.

We headed back to the cottage, to read and consider the seashell art. There was so much seashell art. I am going to see it in my dreams. (Lyn is an art history major and seemed to find the art actively offensive, as if someone was kicking her in the shin whenever she looked at it. I mostly just found it *hilarious*.)


SHRIMP EYEBALLS

Dinner was at the Black Rock Cafe again. This was because the other upscale restaurant in town was closed, and the other options included aforementioned fry counters, the Hotel Pub (now teeming with randy construction workers at this hour) and something forbiddingly called Finlay's Fish BBQ. The choice was easy.



The restaurant was even more packed then the night before, as Kalbarri's entire holiday population seems to have come to same conclusion we had. I chose the local tiger prawns with scallops and mashed potatoes in a butter sauce. Extremely good, and the seafood was obviously freshly caught and local - the intense taste of Aussie prawns is something well worth experiencing. I also enjoyed the roe on scallops. Why aren't those more common in the states?



Lyn chose the grilled snapper with mash and veg. She said it was good, although a tad overcooked. This seem to be common affliction in Australian restaurants.

An Asian man wearing a windbreaker wandered by the restaurant windows a few times. He was soaked, cheerful looking, and eating a sandwich, and he waved when he saw Lyn. "Do you know that guy?" I asked her.

"I've seen him around everywhere today," she said, waving back. That must have been one wet sandwich.



We shared an excellent fruit salad with ice cream, then headed out into the night and back to our cottage again.

Australian Road Trip! The Pinnacles, Cervantes, Stromatolites, ADVENTURE

I always thought of Australia as America's reversed counterpart. We share so much: British heritage, love of bland deep fried food, oppression of native peoples, a deep stock-raising tradition, a curious affection for ridiculous hats. But I think that Australians and Americans share their deepest cultural affinity in the matter of space. Both Australia and the USA are new countries, new countries that had an inordinate amount of space, space that could be settled, tamed, and made profitable by immigrants with the right mixture of gumption and foolhardiness. America had its manifest destiny and Australia had the same: the image of a dry, sparse, and, uh, inadequately inhabited land that might be made verdant, beautiful, and vaguely British, just enough to keep you comfortable. We have cowboy movies, Aussies have Jackeroo movies. And Australians love to road trip just as much as we Americans do, have elevated the road-trip to a bona-fide icon.

Of course, an Australian road trip is often a more serious pursuit then its American counterpart. Even in darkest Nebraska, drivers can usually find water, semi-edible food, and a place to sleep blissfully free of wildlife that will kill you. This is absolutely not the case in Australia's Red Center, in the very middle of the real-deal Outback. Out there, you bring along your water, you bring along your food, and you watch out very carefully for the world's most dangerous and aggressive snakes. Let's not even get into the crocodiles. You don't take fun-loving dips in waterholes in Australia's northern regions, unless you are keen on being eaten. There are various entertaining accounts of such attacks, if you're interested. (EVERYONE IS).

My Aunt Lyn decided, on this particular Australian road trip, to take me through northern Western Australia. Due to the down under nature of Australia (shocker!) going north means you're heading into the warmth, and away from the surprising chill of Perth in winter time. Furthermore, the North has that wild untouched antediluvian wilderness thing going on, and that's something me and most of my family members find impossible to resist. Opportunities for unabashed and abundant science geekery aplenty, in other words. To get a sense of the extent of this, stromatolite viewing was one of the major highlights of our itinerary. We'd spend the first night in the little town of Cervantes, about four hours or north of Perth on the Batavia Coast, then spend the next two nights in Kalbarri, about five hours north of there. En route, we'd go to the eery Pinnacles desert, pass through the port town of Geraldtown, ogle a pink lake, and finally end up at Kalbarri National Park, one of the major scenic wonders of WA. Not a bad deal all around.



We started reasonably early on Tuesday morning, and bundled all of our stuff into the car, including a very optimistic full picnicking set. The weather in Perth was cloudy and cool, and we made good time out of the city - Lyn was happy she managed not to get lost, like the last time she attempted this whole "going north" business. I appluad her. There was nothing really resembling traffic. What Perhians consider deadly and totally unbelievable traffic, most Americans consider "Sunday afternoon." Wusses.

