I started very early in the morning (5 am), because I had a long way to go to Shark Bay (730 km or about 7 hours). Or about going from Los Angeles to San Francisco along Highway 101. Crazy, isn't it? But I am a crazy guy and was bracing myself for a lovely drive, spotting herds of kangaroos hopping parallel to the highway. I had not taken into account the June rains, which although spotty, are enough to make the drive on the wrong side of the road pretty tough.
I had also not counted with the road trains. Remember in the most recent Mad Max movies, where Cheryze Theron drives this enormous vehicle across the wasteland? Well, these vehicles exist here in Australia! They are 32-wheelers, heavily loaded, that spray a wake of water that rivals the Niagara Falls as they rumble down the road, and are unable to stop within less than a kilometer. Kangaroos? I saw plenty of them, bloating by the side of the road after they had had an unhappy encounter with a road train. Mind you, they are very good drivers, but with that mass behind them you just want to stay out of their way.
Rain had turned the countryside green and beautiful, so I had a hard time meshing the book I was listening to, "Beyond the Black Stump" by Nevil Shute, with the green carpet rolling ahead of me. The title of the book refers to the vastness of the country "beyond" an imaginary "black stump" far in the horizon, and tells the story of a geologist working in dry and parched Western Australia. It is a great book that I heartily recommend, but it was not jiving with what I was seeing ... until I crossed the 26th southern parallel, where the dear Lord had drawn a line (no doubt marked by a black stump) beyond which extended a vast, unwelcoming dry land, that not even the rain could turn into anything but a harsh desert (like all deserts it is clear that it floods and turns into a vast mire from time to time, but never changes into anything but a desert) that reminded me a lot of the Mojave Desert.
By 2 pm I was getting tired, counting the kilometers left to Shark Bay. I was heading for my accommodation for the next couple of days at Coral Coast RV Park, which I had been lucky to find through Booking.com as being near Shark Bay. I had checked in Google Maps and it looked close, a bit to the north, so as I got within cellphone tower coverage range I asked specific directions, and got back that I was 2 hours away. What? Yes, the "near" Coral Coast RV Park is only 230 km away, in the tourist town of Carnarvon!
OMG! My luck to have started this trip in a compact green country like Japan, and had followed that with an expanded dry country like Australia. Anywhere I went in Japan I was only one or two hours away. Here, 8 hours is nothing (plus two more hours just for good measure). Well, I guess that is why I call it adventure travel.
I never saw a herd of kangaroos (and after seeing so many dead ones by the side of the road I was as alert as we normally are about deer crossings), but I did see a flock of emus!
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