Dateline Down Under - February 12-14

Dateline Down Under – Perth
Tuesday, February 12 - 14, 2008

It is February 14th here in Australia and as I sit here typing this blog we are in the middle of what has become a common occurrence in Perth a nightly wind storm, so loud it feels like the house will soon come off of the foundation. However, tonight the temperature has dropped significantly and it looks a lot like rain. Must be something about Thursdays here!

Carol has left the keyboard and is now watching some Australian Science show on the tellie in which they are measuring the size of ram and bull testes, so Steve has orders to mention this in the blog after having to take a break to join in watching the show…

As the previous blog mentioned we have spent this week traveling the State of Western Australia that surrounds Perth, learning about the history and meeting new people. It has been a truly busy week and we have lots to tell you.

We managed to get the video of the koalas at Yanchep National Forest. For your animal entertainment just click on this video:

This week may seem like a geology, history and cultural lesson but what would you expect from us? To begin with, before you begin reading the below, understand that we are walking on the oldest earth on Planet Earth! The area surrounding us here in Western Australia has been here for 3.5 BILLION years, and constitutes the oldest geology on the planet! The Aboriginal peoples have been roaming and stewarding the land in this area for some 20,000 years, according to all of the historical information we have come across in our travels.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008
On the Road

Tuesday found us packing our lunch and heading south. Our goal was to go to Rockingham, Mandurah, take a trip to Pinjarra, drive back up towards Jarrahdale and check out Serpentine National Park and finish the day driving through Armadale and Cannington and try to make it back to the Indian Ocean for some sunset pictures.

Steve was thrilled to find CalTrans alive and well in Australia! We were just leaving Fremantle on the coastal road, and we entered a construction zone. There was actually a guy along the side of the road SLEEPING ON HIS SHOVEL! Leaning on that puppy with his eyes closed! Steve didn’t want to piss him off by taking his picture, but we had had a conversation with a couple of Brits and our tour driver back in Melbourne, and they were ragging on the British Highway workers, and we were giving the CalTrans dudes the business, and now this! It was great!

We made our way through Fremantle and followed the Cockburn road through Rockingham and on into Mandurah, these towns are pretty much like most of the towns you see along the coast, we left Mandurah and Carol found a really neat place called Abingdon Miniature Village and you can find the pictures on the Google Picassa Photo Album linked here. The village was created by Ian and Sonia Klopper who decided in 1999 to cast off the shackles of thecorporate business ladder and follow their dreams. Ian had a passion for gardening and Sonia's dream ws to establish a traditional tearoom. They have definitely realized their dream and it is truly a wonderful place. The Village has miniature replicas of historic British buildings and a great shrubbery maze. The pictures of the miniatures are so life-like…you will be amazed that this is all hand done and is pretty cool. We chased each other through the maze and walked through the secret garden. Knowing that we both love to garden you can see by the pictures that we were both really happy to have found this out of the way place. It truly was a little treasure and made the trip worthwhile.

After we left Abingdon, we followed the Pinjarra Road to Pinjarra which is in the Shire of Murray (here in Australia counties are called “shires” (remember your lore from the Hobbit and the Trilogy!)), we walked the town and took some pictures of the really cool buildings in this part of the world. One of the really cool things we notice about traveling around Australia is the way the towns are set up for tourists. There is always an Information Board just as you drive into the town followed up by the directions to the local visitor’s bureau. These bureaus are very well equipped and give you so much information about what is going on in the town and how to get around in the town. The people are so friendly and they don’t mind giving us “Yanks” some help. We have found over the past few weeks that there are very few Americans touring this area (in one town we were only the second couple to sign a guest register since August of 2007), but many people from Europe. This is especially true for the Brits, who seem to be everywhere enjoying their terrific exchange rates word-wide. This is good news for us, because we LOVE Brits, as you all know from previous adventures.