The road outside Perth passes through the Swan River Valley and quickly descends into that grey, bushy, and slightly weird landscape affectionately referred to as "scrub." It's a landscape that's host to most of the iconic Aussies beasties, including grey kangaroos, kookaburras (in wet places), wallabys, emus, and even the occasional dingo. If you can tell dingos from standard issue dogs, you're a hell of a lot cleverer then me. There is also a whole lot of nothing, a totally inordinate amount of nothing - definitely approaching or exceeding Nebraska levels of nada, which is impressive about two hours out of a huge metropolitan area. Road signs helpfully inform you how far it is to the next patch of something approximating civilization, and warn you in pleading tones to FOR GOD'S SAKE GET WATER AND GAS YOU'LL REGRET IT IF YOU DON'T. Dingos eating babies, attacks by emus, you can imagine the possible ramifications.

We stopped for lunch at a totally authentic Australian roadhouse, which meant that it was 1. elderly and constructed mostly of tin siding, 2. had bathrooms marked for "Sheilas", 3. had an outside exhibit of depressive looking parrots, and 4. had a menu that revolved entirely around fried meat pies and beer. Lyn decided to take an extreme risk and ordered a roast beef sandwich, which looked as it had actually been vomited upon by the proprietor and tasted like all of Australia's erstwhile culinary sins condensed into a single packet of evil. Should have chosen the fried thing with a side of fried with fried crumblies on top.

I stuck with pumpkin soup, which was perfectly acceptable. Australian pumpkin soup is always perfectly acceptable. That and Violet Crumble will never, ever, let you down.

We forged onwards into the Cervantes area. Dead kangaroos began to appear by the side of the road. Apparently the carnage only increases the further north you go. Are northern kangaroos inherently more suicidal? Do truck drivers use them for target practice as a way of desperately alleviating the incredible boredom of driving through millions of miles of scrub scrub scrub. Fuck if I know. My paleontologist, dead-things obsessed cousin would be absolutely thrilled and would drag them all home to her den for cleaning, articulation, and adoration. I'm sorry we can't ship you a really nice carcass, Laura.



Just prior to Cervantes, we turned off to Lake Thetis, to indulge a very particular and long term nerd fantasy of mine. The salty and unimpressive looking Lake Thetis happens to harbor an, um, vibrant community of stromatolites and thrombolites, which are the planet's most elderly "living fossils." Stromatolites have soldiered on virtually unchanged since the very dawn of life, and exist only in a few rare and remote places. Western Australia features the largest concentration of them on the planet, and they occur in remarkable numbers in Hamelin Pool in the Shark Bay region, further up the coast. Our Stromatolite Friends are created by the conglomeration of cyanobacteria. Stromatolites are formed as this bacteria deposits deposit calcium on the lake bed, which glues cement into the rock-like structures we view today. "Blister mats" of cyanobacteria also form around the lake's rim, and these nascent stromatolites are very delicate. Don't poke them. Dark regions on a stromatolite indicate where bacteria is alive and laying down sediment. Thrombolites differ from stromatolites in that they clot sediment instead of layering it. This is extremely useful information at cocktail parties, let me tell you.



Stromatolites don't do a hell of a lot. In fact, they resemble cow patties to a truly remarkable extent. The thrill in viewing stromatolites really lies in the symbolism of the thing. Organisms that looked exactly like them were around right after the "primordial soup" stage of life on this planet. The fact that we can view them, unchanged and living today, is truly remarkable, and is extremely pleasing on a quite deep seated level. The stromatolite and thromatolites at Lake Thetis are around 3,000 years old, which is not superlatively elderly by stromatolite standards, but is deeply impressive for everything else living. The lake was cut off from the very nearby Indian Ocean a while back in time and has merrily created its own chemical environment, one that makes stromatolites very happy indeed. There are plenty of them: a boardwalk has been conveniently set up for your viewing pleasure, and this handily facilitates deeply introspective walking-and-thinking about the Origins of Life.

I would not recommend a special stromatolite trip to the action inclined.

