You may not have sensed it from the dark elements I included in the previous post but I do actually like to have fun when I travel. In the post called Conventions and Conversions I admit to being a pedant so there will be, as there almost always is, an educational element included in today’s post. If I don’t convey some of the fun I had, the fault will be mine.
How I discovered the Pinnacles
My research for the material I include in this blog generally occurs in two stages – one prior to my departure and one when I’ve returned. While I like being surprised by a place, I also like finding a place’s surprises and having some idea of what I should expect. It’s largely the surprises that prompt my post-trip research. I’ll always depart with some knowledge of the places I’ll visit. Sometimes it’s very specific and other times it’s quite general. Sometimes it’s limited to a certain place or activity and other times I stumble upon something that prompts me to chase geese (wild or otherwise). And it was on just such a circuitous romp across the internet that the Pinnacles hit my consciousness.
It began with my research on Uluru when I somehow came across a place called Mount Augustus. Have you ever heard of it? I certainly hadn’t. It’s in an eponymous national park in WA about 1,000 kilometers from Perth. Wikipedia describes it as, “…a prominent inselberg that stands 1,106 metres (3,629 ft) above sea level, or approximately 860 metres (2,820 ft) above the surrounding plain, and covers an area of 4,795 hectares (11,850 acres). It has a central ridge which is almost eight kilometres (5 mi) long.” And it looks like this.
[From Wikipedia By Graeme Churchard from Bristol, UK – Mount Augustus Uploaded by PDTillman, CC BY 2.0]
The much more famous Uluru is puny by comparison. Uluru rises a mere 348 meters above the surrounding ground (860 from sea level), has an area of 333 hectares, and a circumference of about 9 kilometers compared with 49k at Burringurrah as the Wajarri people call Mount Augustus.
This sent me on a search to see if WA had other wonders I didn’t know about. It did. And some, like Wave Rock and the Pinnacles are close enough to Perth to see on a day trip. Since RS’s schedule for our final day in Perth included morning visits to The Bells and the Mint with a free afternoon, I decided this would be an apt time to break away. This seemed to me an ideal time to explore a little of WA on my own so I booked a day tour that included a visit to Namburg National Park and the Pinnacles Desert.
But there were some stops along the way
From this point forward in this and the forthcoming post I will be writing about my time in Juat Country. (Transliteration is often a tricky matter. Think of how many different ways you might have seen Hanukkah spelled. It’s often trickier when a language isn’t written. This process is usually called oral transliteration. The result is that you will often see varied spellings for the same word. This is the case for the Country I’m about to enter. You might see it written as Yuat, Yued, or some other variant. Because the Country name appears as Juat on the referential map below, I will adhere to this spelling for consistency sake.)
I would like to acknowledge the Juat People of the Noongar Nation – the Traditional Custodians of this land. I would also like to pay respect to the Elders past, present, and emerging and extend that respect to other Aboriginal people present.
On our way out of town, we rode past a long grassy expanse called Langley Park. This was Perth’s first airstrip and occasional fixed wing aircraft land their today allowing it to maintain its active airfield status. It was a cool fact but we rode by too quickly for me to get a picture. I did, however, manage 28 pictures at our first stop – Caversham Wildlife Park (CWP) Here’s one.
I know that CWP isn’t the story that inspired the movie We Bought a Zoo but in some ways it might have been. Purchased in 1988, CWP is family owned and operated and features 200 species and more than 2,000 individual animals. Nearly all CWP’s individual animals such as this wombat (who appears to be the only one not smiling in the photo)
are orphaned or otherwise in need of rescue and can’t survive in their normal untamed habitat.
We arrived before the park’s official opening and they do, for an extra fee allow people to schedule lengthier and more complete interactions during regular business hours. You can take a photo break with the rest of the pictures from the morning.
Going downhill fast
(Nobody’s gonna slow me down.)
Our next stop was in Lancelin where we crossed into Juat Country. The Juat People are one of the clans within the Noongar Group.
[From Wikipedia by John D. Croft at English Wikipedia under Creative Commons 3.0]
I’ve been unable to discover (and certainly didn’t know at the time) what meaning the sand dunes might hold for either the Juat or the Noongar or how they might feel about the expansive number of djanga (or as we would likely be called today wetjala) sandboarding on their dunes. I only took three rides down the slope on the board provided by the tour operator. (Here I am looking at my feet at the beginning of one downhill plunge.)
It was damn fun.
We’d finished two fun activities and it wasn’t near lunchtime yet. For this, we’d drive another hour north past the park to a town called Cervantes where we’d eat at The Lobster Shack after touring their processing facility. The lobsters caught on Australia’s west coast are properly called Western rock lobsters. Although they’re sometimes also called crayfish in Australia and New Zealand, these crustaceans aren’t biologically related to either true lobsters or crayfish.
Eating rock lobster is a bit like eating Maryland steamed crabs in that it’s mainly a hand dining activity and it’s a bit of a process. You use a thin knife to cut along the back and head shell, spread the shell, and gently remove the meat with your fingers although I guess you could use a seafood pick instead if you’re overly dainty.
There’s a bit of a back story to this post’s feature image that you can see in its entirety below. Most of the people taking this tour were Japanese in their twenties or thirties. There were one or two families and a few singles like me (though no one nearly as old!). Caversham Wildlife Park had one or two face-in-hole boards and I offered to take the ‘koala’ photos of one young couple. To surprise them, I counted down (actually up) in Japanese. (Fortunately for me, taking photos only requires a count to three because I can only count to four – ichi, ni, san, go.)
This got us chatting on the bus and on the sand dunes and when she spotted a face-in-hole board at The Lobster Shack, R (whose name I’d learn at lunch) asked to take a picture with me. How could I refuse?
I learned at lunch from her husband, H, that they had honeymooned in Portugal and were taking something of a second honeymoon in Australia where he’d been but she hadn’t.
Here are the pictures from the second part of the morning. We’ll get to the Pinnacles in the next entry.