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.

Onwards to Kalbarri

The beach near Kalbarri.

We arose somewhat worse for the wear, owing to the large amount of fried food and wine from the night before. Lyn was worse off then myself. The day had dawned windy and a bit overcast, and it looked like a storm was contemplating forming up over the Indian Ocean - this would not, as it turned out, bode ultra well for the weather in Kalbarri. I grabbed some mildly drinkable coffee at the gas station on the way out of town.



On the way out of town, we paused at the beach at nearby Jurah Bay, and were suitably impressed by the Power and Drama of Nature. The photos do a poor job of conveying the impressive irritation of the wind, the waves, and the clouds, I'm afraid. But perhaps you get the idea.



We also passed by these very eery white sand dunes. Lyn loves sand dunes, although we didn't manage to pass near enough to a really nice, pretty unmolested specimen for us to jump on it. Pity.

In the winter, the bush outside Cervantes, en route to Greenough, turns rather inexplicably green and English country-side like. There are tall trees, incredible spreads of mustard and sunflowers, peacefully grazing sheep, and old colonial farmhouses a plenty, as well as plenty of tea houses serving up scones and clotted cream. This verdant landscape is a product of the same illusion that one Captain Cook fell prey to when he first sighted Botany Bay. Cook made the unfortunate mistake of confusing Australia's *wet* season (Winter) for its *dry* season - and concluded that Australia would make a downright lovely place to farm and replicate a cozy English countryside existence. He was very, very wrong, but this illusion is what prompted England to send over the first batch of convicts in the 1787 "First Fleet." Remarkably, Australia managed to turn itself into a great and prosperous nation anyhow. But this was not, as you can imagine, a very easy process. In any case, the region around Greenough, Geraldton, and Northhampton is very friendly and gentle looking in the winter time, and it's a remarkably pleasant drive.



The wind here is a mite powerful, as evidenced by this deeply unhappy looking tree near Greenough. Some friendly local goats were using it as a shelter.



We paused to eat in Geraldton, the only city of any real size between Perth and Broome. Geraldton is a fairly characterless port city with a bit of a run-down aspect, although it is rumored the place will explode into wealth and splendor once some nearby mines are opened. As it is, the promenade area near the water is nice enough, and we proceeded to forage for food. We were accosted on the street by a very exuberant Green Peace volunteer with an eyebrow ring who would very much like us to donate to stop whaling. Fair enough: but as Lyn explained to me, in Australia, you can't just slip a charity representative on the street a 20 and call it a day. Oh, no. You must set up a direct-payment account and hand over your credit card number if you'd wish to make a donation, which is all sorts of unnerving when dealing with hippie boys with eyebrow rings in good old Geraldton. We declined.

Another byproduct of Geraldton's extreme isolation is its expensiveness: the restaurants here all charged extorinate prices for plain old lunch fare. We ended up settling on a perfectly average Thai restaurant a little off the main strip. There's also a very nicely located Dome here, right on the water. Dome is nothing if not predictable.

We headed out of town in the direction of Northampton, en route to Kalbarri. Northhampton is yet another Dusty and Sort of Old WA colonial town, featuring a couple of museums the guidebook warned us off as "boring" and the required pub, truck stop, and general store. The biggest tourist-attracting event in this town is the annual "airing of the quilts." To give you an idea of the incredible fun and adventure this place exudes. Still, it's one of the oldest towns in the region - Welsh and Cornish miners began working here in 1848, and the Lynton Convict Hiring Station was erected in 1950. And that's, well, about it. Okay, they do hold a Purple Bra day, where purple bras line the streets instead of quilts to raise cashola for breast cancer. That's actually pretty adorable. The major Historic House in town was built by convicts. Australia was built by convicts. Australia is not entirely sure it is okay with this but is soldiering on anyhow.



On the way out of Northhampton, nearby Port Gregory, there is a goddamn pink lake. This totally fascinated Lyn when she passed by last time, and I have to agree: it is totally, completely, a brilliant pink lake. This is not due to judiciously applied artificial dyes, of course. It's singular pinkness stems from a powerful bloom of algae, which produces pink-hued beta carotene. This beta carotene happens to be quite lucrative - think vitamin companies - so there's an aquaculture harvesting company collecting the stuff nearby. In the meantime, passerby's and residents get to enjoy the never ending thrill of a motherfucking pink lake.



Finally, we made it to Kalbarri, or at least the outskirts of town. To get to town, you pass through the sea cliffs bit of the national park, which totally failed to disappoint. The sight of incredible sandstone cliffs running right into the churning Indian Ocean was nothing if not impressive.


The drama of the sea. Dramatic.



It was incredibly windy up there,which was a bit unnerving (so many signs imploring tourists not to tumble off cliffs and die, the mind goes places), but I still got some pictures I deem mostly acceptable.



