Copyright © Tanya Piejus, 2001

31 October 2001

G'day from Albany

I have grave doubts as to whether I'll be able to get up off my chair when I've finished this as I have very stiff bum muscles at the moment. But you'll have to read the rest of this email before I tell you why...

I left Perth on Friday in considerably improved weather from when I arrived. I thought Western Australia was supposed to be hot around this time of year but there's been a viciously cold wind known as the Fremantle Doctor blowing onto the coast and I've had to buy an extra fleecey top to keep warm.

Having enjoyed the flexible hop-on, hop-off approach of Oz Experience round the eastern states, I've gone for Easyrider to do the west as they use the same system and the same small 21-seater buses which make for good socialising and fun on the road. I caught the bus early Friday morning for the friendly town of Dunsborough and its excellent YHA hostel. The main reason to stop off there is to dive the wreck of the HMAS Swan. Instead of scrapping this war boat, it was scuttled 2km off Dunsborough to provide a top-notch dive site. It's been specially prepared so that recreational divers can safely swim round and through it without getting stuck. It's been down since 1997 and has already become home to large numbers of fish. I did two dives there, the first of which was an orientation swim along the starboard side of the boat, down under the stern with its shimmering shoals of trevally, back along the port side to the crow's nest and into the bridge. The captain's leather chair is still in place and you can sit in it and watch the fish swimming past the glassless windows. That was pretty good for starters but the real treat was on the second dive when we went inside the wreck and swam the length of the ship through the maze of corridors. It was distinctly eerie finning through the shadowy cabins with their half-open cupboards and abandoned furniture, encrusted with marine creatures and coated in a thin layer of silt. The image that most sticks in my memory is of following a shoal of stripy yellow and white fish that shimmered about the bulkheads and companionways in the soft blue light filtering down from the surface and the hard yellow beam of the divemaster's torch. I'll also remember looking up from the quarterdeck and seeing the crow's nest silhouetted against the surface of the water just under the blurry, bright spot of the sun.

The bus picked me up again on Monday and we headed on down the coast for lunch at gorgeous Meelup Beach - yet another postcard strip of white sand with turquoise sea and lush green bush fringing the beach. We then started making our way to Ngilgi Cave and were happily cruising along the winding road through the bush when suddenly a white car appeared round the bend ahead of us, coming straight towards us in the middle of the road. Our driver braked hard and swerved to his left to avoid it but the driver of the car did the unpredictable and swung to his right. There was a sickening crunch as the car tore into the front left-hand corner of the bus and careered off the side of the road. We came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the road with our front left wheel completely mangled. Having realised that no-one had injured themselves beyond the odd banged knee or chin, we piled off the bus to check on the car. Considering what had just happened, everyone was remarkably composed and some went to help the people in the car, others ran up the road to fetch the ranger at the cave, more went to stop the traffic on the road and the few that were unneeded kept out of everyone else's way and dealt with their own shaken nerves. Despite the car being completely totalled, the European couple inside were relatively unscathed. The woman in the passenger seat had a suspected broken arm and was badly concussed from a gushing head wound. The driver only had glass cuts but was extremely shocked. The car was leaking petrol so we got them out and it was only about 20 minutes before rangers with a first aid kit, police, ambulance and a tow truck were on the scene to tidy up. We were packed off to the cave, fed tea and coffee and given a free tour of what turned out to be a beautiful cave to keep us busy until another bus arrived to take us to Margaret River. I could trot out the cliches about being made starkly aware of my own mortality at the moment the car struck our bus, but I don't want to risk sounding tacky. Suffice it to say that I watched my travelling companions eating, drinking beer and playing pool that night, as they would any other evening on the backpacker circuit, and felt immensely relieved.

