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The moon and back
There may be few worse things, but not many, than to have a flat car battery in the Australian desert and it happened to a young couple who happily for them caught our attention. Fortunately they had jumper leads and we had a car that worked; the wife was seven months pregnant so there would have been better places to have been marooned, and we felt good having done a good deed for the day restarting their car.
About three hours north of Perth, just south of Cervantes is a place called the Nambung National Park and, within it, contrasting deserts, one of pure white sand, another of yellow and then the gritty, dusty outback red. But it is not that which makes this park famous, the area is best known for the Pinnacles Desert, where hundreds of limestone pillars rise out of the sand like some moon landscape. These limestone pinnacles reach as high as 3.5 metres, many are like columns and pillars (and some phallic ones at that) while others are like big, jagged tombstones; and there are literally thousands of them. The scientific explanation is that they were formed from sea shells which were broken down into lime-rich sands which were blown into the desert forming dunes. Acidic rain then dissolved small amounts of the calcium carbonate which leached its way down through the dunes and formed a sort of cement in the lower levels, thereby creating a limestone rock. In turn, the winds eroded the soft sand leaving the hard pinnacles exposed.
That explanation done, we preferred the version from the aboriginal dreamtime which is to the effect that the pinnacles are the upward reaching fingers of children who, against their elders’ advice, strayed into the desert and sank in the soft sands. Those fingers, said to be grasping for help, are all that remain.
We didn’t sink though, we parked up in the sand among the pinnacles with the air conditioning on full blast watching a family of scruffy looking Emu forage in the few scrubby bushes while we foraged on grapes, cheese and crackers, avocado and prawns thoughtfully packed by cousin Fiona who came with us for the day.
Nearby, the town of Cervantes is a cray fishing port and Fiona’s lunch was intended as an entrée to a good hearty post-desert feed of fresh crays. Unfortunately for us the fishers were having a few days off over the New Year period and the only café in town wanted $A29 for a salad and half a crayfish, previously frozen. That wasn’t for us so we detoured to a place called Gingin only to find the one café in town also closed. Undeterred we decided to wait until we reached home and head down to the local Thai restaurant for some good ethnic food. That too was closed.
It may seem careless to break down in the desert, but if one thing is evident in Western Australia it is that cars are pretty indiscriminate about where they fail. There are always vehicles needing attention on the sides of the highways that intersect Perth, so frequent is it that we set about looking for an explanation and we aren’t yet sure we’ve found one. There is no warrant of fitness requirement here and our initial thought that this may be the explanation was set aside in the knowledge that few countries we have visited have any enforced roadworthiness standards. Nowhere else is there as many stranded vehicles, not even in Cairo. The high temperatures may be a contributing factor, but then again it is not as hot here as in the Middle East (although we learned that the central north-west of Australia is the hottest place on earth). The third possibility is that as a consequence of the sheer number of miles cars travel here in this big country, they regularly clock up 300,000 kilometers without too much need for maintenance whereas at home 100,000 is considered high mileage. The truth may be a combination of all factors but one thing is for sure; cars left unattended on the side of the road don’t last long before their windows are smashed and every removable item taken.