Finally, we got to Cervantes. Cervantes is about as small as small towns get, which translates into a couple of roads, a few wind-worn and perfunctory houses, a single general store, and the inevitable pub. Also, a golf course and an RV (excuse me, caravan park. There is always a golf course and a caravan park in Australia. The country is presumably populated almost entirely by golf loving caravan dwellers who enjoy fried pies with gravy and horrible techno music. Bless their little cotton socks, every one of them. Cervantes was founded in the 1960's as a crawfishing settlement and was apparently even rougher now then it was back then, consisting mostly of shacks populated by sunburned and smelly men and a single general store with a focus on beer. It's come up in the world now since, of course. Will totally turn into a tourist mecca once the big mine comes in, or once the crawfishing industry becomes ultra glamorous via some magical alteration of the universe as we know it.

Our guesthouse was run by a chilled out looking man with a beard and glasses, who regarded our appearance with vague interest. Lyn had in fact chosen the guesthouse because of his website: at the bottom of his perfectly normal looking personal site, there was a small disclaimer. The disclaimer explained that the owner had experienced a considerable number of extaterrestial viewings and experiences in the region, and that guests who might be unnerved by such phenomena might find it wisest to stay elsewhere.

We asked him about a good place to get a local spiny lobster, which I was eager to try. "I used to love them," he said, with a bit of a reisgned sigh, "back before I started my raw diet. But try this place." He handed us a voucher for a low price on a special seafood dinner, put on by the Country Club.

The room was extremely pleasant and had a nice view of the sea and the scrub-lands that led up to it. There were a profusion of paranormal themed magazines in the room, discussing such topics as the mafia's secret takeover of Australia, uranium enrichment on the moon, and the usual assortment of anal-probing experiences and Things My Dead Mum Told Me. I discovered that New Zealand produces its very own, very thick conspiracy theory and paranormal themed magazine, which is impressive for a remarkably tiny country. Lyn posits that Kiwis just go funny out there in their incredibly beautiful and incredibly isolated country: this may indeed be the case.



Then, it was time for the Pinnacles. Ah, the Pinnacles. Haven't heard of them? Color me unsurprised. These geological oddities happen to be out in the bona-fide Middle of Nowhere, which probably has saved them from being coated with graffiti. The limestone formations occur in staggering numbers in this small, sandy expanse, and range in size from big guys as tall as myself to little squirts about as high as my ankle. No one is entirely sure how the Pinnacles happened, and there are three primary theories on the matter. Allow me to a bit of a hussy and quote Wikipedia:



" 1. The Pinnacles were formed from lime leaching from the aeolian sand (wind-blown sand) and by rain cementing the lower levels of the dune into a soft limestone. Vegetation forms an acidic layer of soil and humus. A hard cap of calcrete develops above the softer limestone. Cracks in the calcrete are exploited by plant roots. The softer limestone continues to dissolve and quartz sand fills the channels that form. Vegetation dies and winds blow away the sand covering the eroded limestone, thus revealing the Pinnacles.


(yes they look like dongs let's just get that out of the way)

2. The Pinnacles were formed through the preservation of casts of trees buried in coastal aeolianites where roots became groundwater conduits, resulting in precipitation of indurated (hard) calcrete. Subsequent wind erosion of the aeolianite would then expose the calcrete pillars.[1]

3. On the basis of the mechanism of formation of smaller “root casts” occurring in other parts of the world, it has been proposed that plants played an active role in the creation of the Pinnacles, rather than the rather passive role detailed in 1 and 2 above. The proposal is that as transpiration draws water through the soil to the roots, nutrients and other dissolved minerals flow toward the root. This process is termed "mass-flow" and can result in the accumulation of nutrients at the surface of the root, if the nutrients arrive in quantities greater than needed for plant growth. In coastal aeolian sands which have large amounts of Ca (derived from marine shells) the movement of water to the roots would drive the flow of Ca to the root surface. This Ca accumulates at high concentrations around the roots and over time is converted into a calcrete. When the roots die, the space occupied by the root is subsequently also filled with a carbonate material derived from the Ca in the former tissue of the roots and possibly also from water leaching through the structures. Although evidence has been provided for this mechanism in the formation of root casts in South Africa, evidence is still required for its role in the formation of the Pinnacles.[2]"

Now that that's all entirely clear!


Oh, those crazy tourists.