Another bus and driver came down from Perth and the tour continued yesterday as planned. We turned inland through the south-west's famous karri forests. These are huge, ancient eucalypts of a particularly noble appearance and provided the setting for the Ewok village in 'Return of the Jedi'. One of the finest examples of these great plants is known as the Gloucester Tree and is a lookout post for bushfires. Consequently it has a spiral ladder of spikes knocked into it to scale the 61m to the platform at the top. Those of courageous heart and questionable sanity can climb this ladder for a breathtaking view across the forest to the massive sand dunes that mark the coastline. As you will have guessed by now, me being me, I was one of those who decided to climb the tree and this is where the sore buttocks come into it. Climbing up and down nearly 200 feet of metal rungs gives the gluteus maximus a really good workout. We also walked among the tree-tops in the Valley of the Giants - an area of towering, charmingly-named tingle trees - swaying gently on the 40m-high reverse suspension walkway. We overnighted here in Albany where I'm spending a couple of extra days before returning to Perth.

This morning we went to the blowholes in the rocks on the coast. I've been to blowholes before but not ones where crashing waves blast salty air up through cracks in the rock and give anyone standing above them a Marilyn Monroe-esque billowing dress experience. There's also one you can hang your head over and get a faceful of vertical-hair-inducing sea air every time a large swell comes in. I've just come back from another hair-raising adventure that reconfirmed my posterior pain - a whirlwind ride on the back of a throbbing Harley Davidson through the pretty river country round Albany. I think I had my cheeks clenched the whole way round.

It's been a rollercoaster ride of a week!

7 November 2001

G'day from Denham

After I'd emailed you all last week, I got talking to the owner of the dive shop where I was using the internet. He had a special offer going for a double dive at the islands just out of Albany so I couldn't really say no. I was up early Thursday morning and was soon swimming around the rock piles and caves off Breaksea Island. The environment there is quite different from anywhere I've dived before. The water is cold and supports a variety of big curious fish, colourful sea fans and corals, and the occasional sealion. The second dive was on the wreck of a whale chaser where a fluorescent purple sea fan grew on the deck and a population of fish called big eyes rested in the wheelhouse looking even more startled than most fish, especially when you stick your head into their hiding place and blow bubbles at them. Blending into the rust was a wonderfully ugly and viciously toxic stonefish. I was so impressed by these dives that I booked up for a night dive too. I had planned to take my Advanced Open Water course back in Perth but they'd cancelled it. A conversation with Uwe, the owner of the shop and my dive buddy that morning, and I was booking the five dives needed for my next qualification. Before I knew it, I'd rescheduled my bus back to Perth, extended my stay in Albany and started reading my new manual.

The night dive was an exhilarating experience to say the least. The darkness makes it difficult to control your buoyancy and I felt like I was on my first dive all over again, floating onto the rocks or suddenly drifting towards the surface. We had our own dive lights and shone them into crevices and under overhangs to pick out lurking sergeant baker fish, lobsters and a pair of octopi. We rested on the bottom, turned off our lights and let our eyes adjust to the darkness. The moon had risen full and pink on our way out to the dive site and there was a surprising amount of soft, grey light filtering down through the water. Silvery forms flitted past and the white reflection of the moon shimmered on the surface 10m above our heads. The next day I was out early again for the compulsory dives in navigation and depth. We dived down to the maximum depth allowed for recreational diving, 40m. Down there it was perfectly quiet, lit by a pale blue light and away from the buffeting surge of the waves. Below 30m the effects of nitrogen narcosis start to kick in. It takes people in different ways and I'm glad to say I had the best side effect from it - a lovely feeling of peace and euphoria. I finned slowly along beside Uwe with brightly coloured fish eyeballing me through my mask and thought 'Woooooow!' in a hippy kind of way. Reactions and hand-to-eye co-ordination are also supposed to be more difficult at depth and Uwe set me three tasks to do. First I had to assemble a nut and bolt - too easy, what's next? Put the top back on a light stick - no worries, give me a real challenge! OK, now put a cable tie through the top of the light stick and do it up - piece of cake, mate! I was born to dive. After a surface interval, it was onto the navigation exercises. Uwe deliberately made the natural navigation task difficult. I was fine until I got past my second starfish then the featureless terrain threw me and I ended up at the wrong bommy about 10m off course. The compass navigation was a cinch, however, and Uwe certified four dives, including the wreck dive I did the day before. We scheduled an underwater photography dive for Monday to complete the course.

