Beneath the Southern Cross, Part Six and Out

I haven’t mentioned yet that it was only because of the dolphins that we were even out on the beach that morning. It was really cold with strong chilly winds blowing that sent us inside as soon as the dolphins swam back out. The kids and my parents found an empty movie room where the Planet Earth series about the ocean was playing so they cozied up in there and watched about two hours of documentaries. Mark and I found some wind-protected sun and laid in it like lizards.

I guess we must have fallen asleep because the next thing we knew, my parents were telling us that they’d left the movie room and Gabe had made some friends and they were all playing Frisbee around the corner. I pictured a bunch of eight-year old Australian boys on holiday with their parents. But when we walked around the corner to come see, opening up in front of me was: Grateful Dead meets seaside resort. Gabe’s new friends were 20-something guys who’d come to Monkey Mia prepared to play. They had Frisbees and juggling balls and those sticks you can make dance. We ended up spending the day with them. There was Gil and Omri and Ruven
from Israel and another
guy from Spain and two women from France. Suddenly, after all the flies and long desolate outback driving, stinging sand and frigid morning winds, low-budget accommodations with a sink that wouldn’t drain and a grocery store with sketchy-looking meat and produce, finally after all that, we’d found a bit of paradise.There were dolphins, palm tree-spotted grassy areas, happy music, a friendly café, a sun that was warming everything up, and new friends to play with. My parents took pictures and read in the shade. Mark and Gabe and I played volleyball with
some Israeli, German and Dutch folks. Jordan made the dancing sticks dance and made us all some delectable chocolate chip cookies out of sand. Gabe learned to juggle. Mark and the kids took out a canoe while I took a little nap in the sun. We laughed and played all day. I think the last thought on each of our minds as we drifted off to sleep that night was, “Thank God.”

We enjoyed who Gabe referred to as “The Guys” quite a bit and now have a place to stay when we visit Israel. One of the funniest things I’ve ever heard is an Israeli saying, “Good on ya mate!” Spending time with a group of people from all over the world in Monkey Mia, Western Australia kicked wide open the doors to international travel in my mind. For my entire 38 years, the world has always seemed a faraway place to me. It’s been a world of which I feared I may never see more than pictures. And the US has always seemed vast enough to be a world unto itself. It seems things have been flipped onto their heads for me as the world now feels like it is right around the corner and the US but a very small part of it all.

We all agreed that Monkey Mia was worth seeing afterall. Therefore, we awoke early the next morning to greet the dolphins and interact with them on what to them was just another Wednesday morning. Gabe had a bit of a hard time watching the dolphins on the second day as his head kept jerking backwards to the grassy area to see if The Guys were there yet. I’ve never heard him so excited to see anything appear in his life than he was when The Guys rolled out of bed at about 10am and sauntered out into view. “They’re here!!!” he yelled and took off running toward them faster than a bat outta hell.

We learned a new Aussie phrase that morning. We had spoken, the day before, with Capes, the Aboriginal tour guide who told us that he’d be happy if we joined him on his morning guided walkabout the next day. All we had to do was meet him right here at 8;30am. So we dutifully showed up at 8:30 am and he wasn’t there. We checked with the information people who said that that tour was fully booked. Fully booked? We’d just spoken with him the day before and he didn’t say anything about needing to make a booking. So we thought the information people must have been mistaken and we went back out to wait for Capes. He never did show up. We found it all very peculiar that he didn’t show up for a fully booked tour that no one else seemed to be waiting for either. We mentioned it to one of the dolphin rangers a bit later and he laughed. ‘Fully booked’, he explained, means that Capes won’t be in today. Maybe he had a late night the night before, wink, wink. But for all intents and purposes, that tour is ‘fully booked.’ Got it.

On our second day in Monkey Mia, after the dolphin had had their morning tea and chat with the people, we ran into another exchange family who were also visiting this part of the country during their school holiday. The 10 of us took ourselves on the guided bush walk and enjoyed laughing and chatting with this other family who are from Seattle and having challenges and joys during their adventure in Australia as well. The afternoon was another lovely day on the beach, in the water, playing with The Guys and relaxing like one does at a resort.

Once we befriended Shark Bay or it befriended us, I realized that the land we were in was quite spectacular. I loved seeing the red dirt of the off-shore land butt right up against the white sand on the beaches. At one point I was looking out the front window of the camper and I could see deep red dirt on my right and bright white sand on my left as though I were in two different places at once. The ocean was just as phenomenal as it ever is. My stepdad, who is an ex-naval officer and submariner commented that he'd never been on the Indian Ocean before. I asked him if it looked any different, wondering if it maybe had an Indian flair to it. He said he couldn't see much of a difference but that he might if he got to know it better. I loved the rich red and kelly green colors next to each other especially with the bright blue sky as a canopy over both. I knew that against all odds, I was going to miss this place.

