whales
I went on a holiday in late September 2000, to whale-watch at the Head of the Bight and generally have a look around the eastern Nularbor Plains and northern Eyre Peninsula. Alvira and usagi went with me. Thanks, Alvira, for the co-driving and general assistance - I would never have got so far without your help.
I took VK5's camera, intending to occupy myself when frustrations arose from being unable to be as physically active as I like. I've never used a camera with controls before *L*, and rarely used a camera at all - I used to be too busy doing things to stop and take pictures. Well, I took a few this time! About 25 of the 140 exposures I took are pretty good, I think. Not professional quality, but VK5 reckons this is a fair rate of decent shots...
Below are the ones that scanned well... I've created a few images with several related shots mounted together. The thumbnails link to the full-sized images, which will each open in a new window. Just close that window to get back here.
First couple of days: changes in landscape were fascinating. Low rolling hills, wheat and sheep; tidal plains, mangrove swamps; open-cut mines curving around iron-ore outcroppings; steel-processing towns; inland plains, more wheat and sheep; arid-land scrub, trees 2 metres tall; the Nullarbor Plains, scrub about 1 foot tall.
Day 2: we climbed a mountain. Mount Wudinna is, according to local signage (but I find it hard to believe), the second largest monolith in Australia. If it's true, theres' a BIG gap between the size of the largest (Uluru) and the second largest. We "climbed" (walked up) one face and down another in less than 2 hours *l*. It's still a seriously large lump of granite!
Mt Wudinna
Day 3 - Thevenard: bulk grain-handling port, such clear waters under the jetty we could see nursery schools of about 50 to 100 fish (a local told us that the ones about a foot long were young sharks).
Nullarbor: coin-operated showers; wild dingos lurking in roadside vegetation, and coming closer in curiosity if you sit still long enough; there ARE trees on the Nullarbor Plains - the roadhouse has two!; cliffs, red, gold, ochre, crumbling down into crashing waves; whales - 6 mother and calf pairs playing in close to the cliffs, some within 50 metres of the viewing platform, and a couple of single whales further out. When the pics are ready, if there's one with a large brown lump and a small white lump on a blue background, that's the one with the albino calf *l*. (Sorry: those ones didn't turn out).
Sunrise at the Nularbor Roadhouse
Views from the Head of the Bight whale watching platform
The whales!
After the whales; Cactus Beach. A world-famous surf beach, I'm told. As well as incredible coastline scenery, we were fascinated by the skinks in the sand dunes (I've since been told that I don't know my lizards - they're dragons!). Some were in sandy camouflage colours, but some were incredible jewel-bright blues, greens and golds. Inland slightly, the dunes were incredibly wind-sculpted. One looked like the top of a kilometre-wide lemon meringue pie.
Cactus Beach (east)
Cactus Beach (west)
A lizard at Cactus
Lemon Meringue Pie sandhills
Penong: tiny farming community, just inland from the surfers' mecca, has an active local community of craft workers. I bought a hand-made hemp shirt, a couple of hand-woven baskets, and some hand-made paper.
A couple of quiet days at Smoky Bay, a quiet little fishing/holiday village. Caught a hilarious sight of the queue at the barbecue shelter... a crescent of seagulls, with a few cormorants behind them, then a dozen pelicans lined up behind them!
Point Labatt - Australia's only mainland sea lion colony: more cliffs, surf, beach, rocks and about 50 sea lions basking in the sun. Occasionally a pup would roll away from, or snuggle closer to, its mother, or an adult would stretch, scratch, and turn over to bake the other side... Saw a Sea Eagle scoop a fish up out of the ocean. A thunderstorm started up some distance north, and we had about 30km of dirt road (northward, of course) to get back to the highway. We saw a couple of Wedge-tailed Eagles feasting on a roo carcass, but Alvira and usagi wouldn't let me stop to take photos (Alvira was scared that we'd be stuck in the middle of the storm, and usagi was disgusted that I'd consider taking pics of something SO gross). We missed the storm while driving (I told you so, Alvira *l*)...
Seals at Point Labatt
Venus Bay: that night after dark, the storm moved in over the bay... We walked up to the lookout over the ocean, and watched sheet lightning and massive 3 to 5 forked arcs over the ocean. The next morning we walked around the headland from the sheltered bay with lightly ruffled waters, to the open ocean. Yet MORE cliffs and crashing waves (I like this stuff). A pod of dolphins were playing in one small cove. We watched them for about twenty minutes, finally figuring out there were about a dozen. Then, as we were walking away, they moved out past the surf break, lined up and caught the next wave in, tumbled under the wave and came back up behind it all ready for the next one. We watched them body-surfing in formation for a while longer *L*.
Cowell: beautiful carved jade (too expensive to buy *frown*), a long jetty with even more sea-birds - Pacific Gulls, and these even larger birds that I couldn't identify... I warned usagi not to look up as we walked under them perched on light posts along the jetty.
Whyalla - back to the iron-ore mining/processing region. We had a picnic lunch in the park, which showed a *shocking* side of Alvira's personality *L*... A seagull shit on her sunglasses. She grumbled mightily as she cleaned them, then yelled at the gulls that they'd better not expect food from her after treating her like that *l*. I suggested that the local council start up seagull etiquette lessons, and she said they ought to "teach them not to crap on people who are feeding them". Well, usagi was sat behind Alvira, and when the word "crap" came out, I was hard pressed to keep a straight face, as I've never heard her use such language! It was doubly hard when I could see the look of utter astonishment on usagi's face!
Returning inland - Wudinna:We stopped to call ahead and see if we could book accomodation at the place we wanted to spend the last night. There was someone using the pay-phone, so I strolled past to look in the window of the general store... She looked up, and I recognised a friend who I hadn't seen for more than ten years. She says she recognised me a moment later - when I broke into a massive grin as I realised who she was.
She and her children were staying at the local caravan park, so we soon organised to stay there instead of travelling on. We put the kids (and Alvira) to bed, and sat around a camp-fire until 2am catching up on changes in our lives, and reminiscing. It was fantastic...
... and one full-size pic:
Me and usagi at Cactus(ready for a little black humour? -
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- We weren't paddling deep enough for sharks)