I had come up with various ideas to keep myself occupied over the weekend but got distracted by the boys from Albany Harley Tours. There was a vintage bike rally in town followed by a hill race and I spent the weekend pretending to be a biker chick and getting free rides round town on the big, red Harley. The weather was dismal, being a typical south-west blend of whipping rain, blasting wind and bone-gnawing cold. But Monday morning dawned bright and calm for my final dive. Uwe is convinced I'm a weather god as I managed to conjure up perfect conditions for all my dives. We took his camera down to the caves and shelves where I dived before and I snapped away, trying not to be put off by the heavy surge that kept messing up the picture in my viewfinder. We finished the film off on a second dive and I claimed my Advanced certificate before reboarding the bus for Perth.

After twelve hours in Perth, I was off again with Easyrider, heading north. Yesterday was a day of intense driving to cover the 700km to pretty little Kalbarri. We overnighted there to see Murchison Gorge, a deep, layered sandstone canyon carved out by the Murchison River. The rich, red rock has the appearance of flaky pastry and is good for climbing and abseiling. We all had the option to slide down a cliff on a rope but I had to decline due to my ankle which I managed to wrench again on the way down. Three hundred more kilometres beneath our wheels has brought us into the familiar windswept redness of the outback. It's raw, dry and hot again and it's hard to believe that I was shivering and cursing the rain just a few days ago. Before arriving here in Denham we stopped off at the Hamelin Pool stromatolites. These quiet little mounds of microscopic cyanobacteria have been around for billions of years, refreshing the atmosphere with their oxygen production and were probably responsible for the course of evolution as we know it. Standing on the boardwalk, looking out across the rocky masses, it's easy to believe that it all began with these columns of tiny beasts in their gently lapping ocean, sucking up the sunlight and slowly giving life to the world. Tomorrow we're off to interact with some of that life, the friendly dolphins at Monkey Mia.

14 November 2001

G'day from Broome

It's hot, hot, hot here in the far north-west corner of WA. But the sky is blue, the ocean's warm and there's a cooling sea breeze that makes it all too easy to slip into Broometime.

I went to Monkey Mia last Thursday expecting the whole dolphin experience to be commercialised and more than a bit tacky. The 'Rough Guide' didn't give it a very good write-up and I was in two minds about the ethical merit of feeding wild animals for human entertainment. When we arrived, four dolphins were cruising about in the bay obviously waiting for the show to begin. At 8 a.m. the rangers came down and told us we could stand knee-deep in the water. Strict instructions were given not to touch the dolphins or interfere with them in any way as they made their approaches. I had expected them to keep their distance but as soon as we were standing there, in they came. Two mothers with grown-up calves soon appeared and, as the ranger walked up and down, one of the mothers followed at his heels like a puppy. She occasionally rolled on her side and gave us a wry smile as she patrolled the line of watchers. Her calf clicked, squeaked and frolicked, swimming straight at our legs then turning away at the last moment with a playful flick of her tail and blowing out a burst of air. The rangers came out with buckets of fish and we waited in keen anticipation to see who'd be the lucky few picked to drop a fish in a dolphin's mouth. The nearest ranger looked straight in my direction and I had a brief 'Who, me?' moment before stepping forward to take the proffered fish. The dolphin, Puck, opened her long, toothy mouth and I said, 'There you go, madam. Enjoy!' before dropping it in. Only the adult females are fed and they get a fraction of what they need each day in order to encourage them to go out and forage for themselves. Calves are never fed and people aren't allowed in the water when there are really young ones present. Despite my concerns, the situation was well controlled and the dolphins genuinely seem to enjoy the interaction. Looking at the faces of those watching I came to the conclusion that, for the sake of encouraging an appreciation of the natural world, this altered behaviour is perhaps acceptable. I certainly went away with a feeling that I had experienced something magical and special and I'll never forget that playful, intelligent face that looked up at me from the water with a cheeky grin.

