Beneath the Southern Cross, Part Four

Shark Bay is the name of a large area. The bay itself is enormous and the land mass surrounding the bay is a peninsula that juts out from mainland Australia and is the most westerly point on the continent. (I like that I can now say that I’ve been to the most easterly point in Australia, the most westerly point and the southern-most land mass in the world besides Antarctica. I don’t know that I’ll make any money off those claims but everyone’s gotta have something.)

As we began our venture onto this peninsula, we stopped at a few recommended places. The first was the home of the Stromatolites. Now these guys deserve their own blog page, their own website. Tiny, microscopic organisms called cyanobacteria build up to form these stumpy rock-looking creatures called Stromatolites that live in the ocean.

These stumpy rock things are my new heroes. 350 billion years ago, give or take, there was not much oxygen on the earth so it was not a very friendly place for life. The only living things were these cyanobacteria who apparently didn’t need much. But what these organisms did was produce oxygen. Over a few billion years, they increased the amount of oxygen in our atmosphere just enough to make it possible for other, more complex life forms to survive here. Without them, you’d not be reading this blog right now. So while we may feel a deep connection to the chimpanzee as a distant relative, it is these stumpy Stromatolites to whom I feel I owe my life. They only exist in this one area in the entire world because the sea right there is so high in saline that it is too salty for any other animal to live in and therefore, safe for these fragile little Stromatolites because there are no predators or competition for food. Seeing them and learning about their role in, well, in my life, made me feel like I had completed the ultimate pilgrimage. If it weren’t for the flies, I’d have stayed with them to pay homage much longer. But the flies drove us back to the relative sterility of the camper van and on we drove to our next stop.

Shell Beach is a beach where tiny, white, perfect seashells are piled by the trillions, 30 feet deep for several miles. There is no sand to speak of. Just shells. Most of them so tiny you could fit two or three of them on a dime. It is spectacular. But the climate there was just unreasonable. At the parking lot end of the beach were the flies. Once you got on the beach, the fly population thinned (notice I didn’t say disappeared) but the winds picked up and whipped specks of tiny shells at our legs. The sun bounced off the white shells producing a brightness that scoffed at our sunglasses. We decided it was a good time to let the kids run free and because we were in a bay, the water was calm enough for them to practice snorkeling.

Sadly, it was freezing and none of us could stay in for very long. I thought I’d go for a swim to work off some of my building frustrations with our new climate but the ocean was so shallow that for what looked like miles, it didn’t even reach my knees. Things were starting to look more and more grim and we were having a harder and harder time shaking it off. We toweled off the kids and bundled them and their purple lips back into the camper and drove the rest of the way to our caravan park.

The Denham caravan park. Let’s just say it was low-budget. The good news was that when we arrived in this little town just down the road from Monkey Mia, we discovered that the flies had disappeared. Because the 80 mph winds made it impossible for them to land anywhere. The sand, on the other hand, had no trouble at all stinging our legs and arms and faces as we tried to walk down the street in town. We finally had to just turn around and escape the gale force winds by staying in our cabin the rest of the afternoon. But we had something to do—we put our heads together to form an escape plan. We were all miserable (except, of course, my stepdad who, for those of you who don’t know is pretty much happy anywhere,) and we all wanted out. We thought about driving in the middle of the night to get back to civilization, we called all sorts of other caravan parks around Perth to find somewhere else to stay. We talked about some of us flying down to Perth from there while two people drove the camper van back. We were willing to forfeit deposits and spend more money on alternative accommodations. We were willing to sell our souls to get out of there. We felt like we’d just driven over 10 hours straight into the belly of hell. But because it was the school holiday, the supposed masses of travelers, with whom we still hadn’t crossed paths (though it was now becoming clear where they all were,) had reserved everything in Perth. We were stuck. We couldn’t leave because we had no where else to go. It became clear that our only option was to muster up all the internal resources with which we were each endowed and make do.