Entering Kalbarri town itself is a dramatic experience. The meeting of the river and sea is a real natural wonder, and even more so when a storm is coming in and the waves are turbulent and discontent. Surprisingly, Kalbarri has only been occupied since the 1950's or thereabout. It's now become a tourist mecca, albeit on a minor scale. It's very isolation means that huge numbers of folks aren't coming through here on anything approximating a regular basis. The other part of the National Park is the substantial Murchison River Gorge, which is composed primarily of red sandstone and looks startlingly like those found in the American southwest.


Eurypterids are cooler then you are.

The science dweeb in me was thrilled to find out that the canyons houses an impressive numbers of "trace" or "icho" fossils, which are composed of tracks or other impressions made by early life. Kalbarri has a number of trilobite prints. Far more awesomely, it also hosts the tracks of Eurypterids, which are giant aquatic scorpions that persisted into the Triassic era.

The town of Kalbarri itself is a very small and pleasant tourist spot, composed primarily of condominiums, fish and chip shops, and souvenir emporiums. We had rented a small cottage at a B&B in town and headed there forthwith. It was run by a tanned and cheerful older guy who (as we would later learn) supported himself by way of training people to perform High Ropes Rescues from the top of buildings and things. That is definitely hardcore in any sense of the word.


The Indian Ocean, being magnificent.

We headed out to the Wildflower Center to have a bit of a stroll prior to checking in. This region of WA is renowned for its spring wildflowers, although we were just a week or so too early to really get the full effect. The Wildflower Center is a small, private operation run by a family who possess both an ardent affection for nature and an amusing inability to spell, as evidenced by the interpretative signs. I amused myself by looking for Bulldog ants, one of Australia's most horriyfing creatures. They are large, highly aggressive ants that jump when agitated, have an inordinately painful sting, and are capable of tracking a human for a mile. Sadly, I didn't find any, although I hopefully tried to agitate several nearby ant colonies (mostly by stomping and yelling COME ON, ANTS. JUMP, YOU LITTLE BASTARDS!) . Lyn was sad she didn't get to see the hilarious results if I DID find them.


These flowers resemble purple pixels. I love them.


I have no idea, but weird, yes?

The cottage, as it turned out, was decorated entirely in Seashell Baroque by the proprietors wife. There were seashells glued literally to everything. Beds, light fixtures, walls, you name it, there were seashells glued to it in mildly Satanic patterns. I was worried that I would wake up with seashells stealthily affixed to every part of my body. Other then that, it was nice enough, and I enjoyed paging through the remarkably boring (you can understand, I think the juxtaposition there) collection of local newspapers. Apparently the Old Bastards club is by far the most happenin' group in town. Party-party.



We headed out to the beach for a while to watch the sun go down, and I did a bit of beachcombing. I found a mummified octopus, which Lyn resolutely refused to allow into the car.



I also spotted this sea-gull. I am still uncertain what kind it is, though it is the immature variety (you can tell by the drab plumage). I like the juxtaposition of the common silver gull with the big guy.



A bevy of wild Galah parrots, chewing on the grass and conversing among themselves. Listening to parrots hang out is great fun: you can tell they are having animated discussions with one another. As an American in Australia, you constantly find yourself making internal BUT THAT'S A ZOO ANIMAL comments to yourself, then feeling sort of embarrassed.

As there is nothing to do whatsoever in Kalbarri other then go to the pub (which I am certain would be filled with Old Bastards having a geriatric good time), we headed off to a embarrassingly early dinner. We picked out the Black Rock Cafe, named after a large rock in the nearby bay, and situated nicely on the coast. Not that we could actually see the water since it was dark outside, but the thought was there. The surprisingly ambitious menu featured a lot of local meat and produce, so we hopped to it. Australia has a pleasing number of good restaurants, even out in the absolute middle of nowhere. Truck stop beef n' gravy excluded.




I ordered a local lamb shank, with a red wine reduction sauce, mashed potatoes, butternut squash, and some veg. Very nicely done, and Aussie lamb's reputation is totally deserved. My mother will be thrilled to hear that Australia has converted me into a mashed potato lover. Something about the Fatal Coast just compels one to slam down the mashers, apparently. Yum. No, I do not know what the garnish of red squiggles are. Maybe beet?



Lyn had an equally good sauteed snapper with a banana-curry sauce. At first blush this sounds horrifying, but it in fact was very good, with a subtle fruit background and a nice, spicy flavor. A step up from the soggy meat pies over soggy meat sauce with extra meat I was sort of expecting to find in Australia, no?

We retired to bed early (shocker), with the intention of a busy day of national park going, river cruising, naturalist-geekery and other awesome ahead of us. This would be somewhat truncated, as I will explain shortly.