What a Trip It Has Been

What a trip it has been
So I am now going to relate to my loyal reader the events of the last week. These events have mainly involved me being trapped in a small van on our way through the vast nothingness of Western Australia to Exmouth. My trip started on Sunday morning on the 28th of September. My friends and I had spent the last month trying to figure out what we would do for our Mid-Semester Break. This is the Australian equivalent of the Spring Break with the only real difference that its name carries with it less connotations of psychotic partying, and most of the Aussie student just go back to see their family.
For our spring break Georg and I spent a great deal of time juggling ideas that would involve us traversing the outback with a few other students roughing it on our own and getting to see the barren stretches of endless road and bush for ourselves. Our original plan was to take a plane up to Broome, the northern most point of WA, rent a car, and road trip back. Georg and the few others that wanted to go with us had the suicidal urge to go offroading. It must be understood that everyone who was planning on travelling with me was from Europe and had not the remotest inkling of a glimmer of the notion of how big and open a track of nothing there is after you leave Perth. Not only is the bush in WA as big as I have noted but unless you have a really good grasp on your map (or GPS), you would still need something on the lines of a Jeep or Dune Buggy to traverse the rough terrain. The real downfall of this plan, however, was when we added up the price of fuel for the 1,000 mile trip back. So after throwing this plan to the wayside we looked into a flyer that had been going around campus advertising a bus trip to Exmouth. For only $770 we were promised seven days of adventure, full meals, and a place to sleep. None of the days were without an excursion to some interesting location, plus we would have an experienced tour guide to reduce our risk of death via dehydration after succumbing to drinking our own urine, o’natural. I am only slightly exaggerating the danger of the trip. The only reason I believe that our original plan was on the ludicrous side was because I could tell that no one else in the group had the faintest idea of what we would be doing. And you do need to stock up on water at every opportunity (as we did) because you do find yourself travelling for four hours straight before seeing a road house.
So we shelled at the money and left for our trip. Our tour guide was 28 year old Aussie named Sara, who had live more countries than I could keep track of, including living in Borneo to try to save the Orang-utans. There were 37 students on the bus, half from our village and the other half from the Mount Lawley Village. And they were way too many German speakers. Not that I have anything against the German language (in theory), more that you are made abundantly aware of when you have been cut out of a conversation when you are talking to two friends and it goes like this:
Thomas(German): Hey, did you have a good time last night?
Christoph(Austrian): Gut, erhielt ich vollständig betrunken!
One the first day we visited the Pinnacles. These are thousands of tall pointy rocks in the middle of the desert. As rocks go they did their job very well. While I cannot say that this was the most exciting part of the trip I appreciated it none the less. One the way there we saw a shingle-back on the side of the road. Sara stopped to show it to us. It is a rather ugly lizard whose tale looks like its head. When it gets annoyed it opens its mouth to twice the size of its head and sticks out its tongue.
The first night we were meant to sleep at a farm house but, by an amusing serious events, we got to stay at a beach house. The beach house and farm were run by an amiable sheep farmer who hunts kangaroo on his ranch. And guess what was for dinner! Yes we had kangaroo stew for dinner. This meal was a pleasant one and tasted similar in many ways to deer. The next morning we had sand boarding which meant that we had to wake up at the ungodly hour of 5:30 in the morning. Two psychotic students from Mt. Lawley, one a Norwegian name Roy the other a German named Thomas, took it upon themselves to jump in the ocean every morning. They did this, despite the fact that the water was 45 degrees and far too shallow to actually swim in. That morning we did indeed go sand boarding which was much better than the first attempt of sand boarding we had two weeks before. The problem with sandboarding is that, unlike snow, sand does not melt. It gets into every crevice of your face, your pockets, and fills your shoes. This was the start of Ryan the sand man as I progressively gained more and more sand about my person every day till by the end of the trip if I shook myself slightly a small beach would fall from my person. However the sandboarding was an interesting excursion and we all had fun.
Our next stop that day was to the Kalbarri coastal gorges. These were breathtaking gorges on a beach. We saw dolphins jumping in in the water bellow. After this we drove to the Murchison Gorges which, while smaller than the Grand Canyon, where nonetheless of a similar degree in awe-inspiring. It was during this excursion that I learnt the German phrase for damn flies “Verdammen Fliegen” which I used in excess on the trip. The flies were relentless and covered us at any opportunity. Our last excursion of the day was to the aptly named Shell Beach. What the beach lacked in sand it made up for in shells. It was at this stop that I found the error in my ways of leaving my thongs (flip-flops) at home. My rational had been “well these will just take up more space in my backpack if I will only were these on the beach and on the beach I might as well just be barefoot. So while on the beach I went barefoot. The shells hurt a little but I ignored it. While talking to Jed I absentmindedly started picking at a sand covered rock with my foot. As I started dig deeper I noticed this odd red substance in the ground. I started picking at it more to figure out what it was. The deeper I got the more of it I saw. Then I looked at my big toe and realized that I had cut open my toe and was making the gash deeper and deeper. This made the rest of the trip much more interesting as I could not put my sneakers on because my toe was cut and I had no thongs so I went of the trip barefoot everywhere.
We spent that night (after eight hours of travel) at Monkey Mia, a beachside community renowned for its prevalence of human friendly dolphins. In the morning there was a little show on the beach in front of the hostel as dolphin handlers fed the dolphins. From there we went to a quasi-aquarium on a beachside where we were shown all the local aquatic creatures. I was terribly amused at how this pissed off our environmentalist tour guide. The people running the aquarium considered themselves environmentalists because they were catch the creatures in a friendly manner taking care of them for a year or two, feeding them well and torturing them and then releasing them. This was done with the idea of demonstrating the beauty of the local environment so as to promote conservation. But Sarah was under the impression that these heathens were merely taking creatures out of their homes pissing them off in cages and then discarding them. I personally found the aquarium to be very pleasant and the animals all seemed content and well treated. From there we spent many hours on the car only to stop at barren roadhouses in the middle of nowhere to buy overpriced deep-fried food. We spent that night at coral bay and luckily had the next day to stay there and not do any traveling.