We had one more night in Denham (the town just down the road from Monkey Mia that we were staying in) so we made our way back there and while Mark and the kids went to the grocery store, bless their hearts, I had a rare opportunity to walk through a museum without children. My parents and I visited a surprisingly gorgeous museum telling the story of Shark Bay. I learned so much about the history there that what had felt like a god-forsaken, fly-infested, wind-blown forbidding section of the world was becoming a place I was falling in love with. I learned about the Aboriginal history there and the indescribable tragedy of their early experiences with Europeans. I learned more about the animal life, the struggles they have with non-native animals and their efforts to return the area back to its natural state. Through some video documentaries that played in a loop for anyone to drop in and have a listen, I heard from people who’ve lived in Shark Bay all their lives and what their impact has been on the land over the years. This whole experience taught me so much about sitting still and seeing what’s really there rather than coming into a place with expectations that it be something I already know. It wasn’t a coastal paradise like so much of the eastern coast has been for us. It was harsh. It was empty. It was dry and intimidating. The people were rugged. Of the six of us, I may have been the one that wanted to leave the most. I was trying to talk Dave and Mark into driving the camper van back down south through the middle of the night. But we didn’t leave and I didn’t spend the three days there waiting for the time to pass so we could go back somewhere better. I sat still and watched and learned and found an incredible amount of joy in exactly what was there. We didn’t create a good time for ourselves, we just allowed one. When it was time to go, none of us wanted to. None of us.

Luckily, on our way out of town the next morning, we had one more stop to make that allowed us to prolong our fun. We stopped at a place called Ocean Park. Ocean park is either open from 9-5 or 10-5 depending on which of the signs you believe as you drive down their road. Apparently the 10-5 sign was the accurate one because their gate was still closed at 9:00. But we really wanted to come see this place as it was touted to have a shark display that was well worth seeing and really good coffee. So I went in and asked the guy who was in the middle of his breakfast if he wouldn’t mind us coming in a bit early because we were on our way out of town. He was more than happy to accommodate us and within 15 minutes, we’d begun a private tour with him through Ocean Park.

This is a place with about a dozen man-made tanks of all sizes and they temporarily house the sea creatures that live in the surrounding ocean. What they do is go out almost daily and go fishing. When they catch things, they bring them home and put them in their tanks. When the creatures start showing signs of not wanting to be in captivity anymore (usually by stopping eating) they release them back into the wild. As a result, we were able to see sea snakes and sting rays and huge groper fish the size of small pigs and tiny little clown fish and turtles and a lobster and a squid and several huge sharks. They sometimes have in their tanks hammerheads and blue sharks and great whites. This day they had lemon sharks, sand sharks and a nervous shark (that’s just its name but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for it.) We watched him hold a big, bloody fish head out on a long line for the sharks to swim by and attack. I could feel my adrenaline spike just a bit every time one of those animals jumped out of the water with its mouth wide open and teeth poised to pierce some skin and I wasn’t even in the water. After a while, a crowd joined us on our tour and someone asked if you had to worry about these sharks if you were to see them in the water. Our guide replied, “You don’t have to worry about any sharks. What’s to worry about? If you see one, just get out of the water.” He seemed serious. It was a little disturbing.

Ocean Park was the last stop of our visit to Shark Bay. We drove back down the road off the peninsula and bid adieu to the swarms of flies we knew we were leaving behind. We settled back into our places in the camper and readied ourselves for the long drive back down through the empty and vast desert.

About halfway to Geraldton, where we were to spend the next two nights, we stopped at a National Park called The Pinnacles. Remember that for hundreds of kilometers behind and ahead of us all we saw was red dirt, squat dried green scrub and one two-lane road splitting down the middle. That was it. Nothing else. Until we turned left down this road and suddenly we were on another planet. We were surrounded by light tan/white rocks that stuck up like giant stalagmites (remember that word?) Thousands of pillars of rock stood anywhere from one foot to ten feet tall. A wax museum of petrified ghosts. And I’m sorry but it would take a stronger woman than me to talk about the pinnacles without referring to their phallic nature. Quite a bizarre place in the middle of nowhere.

We got out of our camper and climbed all over the pinnacles, trying to keep our thoughts out of the gutters. The kids got to eat their lunch on the top of one. We played hide-and-seek behind them. We saw two wild emus saunter by like they were native New Yorkers making their way down a crowded 5^th Avenue. It was quite a spectacle. At the risk of sounding not very smart, I will tell you that there was a sign that explained the theory of how the pinnacles came to be and why only in that particular area. Alas, those scientists lost me after the first few sentences. I can tell you there were rains and mountains and a build up of sediment and that it all happened a very, very long time ago. But that’s about as far as I can take you.

We had our fill of the strange tall rocks, remarked about the absence of flies and climbed back into the camper to make our way back to Geraldton. We spent two nights here and had a nice time renting bikes, walking around town, going to the beach and swimming though the water was pretty cold. It was a relaxing time in Geraldton but not a lot of excitement to add to the blog.

Our trip was just winding down at this point. We left Geraldton, made our way back to Freemantle to spend our last night and then returned the camper and got on the plane. We said good-bye to Western Australia. Who knows if any of us will ever return.

All in all, we were all pretty impressed with our flexibility—at least in our behavior if not always in our attitude. Had we known what we were getting ourselves into ahead of time, we probably wouldn’t have booked the trip in this way. But we were all deeply glad we did.

We came back to Newcastle and one of the most remarkable things to me was how genuinely happy we were to be “home.” It really does feel right here. We are happy to be here. We found out from someone the day after we returned that while we were gone, it had rained non-stop for 13 days in Newcastle—the entire school holiday. Monkey Mia just scored another point.

My parents stayed with us for 2 more days after our trip and we were all very sad to separate when they left. It’s so good for us to be together and so hard to say good-bye. The kids really benefit from having people come visit I think. And so do Mark and I. They made it home safe and sound, reporting that after being gone from the US and immersed in a slower culture for 6 weeks, they are missing it here. I can only imagine.

So back into our lives we’ve gotten. Everyone’s back in school. I’m back to my writing and other projects and activities that I’m enjoying. And there will be more blogs to come as things unfold. Our love to all of you!