The small towns here and especially the road signs are quite reminiscent of Ireland and the United Kingdom. One can wander through the small shops and talk with the locals, and just soak up the local accents and culture. Also along the road are these HUGE “stations” (U.S. translation is “ranch”) for sheep, cattle and horses, and some of the homes and fencing of these places is just superb! The local land looks an awful lot like California during the summer months, especially in the San Joaquin Valley and surrounding foothill communities, such as Valley Springs.

We drove through the small hamlet of Dwellingup (sort of a spot on the road), and then headed north and decided we would stop at Serpentine Falls National Park for lunch, and boy was that a great choice! We stopped first at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, built in 1913, and checked the place out, as well as the Serpentine Road House, which is Australian for sort of a mini-mart/petrol station, bar and café all rolled up in one. Road Houses might be the only place to stop along Australian small roads and the outback for hours at a time, so are quite a meeting place for locals.

We entered the park and just as we were looking for a place to park and picnic, Steve spied an entire family of Wongas (grey kangaroos) grazing and shading themselves in the picnic area. We stopped and “National Geographic Steve” began taking pictures. We thought this would be our one and only chance to really get a chance to look at these beautiful creatures. Boy, were we wrong! As soon as we parked our car and made our way to the picnic table we discovered we had some of new “best friends” looking for a handout! This was amazing. These guys came right up to Carol and kept looking at her with those doe eyes and begging for food. Our rule is the same as the rule for any animal…. no human food; but Carol was able to pet these guys and they just sat there soaking up the attention…People who come to Australia pay hundreds of dollars for the “Kangaroo Experience” and here we were right in the middle of an entire family. Total cost for the tour: $10 UAD to enter the National Park. Of course, Steve took about a hundred pictures and video of the entire event and you can see the video below as well as the pictures located at our Google Picassa Photo Album called Serpentine Falls. Be sure to look closely at the Momma and baby Kangaroo. They are priceless!

Steve also took some video so you could feel just like you were watching Animal Kingdom or one of those reality shows. Here's the video:

A word or two about “National Parks” in Australia. We are hitting quite a few as is our usual M.O., so Steve flagged down a Park Ranger and asked about the equivalent of our American “Golden Eagle” pass. The Ranger laughed and explained to us that National Parks in Australia are REALLY State Parks in Australia, with each state running its own operation. He told us the cost of an annual pass in each state would far exceed the cost of daily permit passes, so lesson learned. We chatted a bit about “rangering” in Australia and the U.S., and he headed on his way.

Carol began wandering around the park reading all of the signs and we soon found out that the Serpentine National Park is in the Darling Scarp. This scarp (escarpment) is at the western edge of a huge ancient plateau, the foundation of much of the south-western part of Australia. This area is composed mainly of rocks that are upwards of 2,500 million years old (translates to 2.5 BILLION years old). One of the things we noticed were the small round red rocks and we found out these rocks are laterite rock which was formed about 10 million years ago, when conditions were wetter and more humid, leaching minerals from the soil to form a hard, insoluble crust. They make for really nice trails and roads, and it is interesting to see how uniform all of these small rocks are throughout the southern region of the state here.

This area is rich in Aboriginal history as well. Long before the arrival of the Europeans, the Nyoongar Aborigines of the Whadjuk and probably the Bindjareb (Australian names are so cool!) tribes hunted and camped in the woodlands regions that lay between what is now Perth and Pinjarra. It was the Nyoongars of the south-west who used fire sticks to burn parts of the forest, and over thousands of years, the scrub fires created some areas of open forest and grassland. It is estimated that the aborigines were here for 20,000 years before the Europeans came to Australia.

The Serpentine River, the surrounding hills and wetlands of the coastal plains, provided the Nyoongar with fresh water and food, including fish, tortoise, lizards and birds. Fish traps were constructed on the river, downstream from the falls and where it flows through a chain of small lakes, on its journey to the Peel Inlet. With the start of the winter rains, tribal groups from the north, east and south, would gather near Barragup to catch the fish that were driven downstream by the fast flowing waters.

