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Victor Billot
Southern Hemisphere
Tag: Travel
Melbournia
We spend the last several days of our visit in Melbourne. I had never been here before, and wasn’t sure what to expect. I was surprised at the size – even though it’s smaller than Sydney, it’s still enormous.
Stayed at the Nunnery in Fitzroy, big city prices but a nice place, very convieniently located. Wandered down Brunswick Street and discovered the excellent Souvlaki King and a few doors down a late night bookstore. On Saturday night we check out a mod night Blow Up at the Old Bar, a very cool and friendly small venue, and dance the night away to Motown classics. Ace!
Melbourne has an amazing music scene, the amount of stuff happening reminded me of London. In fact, the city reminded me of a warm, less crowded and ugly version of London as well. The feeling was less hard edged than Sydney, but with a real clothes/music/food thing going on. We let ourselves be sucked into the consumer spectacle as gaping onlookers for a while at Prahran and in the central city. I buy a $15 country and western shirt at Wild Monkey and we have lunch at Sushi-A-Go-Go and their excellent sushi train.
Went down to St Kilda on Sunday, pleasant enough and crowded, and received a quick blast of reality when approached for money by an extremely fucked up homeless man. Underneath the prosperous surface . . .
We flew back to NZ on Monday. We were both feeling kind of tired and glad to be on the way home. Probably too much travelling in a short time, but after visiting Perth, Sydney and Melbourne we took away some interesting impressions. What struck me is how large and cosmopolitan the cities are . . . certainly providing the urban zap without having to venture back up to the Other Side of the planet.
Sydney seemed to have the most frenetic, busy feel – especially in the central city. Great food. Harbour is surreally beautiful on a sunny day from Circular Quay. Perth seemed laidback and small scale in comparison, but with a distinctive feel, very multicultural and strangely isolated at the same time. Melbourne wins for general hipster values, trams and the urban experience.
It’s always nice to arrive back in the paddock and shed that is Dunedin International Airport though.
The Man from Snowy River, and Quokkas
After returning to Perth, we’re tired and spend the day recovering from The Big Drive. Heading down to “Freo” we get an overpriced ticket for the ferry to Rottnest Island. It’s a great short trip and we get to see our first “Quokkas”. They actually do look like large, friendly rats . . .
Then we finally have to get back on the train for a two-night, three-day trip to Melbourne, via the Indian Pacific to Adelaide then the Overlander on to Melbourne. The journey once again has a hypnotic quality as we roll across the blank plains of the Nullabor.
This time we have some more interesting characters on the train, including an individual I name “The Man from Snowy River.” He waits on the platform with a neatly parcelled Akubra hat in its box, dressed in a tweed jacket and cap. He then spends the entire journey having three showers a day. Travelling Red Kangaroo, one gets to travel with the interesting Australians.
For the birds, and wave watching in Lancelin
We stay at the Kalabarri Motorcamp, which reminds me of Christmas holidays as a kid. More pelicans and galahs. We are turning into birdwatchers so decide to get serious and head down to Rainbow Jungle, an enormous local privately run aviary.
The place is built around a series of enclosures where every parrot under creation seems to be featured. Fountains and shrubs keep the place cool, and the central feature is a walk-in cage where you can stroll amongst flocks of birds that fly past your head, watch you from the branches and occasionally crap on you from their roosts on the ceiling beams. A cockatoo grabs my camera cord in its tricky claws and tries to draw it into its cage, no doubt for closer inspection and destruction. I eye it back and retrieve my camera. It’s sly eye changes to a glimmer of rage and it squawks.
Enough birds. We drive south through endless farmland and past a pink salt lake. Stay overnight at a tiny coastal village called Horrocks in a trailer park style cabin. It’s cold!
For our last day on the road we have a relatively short journey to Lancelin, a couple of hours drive north of Perth. Stay at the local YHA which is good value. Perhaps we have done too much driving, but we have seen a lot of Western Australia. Lancelin is empty and quiet, and we spend some quiet time down at the long, white beach watching the huge waves smash the reef a few hundred metres offshore.
Pelican Encounter at Shark Bay
Awake in the cool dawn and depart early from Dongara. The countryside around Geraldton is nothing as I expected – rather than dry, it is green lush farmland for around a hundred kilometres. The temperature is cool and rainshowers periodically pass over us.
The landscape gradually changes into a flat, endless expanse of scrubland with a straight long highway cutting through. The ubiquitous red soil on both sides of the tarmac is covered in pools of water from the rain. The traffic is heavy, mainly heading southwards as Perthonians (?) return home at the end of the school holidays. We also encounter more ‘road trains’ but they aren’t much larger than the biggest size tankers loose on New Zealand roads.
After a long drive we reach the Overlander Roadhouse, the turn off to Shark Bay. Huge puddles of red mud, red mud everywhere and about thirty cars, trucks and utes all refuelling. The gaps between settlements are now becoming much larger, and we have only passed a few isolated farm stations in the last couple of hours.