Next stop up the coast was Coral Bay where the Ningaloo Reef comes right up to the shore and all you need to do is strap on a pair of fins and don a mask to enjoy its fishy delights. The first thing I saw was my old favourite from the Great Barrier Reef, the picassofish - diamond-shaped, kissing-mouthed and decorated by a master craftsman. There were many other fish I recognised and many new ones besides. On this side of Australia is hard coral which lacks the technicolours of the soft corals on the east coast but the fish life it supports is remarkable. We had another chance to explore the diversity from Exmouth. A current along the beach provides an easy swim over the top of some huge bommies with massive amounts of fish, sea cucumbers, nudibranchs and crustaceans. The stuff close to the beaches was great but I had to get out further and see what else the Ningaloo Reef had to offer. Yup, you guessed it, I was off diving again. I did my conjuring trick with the weather and we were able to get onto reefs that are usually inaccessible due to rough conditions. On the first dive we saw a stingray resting under an overhang, huge green and pink lobsters waving their spiny feelers and our dive guide flushed a tawny nurse shark from a cave. It shot out, a remora clinging to its back, turned its wide, flat head and came straight for me. I decided that staying exactly where I was would be the best thing and it zoomed past with a strong lash of its tail away into the blue. The second dive was into the Fish Hole where a huge potato cod wafted out from under its ledge with an entourage of cleaner fish. We also caught a glimpse of a large manta ray and I saw a turtle but couldn't get the message to anyone else before it flapped away.

Moving on from Exmouth, we turned inland for 600km of unrelenting outback before arriving at the mining town of Tom Price. This is the jump-off point for Karijini National Park which is another area of yawning sandstone gorges, but here they are interspersed with gnarly lumps of ironstone. We enjoyed cooling swims in Circular Pool and the beautiful Ferny Pool. This has a waterfall which you can sit behind and get a shiatsu massage from the tumbling water before jumping through the falling curtain into the warm depths of the plunge pool. Another long day of driving, music, snoozing and silly games and our happy band of ten arrived in Port Hedland. This is a brown town, stained by the ever-present rain of iron dust from the mines. Our hostel overlooked the harbour and the flashing red and green lights of the marker buoys along the channel created a Christmas tree effect, mingling with the constant glow from the container ships waiting to come in and deposit their cargoes. The final stretch of hot, unremarkable highway brought us here to tropical, lazy Broome. We spent this afternoon at heatstruck Cable Beach where the lifeguards dispense free water and sunscreen, and have just come back from watching 'America's Sweethearts' sitting in deckchairs under the sparkling canopy of heaven. I could get used to this.

Remember, life is a cookie.

26 November 2001

G'day from Darwin

Thirty-five degrees in the shade. Giant green frogs in the toilets. A rope swing across a warm, dark plunge pool. Bush camping under a meteor shower. Kangaroo tail curry for dinner. Swimming in a crocodile-infested river. Moments-notice road closures in the start of the Wet. Toe-biting catfish. The tiger-striped, beehive domes of the Bungle Bungles from the air. Sweat-soaked days and lightning-show nights. Spaghetti bolognaise in the outback. Ridgey-didge Aussie ockers. Western Australia to the Northern Territory. Broome to Darwin.

I said a reluctant goodbye to my Easyrider buddies and waited for the big, rumbling 4WD from West Coast Explorer to pick me up early on Sunday morning. I joined driver Henry, nine seasoned travellers who'd come up from Perth and eight other newbies for an eight-day camping tour. After stopping at a portly boab tree used to house Aboriginal prisoners in transit to Derby, we left the relative comfort of the highway for the Gibb River Road. This is a dirt track of legend, only navigable for part of the year, and gives access to the stony mysteries of the Kimberley region.

This part of Australia is famous for its cavernous, red sandstone gorges and the Kimberley is peppered with them. We stopped in at Tunnel Creek first, an underground river through a limestone tube populated by bats that leads to a cave full of sparkling formations and a murky swimming hole. We camped that first night at Windjana Gorge and Henry took us down to the creek which stank of rotting fish and other dead things. We sat while the sun sank wondering in what insanity he'd brought to this smelly, unremarkable place. We soon found out. When the sun hit the horizon, thousands upon thousands of fruit bats poured out of the trees, whooshing over our heads on leathery wings towards the candy stripes of the sunset. They swooped down to drink from the creek and were feverishly snapped at by lurking freshwater crocodiles before swirling in a flock out of the gorge to find food. There are few things I would genuinely ascribe the word 'awesome' to but that jaw-dropping display of natural vitality was one of them.

