2015/11 Australia trip - Fitzgerald River East |
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We returned to the South Coast Highway and shopped in Ravensthorpe. We tried to fill up with water again, but couldn’t get any to go into the tank. I think this was when we realized that we were chasing the wrong problem. The reason we had no water that morning was actually that the camper battery had been flat. When we had the camper built in 2002 we’d specified that we wanted two camper batteries so that we could run both the fridge and my CPAP at night. However, charging two batteries in parallel never works well for long, and after he’d had some bad experiences with batteries fuming, John went back to a single battery. Now that we weren’t blasting 300 miles a day, we weren’t charging the battery enough to last overnight. My CPAP would stop and so did the water pump.
We knew that all the gravel roads into the park would be closed so we drove down to the coast at Hopetoun, where there is a blacktop road into the east side of the park. We came to a campground named “four mile”, all brand new with concrete and gravel, but the view up to East Mount Barren was good and we were on another of those perfect white sand beaches with turquoise water.
Wednesday October 28th
We had a thunderstorm overnight and the heavy rain was continuing into the morning. A ranger I met under a shelter told me that I might as well hunker down as the weather system was set for the day, with downpours and hail in the forecast. He also told me that Cape Arid, our planned stop for Sunday night, had recently been burned out, not good news.
Contrary to his forecast the rain eased off and we drove up to the Barrens overlook. The picture gives an idea of the rugged scenery; the distant isthmus, squeezed between lake and ocean, carries the only road into this part of the park.
We were only about thirty miles east of where we’d been at Cape Ann but we had yet more new plants amongst the royal hakea. Most spectacular were these barrens regelias, looking like balsam firs from a distance, but festooned with these bright red balls; they looked like leggy Christmas trees with the ornaments already attached.
Our next stop was at East Mount Barren, the mountain that dominates the campground. We followed the boardwalk, finding more plants, but the trail to the top was rather rough, leading to a wall of rocks. Sandie wasn’t too keen and there were lots of other places to explore. At least that was what we thought, but we found that most of the roads were gravel and closed because of the dieback risk. Even the hiking trails had boot cleaning bristle devices to use before venturing onto the trail; not too friendly when you’re wearing sandals.
All that was left for us to explore were a few blacktop roads that led down to the coast, good for coffee and lunch stops. By now the sun was out and so were the flies, but we walked the trails out 
to overlooks and beaches. There were a few sandy beaches but most of the coastline was rugged rocks and cliffs.
At one of the beaches I met a local who was cooking up a barbeque lunch for a bunch of Chinese tourists who were out on a fishing trip. He said the Western Australian government had pumped tourism money into the area after the nickel and lithium mines had closed. Hence the massive parking lots and concrete and gravel all ready for the hundreds of tourists. Mostly ours was the only vehicle, surrounded by acres of empty parking lot. It seemed to be overkill for a place miles from anywhere.
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Ftzgerald Coast (1.19) |
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We came back to East Mount Barren; Sandie stayed in the camper while I set out up the mountain. There was no real trail, more a route with markers to follow. There were no switchbacks, just a steep climb straight up the rock wall, followed by a traverse through the clouds to the big rocks at the summit. This shard looked to be an obvious target. One of the rocks nearby was adorned with a wooden cross, so I thought that was probably the top.
It wasn’t, but the rock next to it was, and I managed to climb up far enough to take this selfie before the wind blew the camera off the top. I was inside the 
clouds so visibility was limited; I could see nothing at all to the north but the plants around were beautiful, reds, blues, yellows, and a dozen shades of green. The barrens regalia grew up there too, with the same red flowers, but only a foot high.
Coming back down was harder as the plants hid holes in the rock and I fell into one of those and got an unwanted close-up of a banksia plant. I was glad I’d made the climb though even if getting out of bed in the morning might be painful.
Weird and wonderful flowers again on this day; these are just a few of them.
Thursday October 29th 
We had a welcome blue sky in the morning, our first for a week. It was still cool with a wind but it would have been perfect for the previous day’s climb.