Karijini

Well, folks, let me start by making a donation request. Yes, like the PBS pledge break, it’s that time of year again. No, actually, I lost my camera in the wonderful Karijini National Park. I accidentally left it at a trail-head and returned to find it gone. I was sure it would show up in lost and found, but it did not.

So, now I need to buy a new camera. If you’ve enjoyed my photos, or you just sort of like me, consider sending me a few bucks. You can donate to me by clicking here. If you are using a credit card follow the link at the bottom of the page near the credit card icons. All right, enough of that. I did lose my digital camera but still took a few photos with my film camera which were then terribly scanned by the photo place in Broome. Most of the photos below were taken by Anna Lombardi. Grazie, Anna. I’m using a new plugin that should make the images pop up over the web page when you click on them. Let me know if it’s cool or annoying.

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Karijini National park is truly a wonderful and beautiful place. Situated in the endless scrubby desert of Western Australia, Karijini is a series of gorges cut into the earth by streams of lava. Now, though, cool streams of water course through them. You hike down into the gorges, sometimes scrambling along the rock walls, and follow the streams to small and large pools of water which you can swim in. At Joffre falls, we actually swam along the gorge for about 300 meters. None of us dared bring a camera for such a long swim, though, so I have no pics of that.

I’m in Broome now, where the desert meets the tropics. It’s a chill vacation town. “Slow down town,” a resident told me. I’m going to go camp on the beaches for a few days, then buy a camera and, at some point, head into the Kimberleys. Enjoy the pics of Karijini.


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Northward

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At Lake Ballard, a huge muddy puddle really, 50 kilometers outside of the small mining town of Menzies, in the Goldfields of Western Australia, there are statues. fifty-one thin, alien like, statues. Installed by artist Antony Gormley in 2003 the statues are apparently made from digital scans of local residents, but I couldn’t see any resemblance. I’d heard about the statues from two Australians I met (Rock and Annie) and I knew I had to see them. I like art that isn’t in a museum, and Lake Ballard is far from a museum.

I arrived in the late afternoon and trudged around in the mud to see the statues. After the sun set I ate a granola bar and an apple and curled up in the back of my Toyota Landcruiser. Her name is Ruth. I woke up before the sun rose and took some more pictures, then headed back to Perth. It was a long way to go (1400 kilometers round trip), but it was worth it.


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A few weeks earlier I stayed with a friend of my mother’s, Russel. Russel owns a farm in Newdegate, in the Wheat Belt.

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The crops had already been harvested and the new crop was yet to be planted, so there wasn’t much for me to do. One day, though, Russel drove a tractor around his fields to rake up the remaining straw into rows. Then he told me to burn the straw. It was every 12-year-old boy’s fantasy: a man hands you a pitcher full of buring diesel and tells you to frolic about the land starting fires. Hell, it was fun for a 37 year old.

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So, about Ruth. I bought her a bit over a month ago so I could drive around the country, particularly north to Broome and Darwin. Ruth is a four-wheel drive vehicle, which allows me to drive down bumpy, rocky tracks and through sand. I’ve only just begun to get the hang of it, but it’s a lot of fun. I actually towed some other tourists out of a sandy road they’d attempted to drive in their rental car. I didn’t feel quite like a super-hero, but I felt pretty manly.

I’ve met up with three backpackers, Anna (Italian), Emily (Taiwanese), and Masako (Japanese). We’ve been working our way up the coast slowly, camping along the way – sometimes in a nice pretty spot, sometimes in a caravan park, or sometimes at a rest-stop by the side of the highway. Near Shark Bay we drove over 100 kilometers on dirt roads and found a deserted beach to camp at. I had bought a 40-buck fishing rod in Denham and I cast it out into the surf with some squid bait. After twenty minutes I caught a fish! A Tailor fish. I know it doesn’t look big in the pictures, but it weighed 5-7 pounds and fed four people (with some sweet potatoes). After we grilled the fish and baked the potatoes I introduced my international companions to S’mores. You know, the marshmallow and chocolate camp treat. There are no Graham-crackers in Australia so I had to improvise with some Arnott’s biscuits. They tasted pretty much the same. Anna loved them but, as usual, I found the gooey marshmallows just too damn sweet.

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