We climbed in and out of more steep, sun-raked gorges and rewarded ourselves with refreshing swims in the rivers that have carved them. My ankle held out well, having been exercised, x-rayed and taped up in Broome. We were supposed to travel the whole of the Gibb but only got as far as the store at the Aboriginal community of Imintji. This part of the year is the start of the Wet season and the rest of the road had been shut forcing us to double back to the tough-as-nuts outback town of Fitzroy Crossing. We kept our fingers crossed that the road into the Bungle Bungles, the highlight of the trip, wouldn't be shut as well.

The gods of the road were smiling on us and the 60km-long, stomach-churning track into Purnululu National Park was open. The Bungle Bungle massif came to public attention in 1982, being known before to only a handful of station owners, scientists and Aboriginals. It is remarkable for its soft sandstone domes, coated in alternate stripes of orange iron oxide and black cyanobateria. These ramble on for thousands of hectares, interspersed with deep fissures like Echidna Chasm and the booming cave of Cathedral Gorge. Once at Kununurra, I chose to take a plane flight over the massif which looked like a landscape from another planet.

We crossed the border into the Northern Territory on Saturday, reset our watches and made our final bush camp at the peaceful fishing spot of Big Horse Creek. This was a definite no-swim zone as the harmless freshwater crocs are replaced by their dangerous saltwater cousins on the Victoria River. Our arrival in Darwin was preceded by a swim at Edith Falls. I stopped here before on my way up from Alice but this time we swam in torrential rain that turned the surface of the lake into frothing bubbles and soaked our backpacks on the roof of the truck. I've just had another drenching on the way to the internet cafe but in the time it's taken me to write this email the clouds have broken up and the sun has come out again.

I'm now in my final two weeks in Australia which seems hard to believe. My bike is still chained up where I left it four months ago, my post has caught up with me, I'm getting my last batch of digital pictures downloaded and I'll soon be saying goodbye to my final batch of new friends. So it goes.

3 December 2001

G'day from... um... Albany

Er... yeah, I'm back in Albany. It may seem like an odd decision to travel about 4500km back to somewhere I've already been but this wasn't an entirely irrational thing for me to do. As you know, I was in Darwin earlier in the year for some time. Jackie and I just about exhausted its possibilities then and it's pretty much shut down now for the Wet. Not only was I getting soaked on a regular basis by the deluging of tropical storms, it was also unbearably sticky. During the Wet the temperature doesn't change from its usual 30 degrees but the humidity escalates to the point of being energy-draining. With nothing much else to do for the two weeks until I fly out to Bali I decided to go somewhere cooler... Oh dear, this isn't sounding like a very convincing reason for spending $700 to go halfway across Australia, does it? OK, OK, the REAL reason I came back to Albany is a bloke called Shayne. He's one of the guys who does the Harley-Davidson tours and I could make a joke about enjoying having something big, red and throbbing between my legs again but that would just be plain rude.

I'm still getting rained on most days but at least I don't have the oppressive heat to contend with here and I'm enjoying the cooler air. Getting here was something of an adventure in itself. I flew from Darwin to Perth across the dead, red expanse of Western Australia. The flight took over three hours and after leaving Darwin I saw no signs of human life at all until we started to descend into Perth. Even after 10 months here the vast scale of Australia still staggers me. I had to spend the night in Perth where I went to see 'Lantana' at the excellent Cinema Paradiso. I don't know if this Australian film's been released in the UK but if you do get the chance to see it I'd highly recommend it.

I caught the daily coach down to Albany with a disparate collection of seasoned travellers who got on board laden with pillows, neckrests, bags of goodies and piles of books and games to while away the six hours of highway. The bus driver showed a film then put on a documentary about the Kimberley, of all places, during which I kept thinking 'Oooh, been there!'. Shayne was waiting by the tourist centre when I arrived in Albany and has been like an excited puppy ever since.