For our Coral Bay day we had tree options. We could either spend $160 to go snorkeling with manta rays (roughly the size of a bus), spend $40 on kayaking and going snorkeling about a mile off the beach, or just hanging out. I opted for the $40 trip much to the needling off certain friends of mine who thought I was copping out when I could be snorkeling with manta rays. I felt very vindicated when I went kayaking and the guide informed me that there had not been any manta rays spotted for the last four days. And sure enough those friends of mine that went on that trip did see no manta rays. I must say I had great experience with the snorkeling. Having never kayaked before I found that part a little trying, but I persevered and made it with the rest of the group. I was a little nervous because the only times I had snorkeled before had been with a life jacket on so when I first got into the water I had to talk myself down as I was panicking a little. But once I got use to it I found my swimming skills were far better than I gave myself credit for and not only was I able to stay on top but I was also diving bellow to the bottom. We saw all sorts of fish, turtles, coral, octopi, and even a shark. I strove not to tough any of the coral, as I had been informed of how I could potentially kill it just by touching it. This did not deter Jed however from standing on a mound of coral and diving off.
After two hours we made it back home and spent the rest of the day hanging out in the town. That night I walked off on my own onto the beach to play my guitar by the moon light. To my consternation I was discovered by some of my friend who made me perform for them. This went on for about an hour ant then we went to leave. As we were leaving we bumped into another group of our friends from the trip who were miffed with my friends for going to the beach without them. They had an epic story to tell about the last half hour. Apparently Christoph, Roy, Thomas, and Heidi were looking for the group I had been playing for because they heard that they were on the beach. Unfortunately, they went to the wrong side of the beach. It was pitch black and Thomas stepped on something sharp and organic. He screamed “I stepped on a sea urchin” he was convinced that he was going to die but was informed by the biologist Heidi that sea urchins would just cause him a huge amount of pain but not kill him. They couldn’t see the creature because it was too dark so they used their camera to take pictures. Down the beach they bumped into a group of teenagers and told them of what happened . The teenagers went to look at creature and came back telling my friends that what Thomas had stepped on was not a sea urchin but an echidna. Echidnas are mammals not unlike the platypus in the way that they are prehistoric mammals that lay eggs. They almost never show up on beaches so this was a very unlikely event to have happen.
After we were told this story they were still upset that they had not been there with us. The first group of my friends left but this second group saw me with my guitar and made me play for them… for another hour. After we were done we went back to the hostel. At the hostel we met many many Germans. We also met three Irish backpackers. I started talking to them about my affections for all music Irish and was able to use the only Gaelic phrase I knew on them to which the corrected all my pronunciation. They seemed rather intrigued by some of the obscure Irish bands I knew. Though I think I began to annoy the one as she started to describe me as “obsessed” with Irish music. I mentioned I was a fan of the Dubliners and the one said “you heard that Ronnie Drew just died recently?” “No” I replied. “That is a real bumber.” She retorted with the sarcasm in her voice that only an Irish accent allows “Yes that is a ‘bit of a bumber’ I think.”
The next morning we set off to Exmouth. It was another break neck day of travelling. We made it to Exmouth at 2:00pm and went snorkelling. It was a tranquil beach but the water was just a little too chilly for my blood, remember we are just getting out of winter here. That night we threw a surprise birthday party for Elisabeth with a plethora of sound makers that we took full advantage of for an hour until he were out of breath. I left as the drinking games started and woke up to find that Christoph (who had been sleeping in a top bunk) had become completely intoxicated and vomited on the head of Thomas who slept on the bunk underneath him. So of course we relentlessly taunted Christoph for the rest of the trip. From Exmouth we were homeward bound and travelled none stop to the farmhouse we were meant to sleep at the first night. On the way Sara was telling me of how the original aboriginal settlers killed off all the giant birds and lizards that once inhabited Australia. To which I explained my philosophy of evolution karma, in which mammals spent millions of years being stepped on and eaten by dinosaurs only for the dinosaurs to evolve into big stupid birds and lizards and be killed off by the descendents of the aforementioned mammals. At the farmhouse that night we had more kangaroo and sat by a camp fire. I was asked to bring out my guitar and spent the night trying to play songs that people would enjoy and found that no matter where I go one person in every bloody group asks me to play “Wonderwall” by Oasis.
The next day we made two pit stops the first was at the Hutt River Province. This was a giant ranch that had seceded from the federation in the 70’s when the farmer now known as King Leonard was annoyed at the quotas put on his crops by the government decided to remove his land as an entity from Australia. King Leonard is a charming old man of 82 who is the archetypal grandfather figure and dresses in plain clothing. He rather reminded me of an Australian version of my great-grandfather. His micro nation even had its own currency and postage. He had a church and he had an Easter Island style statue of himself in his front yard. The country also offered authentic passports was had a legal system. From this intriguing trip we were onto the Greenough Wildlife Park. The park was a rehabilitation center for hurt animals and had kangaroos roaming freely on the premises. It had everything from emus to donkeys to chickens to camels. While there we were allowed to handle giants pythons.
After another six hours of travelling we finally made it home and I collapsed feeling as though I needed a week of rest from my break. It took me several days to clean out all the sand I had accumulated. But I must say I had a wonderful trip and met many interesting people.
Well that is it for now. I am currently trying not to scream as I have several assignments due and finals are coming up in three weeks.
Yours truly,
Ryan Messer