Another windy, rainy morning. We continued our pilgrimage south, making a few side trips to check out beaches. Sadly, nothing notable.
One side trip was to Jurien Bay, famous for the seals that live on the islands just off shore. … but, due to the winds, the tours weren’t running.
Nambung National Park, known for The Pinnacles, thousands of spiny rocks protruding from the desert. It’s an odd sight. I wasn’t expecting quite so many of them, and I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be such a large area. The rocks weren’t all spiny/pointy though, some of them were quite phallic. Risa read a Japanese man’s blog about the area, and he mentioned that people consider this area what the world would look like after an apocalypse. He said he was sad that the end of the world would look hundreds of vaguely penis shaped rocks in a desert. I couldn’t see it the same way after she told me that…
It was a Saturday, which normally doesn’t change things much for us, except being this close to Perth (~200km) I think there were a lot of people that had come up for a day trip. It was busy. It’s a big place, but it’s not that big, especially with coach loads of tourists running/shouting and climbing the pinnacles (climbing is forbidden). I could imagine the serenity of being here in the quiet, and wished that it could have been like that today. Some noise cancelling headphones, a chair and some Godspeed You! Black Emperor would have been an equally good option.
Another huge surprise for me was being able to drive around in your own car. There was a 4km loop that was slightly different to the 1.5km pedestrian loop that we walked first.
We had brief patches of blue skies, but as we were getting ready to pack up and leave (after another wedding photo shoot), the dark clouds started rolling in on the horizon. Cue for us to get into Deli-chan and make our way to Perth post haste.
I know we would have missed a few things between Nambung and Perth, but we decided late in the day that we were going to push on to Perth for tonight and stay with a friend. I was surprised at how close we got to Perth before we started seeing the urban sprawl. I think it was less than 30km and there was still bushland on either side of the highway. We’re going to be in Perth for a few days, exploring and catching up with friends, as well as less fun (but more important) things like visas and mechanical work.
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