The road up to Shark Bay is another 100 or more kilometres. We stop for a break at Shell Beach which is made up of millions of tiny shells that have been compacted into a hard material known as “coquina” which was originally used as a local building material. The bay is flat and vast, the dull opaque green of the ocean silent with only a tiny ripple at the shore, and the overcast skies make the cloudy waters appear even more strange.
We stop for the night at Denham, a small fishing and tourist town (“the most westerly townin Australia”), and end up having a major disagreement with the hostel manager over our room. However we do get to see the sun set in the Indian Ocean. The clouds are beginning to shift away.
The following morning we make a short drive across the peninsula to Monkey Mia, which is basically just a bay with a hotel and a conservation-style centre. We arrive to meet our first pelican which waddles onto the beach and helpfully fits in the background of some photos. Up close they are the most preposterous looking creature, like a cross between a turkey and a seagull, with a beak that almost reaches the ground. When they fly, their landbound ungainliness evaporates, and they glide serenely through the sky.
The dolphins arrive shortly after and swim close in to shore by the small group of watchers as if on clockwork.
The beach is long and white, with green-blue waters spreading out into the distance. The area is actually a series of bays and islands but the distances involved means it appears you are looking straight out to the open ocean. The calmness of the waters is the only indication this isn’ t the case. There are only a few people around, and we hang out on the beach for a while.
We turn back and head south. This is as far as we come for this journey. It’s over a thousand kilometres back to Perth.
Stopping for Emus on the Coast Road
We have decided to head north from Perth to see some real Australia and I go down to Budget to get a rental car. I take the wheel of the V6 Magna and within a minute I have somehow got myself onto the southbound freeway out of town, and have also managed to lose my street map. But I keep a cool head and despite some strange lane changes (not used to automatics) I manage to find my way back to Northbridge within ten minutes.
Perth takes a long time to escape through interminable suburbs on the Great Northern Motorway. It’s not particularly great, nor a motorway, nor even that big. Once we leave the city it goes down to a modest two lane highway that you’d find back home in South Island NZ. Miles of rolling farmland, I am surprised at how green it is, expecting a desert like environment.
We take the side road to Cervantes and then the Pinnacles National Park on the coast. The Pinnacles are thousands of bizarre limestone rock outcrops rising out of the rich yellow coastal sand. You can drive around them on a rough track for several kilometres; the place resembles a strange alien cemetery, with the light changing on the sand and rock to give an odd ambience. The parks seem to charge entry fees – they’re well worth it, but shouldn’t these kind of things be free to visitors, who are already spending lots of money locally?
We continue north on the coast road, and Julie has to stop driving after being startled by two emus crossing the road in front of us. Other wildlife spotted include kangaroos and much birdlife. Darkness is descending and we are keen to get to the next town. The area is becoming sparsely populated, and traffic is light. Eventually we reach Dongara and find a room at the Priory, a huge rambling converted nunnery. Nice rooms but not many facilities and too expensive. I try my first “Emu” beer in the bar (watery and sour, I prefer Swan instead) and we have an early night.
Wake up age 32, on a night train outside Perth
After three nights on the train, we arrive at Perth 9am on 20 July (my birthday). We are feeling a bit crumpled after our journey and head to Governor Robinson’s a small hostel in inner city Northbridge. It’s a great place, very sharp, clean and comfortable, well-priced and run by a friendly guy by the name of Philip.
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Indian Pacific: 2 Dimensional Drift
The train pulls up in the middle of the plain. This is in theory a station called Watson. There is nothing but small grassy clumps and red soil. An aboriginal woman and her small child step down from the train together with a steward with their bags. I overhear their conversation at the door. She is a teacher; her husband is a mechanic.
A thin dirt road ends at the railway line; and a white ute waits to make the pickup at the side of the track. There are no buildings. The woman and child get into the ute, which drives off into the distance down the long straight road. The train slowly rolls back into motion.
The place names seem random. Even the aboriginal names don’t seem to fit. The land is so old it defies being named.
The entire train stops at Cook, a bundle of sheds. Everyone gets out to walk around. I pick up a small fossil shell from beside the tracks. The air is cold and dry, despite the sun being high in the sky.
A single camel wanders past the tracks. The passengers are quiet and preoccupied; the two dimensional drift of the landscape becomes disorientating after a while and distances seem to lose their meaning. Peoples eyes turn away from the windows; they read, or sleep, or wander down to the lounge car.
Indian Pacific: Plain Talking
The country outside Adelaide is initially greener than I imagined (no drifting sand dunes or camel trains yet.) However the ubiqitous red soil is there; and after some time you realize the landscape is impercetibly changing. The last distant low uplands slide away and the perspective is of a vast surrounding tabletop.
Small scubby plants cover the expanse and trees gradually thin to ten, five, and eventually none in sight. Two kangaroos make an appearance. Even a lone bird silhouetted in a tree is welcomed as a sign of life. The three Japanese guys opposite stare out between sharing around their English copy of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. They must be getting a strange feel for Western culture.
Over the horizon pass by some familiar names. After coming out here you feel a sense of stronger sympathy for anyone held at Woomera. Further down the line Maralinga sits to the north. It seems all the things the Australians want to hide from view are kept out here, out of mind, out of sight.
The plain continues.