We also came across an unusual species of an acorn called a “Honkey” nut of all things, which is indigenous to this region and only found here. We thought all the “Honky Nuts” lived in the U.S. and had a good laugh over that….

After our history lesson we saddled up, said good bye to our new Wonga friends and made our way to Serpentine Falls. They are quite small this time of year, but there were two really nice pools under them. Unfortunately, we were not aware of this and had no swim suits. As there were others there diving off the rocks into the pool, we decided not to scare them all to death by skinny dipping.

Then off to Serpentine Dam to see what all of the weather casters were talking about when they said the Serpentine Dam was at 36 percent of its capacity. What we found was really disheartening. The reservoir is very low and as you can see from the pictures it does not look good for our friends here in Perth. The Serpentine and Canning Dams provide most of the water for this part of the country and the levels are very low. They were stating on the weather channel last week that although Perth City received all of the rain we wrote about in an earlier blog, there was almost none that fell in the mountains.

We drove down the road and picked up the Munda Biddi Trail for a short hike in the bush. This trail, which is about 900 Km long along the West Coast of Australia, and the Bibbulmun Track (1,000 klicks in length), are the two longest hiking trails on this side of the country, and we wanted to experience some time in the bush before heading into the Uluhru Region (Ayers Rock) later in our trip next month. EVERYTHING you have read about the Australian Outback it TRUE! The “mossies” and the biting flies, combined with the heat and humidity, made a short few mile walk seem like a day on the PCT back home! It is tough to decide which needs to go on first – the DEET or the SPF! This is not long trekking for the timid. Of course, Carol was on constant alert for Snikes!!

We left the bush and headed to Canning Dam to see how the water situation was there. About the same as at the other dam, but this dam looked more like a “dam” that we were used to.

We decided to hit a brewery and pizza joint in Fremantle for dinner (no drinks except water!) before finishing the day back at Cottlesloe Beach (which has become our favorite beach) We made it just in time to join THRONGS of others along the beach area to enjoy watching the sun slowly going down over the Indian Ocean. Check out the photos at our Indian Ocean Photo Album on Google Picassa. We were really surprised at how many people were there and the other thing that was pretty amazing was the number of parrots in the trees. We found our friends the Short Tailed Shearlings coming back to roost in the trees along the beach as well. Thousands of birds and almost as many people! Be sure and listen to the birds on the video – what a racket!

For those of you who would like to hear some of the birds of Australia, here's another animal kingdom video just for you:

But Steve managed to park the car, run down to the beach and get some GREAT pictures… We then decided to find our way home in the dark and go a different way, memo to Carol, always bring your glasses… sunglasses don’t work at night. Well, with Carol trying to navigate and Steve driving we drove up the north coast until we came to a street we remembered from the week before and made our way to Perth.

The city is just beautiful at night so Steve the photographer pulled into a local park and he managed to get some really great pictures of the skyline with the moon shining behind some of the storm clouds that we have become very used to. For access to all of the other pictures, don't forget to go to The Eastern Day Trip on Google Picassa.

A twelve hour day but worth every minute of it!

Wednesday, February 13, 2008
On the Road

Wednesday found us Heading East Young Man and Woman, and our destinations for the day included Mundaring, York, Northam, Toodyay, Bullsbrook and finally through the Swan Valley. Some more great names for towns, lots of things to see and do and we were not disappointed.

We decided to stop at a place called Mount Lookout Park. One of the amazing things about the Western State out here is the huge diversity of land, forestlands, farms, huge stations, small farms and wineries, “cowboy” towns, and the like. We drove through miles of hardwood forests between Perth and York. Somewhat like where we hail from in California, the folks out here in these parts hit the coast in the middle 1600’s on, and begin migrating inland and across the interior of Australia about the same time our ancestors were settling the West in America. We took some video of this area and for your enjoyment here it is:

