I was the organiser of the itinerary and accommodation for the second two weeks of this trip, which brings the responsibility for the quality of our accommodation. I did the usual look at reviews and mulled over the choices trying to find the fine line between a bargain and a camouflaged dump. I think I did pretty well in Busselton, Margaret River, Denmark, and Albany. In Esperance there was a 4 lane highway behind our motel, which was sort of all right. Then we got to our chalets in the Big 4 camping place in Kalgoorlie. They had a reasonable bed and appliances but nothing else going for them. When I returned the keys before we left the next day I politely informed the manager and staff, plus a few other campers, that they had won the prize for the worst maintained accommodation in a month of travelling in their state. I left to the sounds of a strong Australian accent thanking me very much. The next night was in a motel in a Wheat Belt small town called Merredin and it all looked nice, and was, but it was also a short distance from the main train line. It was apparently quite busy during the night which I slept through, including a deliberately long and shatteringly loud whistle episode that Tony reckoned felt like it was being done in his room. The last night was in a nice standard hotel in Perth. And I am pleased to report that in this part of West A. the reception people were generally friendly and helpful.
We had 4 nights in Margaret River where we had plenty of nice food and wine, including a superb 8 course degustation Japanese meal at a place called Mikki’s . Highly recommended. We also fluked being there at the same time as the area’s Open Art Studio Festival, and there are a lot of arty crafty people in Margaret River. We took full advantage and visited about 30 of more than 130. That meant meeting a lot of interesting, and sometimes unusual, people who all did stuff that I cannot. The furniture makers got my attention the most, and I was able to use my limited woodworking experience to get into some technical discussions that led to looking in the workshops. That meant I saw, in particular, two items of kit that I would love to have but could never justify, however I might just keep a lookout for a second hand thicknesser with a very special cutting device made of lots of diamond shaped small tungsten blades. I suspect it might require a mortgage.
While in Denmark we did a recommended tourist drive and stopped at a winery unsuccessfully looking for lunch. But like in all small wineries the owner was an interesting fellow who sussed out my interest in wine quickly and made me taste his best 3 reds, which were pretty good, so I bought one of his T shirts as recompense. As we continued the search for lunch Tony googled the guy (Tony is a world class googler), and found out that last year he had abandoned some sort of entertainment event after the local council took too long to issue the necessary permits. He then put up a big roadside sign advising that any council employee wanting to visit his winery had to fill out a 100 page application form and pay a $1000 entry fee. He was subsequently forced to remove the sign. The next place we got to did do lunches and we ordered an expensive platter for four, having been warned it was quite large. That was an understatement and we tried very hard, however there was still enough left that was packed up and provided a nice picnic lunch the next day.
Most of the towns we have been to are pretty small and coffee is not easy to find after 2pm, and sometimes the evening meal choices are a bit limited. Apart from the chicken parmi mentioned in the last report we haven’t had any horrible gastronomic experiences. One of the treats of dining out has been watching Rosie convince serving staff to make her a personalised meal by taking bits out of one dish on the menu and replacing them from another. Tony and I are of the opinion that if someone goes to all the trouble of designing a meal, and having that detail printed in a menu, then you either order it or not. But apparently that is some sort of stupid male attitude.
In Kalgoorlie the self-described best meal in town was in an old true blue aussie hotel restaurant that was packed. The big dining plates were also packed and I was defeated by a caesar salad that included about half a chicken. Kalgoorlie has a hugely big hole which is a gold mine called Super Pit. It used to be lots of gold mines but Alan Bond (he of America Cup fame as well as getting jail time) had the great idea of combining them all. Eventually it got done and now you can watch big diggers filling up big dump trucks, way in the distance, and not on the day we were there you can see the next stage of the hole being exploded. There is only one working brothel left in Kalgoorlie in what used to be a street of them, so we didn’t bother having a look. Apparently in common with most of the world, bricks and mortar in this industry have been replaced by online ordering.
Our rental vehicle for this part of the trip was a very roomy Toyota Kluger. It took all our luggage and we could still see out the rear window. We assumed that getting out of the airport parking area where we picked it up had been arranged electronically, which was overly optimistic, and we had to back away from the exit security arm which would not go up automatically. We then searched for another exit which did not exist, and eventually went back to the rental office where Tony found we had not been given the necessary ticket. The Kluger has behaved itself and has been delivered to its owners at the airport without damage. (We have yet to hear from Avis about the cost of repairing the first car). In it we have done over 3000kms, and generally the traffic has been light and driving not difficult. Tony has had the most experience of unsealed roads as a result of us trying to find a sort of sculpture park at a place called Northcliffe. The GPS was put to the road name only as we didn’t have a street number, so we went down the road which led out into the country and gradually it got narrower, then it became the ubiquitous red dirt road and got really narrow. All the way there was nothing to indicate we were going the right direction, and a few of us quietly wondered if we were going where we wanted. Eventually the driver decided to turn into an isolated farm entrance to ask the way. Fierce dogs greeted the car, for some reason I thought of the film Psycho, and the wives firmly suggested that we leave immediately and return to where we had started. So we did, went to the Information place at the beginning of the road, and found that was where the park was. My favourite tourist place was Lucky Bay near Esperance which has two claims to touristic fame. Firstly it is a gorgeous very white squeaky sand bay, with turquoise and blue water, and round rocky islands out to sea; and secondly it is visited by kangaroos which of course didn’t happen while we were there. In the same area all the brochures show a very pink lake, but it has apparently stopped being pink so that got a miss. Second best tourist thing for me, excluding big holes in the ground, was the skywalk in the Tingle trees near Denmark. Kay convinced me we had done it before but it still seemed all new and those big trees en masse are quite uplifting.
Returning to the big city was a bit of a shock. Heaps of traffic, buildings everywhere, and when we went to lunch in a mall there were suffocating numbers of people, many of whom were extremely large. I think we will cope and get used to it all. Over the last month we have driven well over 6000kms, had a range of weather from cold windy rain to 30% sunny, been in desert conditions and forests with huge trees, had plenty of laughs as well as long silences as the kms ticked away at 110 kph, and managed to play together nicely without any friction. Not bad really for a bunch of oldish people who all have fairly firm opinions about most things. There was a certain funeral hogging all the media attention during some of our time away. I have very firm opinions about the place of that family and their involvement in our political system, which I expressed once and was then regarded as an outcast by the other three. In order to maintain cordiality I suffered in silence thereafter. At least it meant when checking the news each morning there were large bits I could skip over. Tony would feel very lonely without his mobile phone but whenever we needed directions or information he was onto it in a flash. He also showed great bravery when he went into a pub that had lots of big TVs all showing AFL and asked if they would mind changing over to the All Blacks rugby test. The answer was one word starting with “N”. Rosie is a bit of a researcher which proved very useful in finding places others might have glossed over. And Kay is an expert spotter of fauna that no one else gets to see, and we assume she really did see these things. She certainly saw the Wallaby that did damage to our first car. My only claim to fail was managing to miss a couple of Kangaroos that had a go at getting in front of us while I was driving.
In finishing I must pay tribute to the missing Agricultural Correspondent who would have had quite a lot to say if he had been allowed to join in, but I will summarise by saying there are lots of very big paddocks full of canola and wheat.
Dennis.