The Pinnacles are officially part of Nambung National Park, and a surprisingly excellent interpretative museum has been set up at the site. You're allowed to take your car out among the Pinnacles - I don't know what happens if you hit one - so we did that after we took a long and contemplative walk around the center. It's a truly bizarre landscape, and I imagine goes quite quickly from whimsical to downright eery at night. I understand why UFO enthusiasts might choose to settle down here: it is entirely easy to imagine alien beings feeling perfectly at home around here.



The Aboriginal people of the area naturally have an origin myth about the formations. Supposedly, young men were repeatedly warned not to go out to the sandy expanse outside the village and did so anyway. They were sucked into the sand and promptly calcified, and their fingers make up the Pinnacles. Must have been big fingers. But regardless. I can see why the locals would be less then chuffed about staying here at night. They doubtless all turn into looming figures when the lights go low.



The area surrounding the Pinnacles was first recorded by European in 1658, but there is, oddly enough, little mention of the Pinnacles themselves. The formations seem to appear and reappear in explorer's accounts from that time onward, leading some to speculate that they have been covered and revealed by the shifting sands multiple times in history.



A detail of a rock, primarily taken for the geology types. I have no idea what I'm looking at but I dearly hope you find it totally thrilling.



There's a lot of wildlife in the PInnacles, despite the remarkably unfriendly appearance of its surroundings. We spotted grey kangaroos, brown kestrels, and incredibly large and unnerving wild emus. We spotted this particular emu silhouetted dramatically on a hill on the way out of the park, and were pleased to discover he had the kids with him - a bunch of little emulets stalking about. Male emus watch after the young, presumably allowing the female to wildcat around. I am not entirely sure how an emu parties but it probably involves a lot of deep-throated thrumming. And blue stuff. Emu babes go wild for blue stuff (as I discovered while wearing my blue coat at the wildlife park).



We headed out to the beach with a bottle of wine to engage in the requisite Sipping Wine and Watching the Sun Go Down activity. The beach was incredibly lovely, if a bit chilly. This was also the first time I'd really been on a bona-fide beach in quite a long time, and it turned out I had entirely forgotten how sand works, ie, that if one buries your wine glass in aforementioned sand then removes it really quickly and forcefully, it gets all over you. I had also forgotten the whole "don't track sand onto the beach towel, you damned idiot" clause. There were, as always, a couple of healthy looking European tourists taking a doubtlessly fiber rich dinner in their RV in the parking lot above us, but otherwise? Not a soul around. Rural Australia is bloody fantastic for the antisocial.



This is self explanatory I think.

The restaurant turned out to be the local community center, and was in fact housed in a room that could be easily and snappily converted into a basketball stadium and bingo parlor at short notice. Everyone else in the place was eligible for AARP and wearing baseball hats, and had that sun beaten and exceedingly skin cancery look that old timer Australians always have. (There are skin cancer clinics in completely unnerving quantities all over Perth. As an Aboriginal guy said in a video at the art museum, "Why did the English people stay? They just get skin cancer all the goddamn time! All over the place!" Well, yes. Australia and its paler residents are indeed hotbeds of vibrant melanoma. God help them). Lyn and I were both just a teeny tiny bit inebriated (just like everyone else in the surrounding area insofar as I could tell), but I refrained from having another class of wine, though Lyn partook.



The seafood platter, to our surprise, was really well executed. The primordial-insect looking spiny lobster was sauteed with butter and spices and had a lovely, delicate flavor, which was brought out by the veg. Lyn has a tragic allergy to shellfish that turn pink when cooked so I had it all to myself, and I derived considerable carnivorous pleasure from going eye-to-eye with my supper.




Look at the picture. The poor little sucker is beseeching me. Too late, friend. Too late. The fried roe-on scallops were nice little bites, and although the fish was a spot overcooked, the batter was crispy and had a good, rich flavor. The salad bar was completely randomly set-up but was quite good as well: beet salad, Greek salad with real actual feta cheese, corn and pepper salad, and Caesar salad with inexplicable but completely addictive deep fried croutons. No one else in the room had in fact ordered anything other then the Special Seafood Platter. We messily devoured it and repaired to our room. No aliens visited me in the night with probes and malicious intent.


I was a bit disappointed.