One of my first ports of call was the dive shop to say hello to my Advanced course instructor, Uwe, and book myself on a couple of dives. Last weekend Albany was the centre of attention when the HMAS Perth was scuttled in King George Sound to provide another ready-made dive site. I've booked with Uwe to dive the Perth tomorrow but I went out for two dives at Breaksea Island and the 'Cheynes III' wreck where I went last time I was here. I took with me my latest toy, an underwater point-and-shoot camera, and snapped away at my favourite fish and corals. Having achieved reasonable results from my first attempt at underwater photography, I'm hopeful that they'll come out well this time too. The seas around Albany are pretty rough which makes handling a camera something of a challenge but I had my first dose of seasickness out there too. It actually started when I was under the water and I thought I was going to chunder into my regulator which would have provided the fish with a free feed at least. I'd like to think it was the swell and the rhythmic waving of the kelp that made me queasy but I think it had more to do with the huge pile of bacon and eggs I had before I went. However, I hung onto my breakfast and the dive on the whale chaser was excellent, as before.

Shayne does a DJ session on one of the local radio stations on a Friday afternoon so I spent four hours with him in front of the production desk trying to make him laugh during the weather report. He also got me an invite to the Chamber of Commerce's Christmas party last night where we drank lots of free booze and snacked on canapes with the rest of Albany's tourist business community. I've got a free boat cruise lined up for later in the week and, of course, get regular trips on the back of a big, red Harley.

I fly back on Saturday and then it's all over. Ten months seemed like such a long time and now it seems like no time at all.

Last email from Darwin.

8 December 2001

See you later - from Darwin

Oh no, it's raining again... It seems that wherever I go I can't get away from downpours. My plans for diving the wreck of the HMAS Perth were put on hold for three days due to 30-knot winds which blew the cold rain horizontal and whipped King George Sound to cappuccino. As always happens in these cases, the weather fined up the day I was due to leave Albany. Yesterday dawned bright and sunny with a light breeze tickling the flags on the jetty. I finally got out to the Perth but the chaos of the previous few days had stirred up the sediment from the hole in which she sits. For us it made the visibility a measly 2m at best. We went down anyway and finned our way along the deck towards the stern and I tried to take a few pictures. We came back round the antenna and into the bridge where the divemaster took a photo of me sitting in the captain's chair. The Perth has only been down a fortnight and the fish haven't moved in yet, so we had to content ourselves with exploring a ghost ship devoid of any life apart from other divers whose dark shapes and streams of bubbles drifted silently over its surface. For the second dive we went out to the reefs and enjoyed looking at little catsharks, big groupers and neon blue devil fish. Shayne took me for a final spin on the Harley along the coast road before it was time to say goodbye and get back on the bus for the tedious six-hour journey to Perth. I hardly had time to rest before getting up again for the plane to Darwin. I caught up on some sleep before it dropped through thick, grey clouds into the dense heat - and then down came the rain.

I leave tomorrow after ten months travelling, still having seen only a fraction of a vast, sunburnt country. I've often said to people I've met here that making up my mind to do this journey was the best decision I've ever made and that is true now more then ever. I've seen rain-washed mountains, sun-bleached beaches, red-hot deserts, rainforests of staggering lushness, craggy gorges of tortured rock caressed by waterfalls, technicoloured gardens of coral in a looking-glass ocean, and a flora and fauna that constantly defies convention. I've been to cosmopolitan, world-class cities, sedate, quiet country towns and whacky settlements in the outback with characters all their own. I've wriggled through caves, climbed rocks, flown in a balloon, jumped out of a plane, done aerobatics in a Tiger Moth, seen whales and fed dolphins, learnt to scuba dive and stood on top of one of the world's most recognisable bridges. I've also met the friendliest, most easy-going and accommodating people I've ever come across. All of this I'll truly miss and a little piece of my heart is left behind in every one.

But I'm tired. Tired of sharing creaky bunk-beds in roomfuls of strangers. Tired of having to answer the same questions over and over again (Where do come from? How long have you been here? What do you do back home?). Tired of just getting to like someone before they disappear in a different direction. Tired of pounding the endless, hot miles of highway on a bus. Tired of wearing the same clothes and carrying that bloody backpack. Tired of always being the tourist. Tired of impermanence.

I feel like I've done all I came to do and a whole lot more but I'm ready to leave now. It's time to move on.

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