Along this highway we also got our first serious gander at what the Aussie’s call a “Road Train.” If you drive an 18-wheeler in the States and think your stuff don’t stink, you are a wuss! They have these tractor-trailer rigs here that are totally unbelievable. Where we have a tractor with one long or two regular (okay, three in Nevada or east) trailers, these dudes are MONSTERS! They are up to fifty meters (that’s more than 150 feet) long, have as many as SIXTY wheels, and weigh in at a svelte 115 TONS! Not only that, they blow across the country at about 55 MPH (one guy passed us when we were doing about 95 kph), and you do NOT want to get in their way. They have these big grills like cow catchers (we were told these are for protection in the desert and outback because of the kangaroos at night), six huge lights (we saw a few with giant red spotlights on the top of the cabs) on the front grill, and they just look menacing. We ran into them all day on the “Great Eastern Highway,” which connects the West coast of Australia with the Interior of the country. They say they are the most-efficient method of transporting vast amounts of good throughout the country, but Steve keeps having this vision of our little Holden getting crunched between a couple of these bad boys….For a video of these big bad boys check out this link in You-Tube. An amazing sight!

The first town we stopped in was York. We expected an “English” town, and found a cowboy town instead. We have decided it is our favorite town and we are going back sometime next week. York was the first inland European settlement in Western Australia, founded in 1837 about 60 miles inland from Perth. They have restored many of the heritage buildings from the “Western” and Australian Victorian era and it was by far one of the best places we have seen. We had the opportunity to see some really cool buildings, read some great signs, and learn that many of the people who settled this country have a lot in common with their American cousins of the same time period. One can almost see Tombstone, Arizona as you walk along the streets. You can find much of what we found on our Google Picassa photo album for York.

As always Steve manages to find the best pictures and signs and was particularly impressed with the sign that said in 1897 “Nothing Happened on This Spot.” Gotta love that Aussie sarcasm at its finest. We also visited the local post office for some stamps and found that some things never change, in any country or any town. One guy at the cage, 15 people in line, and another postal worker asleep in the back room! After wandering through York we headed out across the country north to Northam.

We drove for about 120 miles between York and the Swan Valley later in the day, and in that time we saw ALMOST NO ONE ELSE ON THE ROAD! We passed many large stations, saw a lot of cattle, deer (yes, the have deer farms here), sheep, parrots and a LOT of wheat fields, but man, it was desolate out there. No cell phone service and we were really happy the car didn’t act up on us out there. Beautiful country and neat back country roads, but really, really sparse!

We were able to stop a look out and from here you could see forever, we took some video for all of our friends and here it is:

We found a wonderful park in Northam which is right along the Avon River. They have a white swan park which is also home to pelicans, mud hens and lots of people. As always, Steve always finds someone to talk to and the men’s room at the park is not an exception. Carol could hear him talking to one of the senior citizens from Perth who was on an “old-folks” tour. Seems they had been driven down to Northam for a barbeque and were taking the train back to Perth. We found out lots about the area and got some tips for our trip to Margaret River. I don’t think Steve has ever met a stranger! He also got some pretty cool shots of the pelicans having lunch in the river, as well as an Australian “drive through” liquor store…. No kidding! They are all over the place here.

We also walked across the suspension bridge the city built in 1982? It was very nicely made, cost the citizens about $82,000, and Steve decided to give Carol a walk of her life and kept moving the bridge back and forth.. Good thing we hadn’t had lunch yet. Carol figures to get her licks in when we do the Sydney Bridge Climb toward the end of the trip, as Steve is not a big fan of heights unless he is in an airplane.

Later we picnicked in the park and watched part of an aboriginal program being put on for the National Day of Apology. The Stolen Generations (or Stolen Generation) is a term used to describe the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children, usually of mixed descent, who were removed from their families by Australian government agencies and church missions, under various state acts of Parliament, denying the rights of parents and making Aboriginal children wards of the state, between approximately 1869 and well into the 1970’s. Finally in the 1980’s an investigation was allowed into this practice and it was found that the former Australian Parliaments were wrong to do this. Finally after several years (and lots of lawyers as Steve would say) it was decided that the Australian government should apologize for these actions. Today was the National Day of Apology and it was celebrated throughout the country. If you are interested in what happened, you can check out Wikipedia article called The Stolen Generation. Pretty amazing stuff. Of course, like America’s treatment of our native Americans and Blacks, it can be a touchy subject, so we just quietly listen to what the locals have to say on the subject, but a vast majority of the people we listened to discussing the subject were pretty much of the “It was about time we did this as a country” opinion.

