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May 30, 2005

Karijini

I spent a few days in Exmouth larking around and drinking copious amounts of goon with Zoe and Alan. Exmouth is very small and isolated but has lovely beaches, sunsets, pelicans and locals with interesting facial hair.

Zoe and I joined another group heading up to Broome through Karijini National Park. Our guide was called Jim and was what is known as an ocker - a true blue, dinky-di Australian, who had worked most of his life as a sheep shearer, travelling around stations all over the country. He had a wealth of knowledge about rural life and told me all about how to shear a sheep. He had stories about everything, including the time he spent as a trucker, driving the massive road trains over huge distances. I love road trains! I asked whether it was true that drivers use a bottle to pee in instead of stopping and if they used speed as much as it's rumoured. He told me they don't usually stop to go to the toilet as it takes a while for a vehicle of that size to reach top speed, so the drivers often just open the door, lean out a little and let the slipstream take it away. Many drivers do use speed, especially contractors or smaller operators because the companies require huge distances to be covered in insanely short time frames. Some drivers get so bored, they have DVD players and watch films as they drive, glancing up at the road regularly - hopefully. In Western Australia, everything is so far apart and there is just empty scrub in between. You can drive for hours along a pretty much straight road without the scenery changing at all, save for the odd termite mound. When you look at a map, the roadhouses are marked in big letters as though they're towns.

We drove out through the Pilbara, stopping at Tom Price, where they mine iron ore, then onto Karijini. We spent three nights camping out on swags in the bush and then swimming in fresh water pools and walking in the gorges among the Hammersley Ranges. We had campfires at night and watched shooting stars. The skies were the clearest I've ever seen, except perhaps in Death Valley - you could see the spirals of the Milky Way and other galaxies. We were absolutely filthy with red dust when we arrived at a campsite on Eighty Mile Beach. I went for a quick dip and watched the perfect sunset, then hit the shower to wash off the streaky orange caked on my skin like a bad fake tan. We arrived in Broome the next day.

Posted by Rowena on May 30, 2005 08:05 AM
Category: Australia
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