We left Northam and Carol found another “off the beaten path” site on the map to see (which is her specialty as the expedition navigator) and we wound up at St. Saviour’s Church and Cemetery. If you know anything about us you know how much we love cemeteries and this was perfect. This church was built in 1850’s and the cemetery included people who had donated the land and also has recent burials. People walked to this church, or road buggies or horse, from a distance of some 15 kilometers to attend services. It was a very quiet place and was being taken care of by two parrots as you can see. One of the things that really surprised us was that the land (minus the trees) could have been a twin to where Carol’s family came from and still live, in Buffalo, Oklahoma. Harris and Salley, check out the photos and see if you don’t agree. We took a lot of photos on our trip back there last summer of the small cemeteries inhabited by Carol’s ancestors, and the similarities were pretty shocking. A very stark look at tough people settling a tough country and living hard lives. This part of the world was inhabited by the Scottish and Irish immigrants, and there are still a lot of Irish living and farming in the area.

In addition there is some really interesting history regarding the area. This area is purported to be over 3,300,000,000 years old and again was first inhabited by the Aborigines. We encourage you to take a look at both of the documents we photographed in the vestibule of the church… they are a very interesting read of a very interesting history. You will find all of the photos in the St. Saviour's Church Photo Album in our Google Picassa area.

We then headed down the road and made our way to Toodyay (pronounced “Toojay” according to Steve’s restroom pal), which is a small town in the middle of nowhere. It was once an industrial area, and there is a model of the local mill still in existence. There is also a “lollie shop” (candy store) collocated with the visitor center, which we both enjoyed! We also found some really cool post cards and Carol has figured out what she is going to collect from Australia… linen tea towels. These towels tell a story about each town we visit and are very decorative.

We then left and headed through the foothills and Avon Valley to Bindoon. Steve just had to go there because it is a “Tidy Town” award winner, which is an award given in Ireland (and brought along to Australia by the Irish) for small towns that are neat and nicely turned out. Our path took us through some lovely back roads, orange groves, small wineries, large cattle and sheep stations, a deer farm and some really beautiful countryside. It is so amazing that so close to the industrial world of Perth and Fremantle lays a world so different. Steve and I decided we enjoy the outlying areas much more than the Big City! We also found out later that evening in reading the “Western Australian” newspaper that the now recently deposed leader of Australia’s largest Biker Gang (their Hell’s Angels) lives there. Oh, the stuff we find on our road trips….

Something that was pretty cool was some of the telephone poles. The locals had painted them, and not just painted, but pictures of people, places and things. It reminded Carol of old fashioned circus posters. Bright colors and interesting pictures, all different on each pole we passed. Hopefully you can see from the photos we took. They were really neat. Another thing we have found here is that the farmers and ranchers still use our old late 1800’s style windmills to produce drinking water for their livestock, which was pretty cool. We could both remember them all over California as kids. For more photos check out the East Day Trip photo album on Google Picassa.

We headed home and decided to take the Great Northern highway through Midland and back to Perth and had the opportunity to go through Swan Valley. This area reminds us of Napa Valley with the fine wineries, boutique beer, olives, chocolates, ice cream and fresh produce. We didn’t stop at any of the wineries as we are heading towards Margaret River in the next few days, but we did see a lot of Road Trains in the area again, heading out to the various highways across the country here. Finally we made our way home and enjoyed talking about the last two days.
So until tomorrow’s adventure begins, we remain, Steve and Carol, wandering around the world!
Reporters From Down Under