Australia day 2

28 June

During the night the heavens opened up and poured a torrent of rain upon us. Snug in our camper van, we listened to the rain, replete with lightening and thunder, pelting our high fiberglass top. This deluge more than made up for the monsoon that missed us in Mumbai. As the black of night furtively became a heavy gray dawn, I could see that a shallow lake had formed beneath our camper while we slept. I had to roll up my jeans and wade out into this lake in my crocs to disconnect the power cable feeding juice to our house [boat].

It was our first night in our camper. There are going to be adjustment as we get comfortable with this arrangement, but so far so good. We have to pat ourselves on the back for making it through our first night. We pulled away from our pond at Myalup and headed for the town of Bunbury in the rain. When we got there our first priority was to find a McDonald's so we could connect to the Internet and check e-mail and post the latest blog entries. We saw a sign pointing to a McDonald's in town somewhere, but then no more follow-up signs of McDonald's were posted again along the way there. We found the Tourist Information Centre on our way to the highlight of Bunbury, its dolphins. The nice woman inside marked several worthy destinations on a map of Bunbury, including the McDonald's. The dolphin experience lost its appeal when we learned that the dolphins were free-living and not likely to be seen. She arranged for Razelle to get disabled parking in Bunbury, but the permit probably won't be valid anywhere else. We'll have to wait and see. She also said there was an Internet café around the corner that was more convenient than McDonald's. We took her suggestion and patronized the place; it's called the Café Fez. Razelle ordered scrambled eggs; I had an Irish cream (flavored) coffee. This gave us the privilege to use their Wi-Fi connection. We spent a good hour during the shank of the morning hooked up to the Internet, reading and writing mail, and checking out information about the area we are in. And, of course, posting to the blog. The price for this privilege was far greater than it would have been at McDonald's, which annoyed me a lot.

We drove south along the coast far later in the day than I would have liked. I feel a lot more competent about driving now after a night's rest and after logging some more driving time today. The scenery was breathtaking along this section. At one point we found a bay with great foaming waves crashing on a crescent-shaped coastline with a few rocks offshore that sent spray skyward when struck by waves, reminiscent of breaching whales spouting.

The rain had cleared up so we tarried here long enough to pose for pictures of each other against this backdrop and to marvel at the plant forms along the hiking trail, plant forms that looked like nothing I'd ever seen before.

Eventually the road moved in from the coast and passed through the most majestic stands of tall brown-and-beige mottled eucalyptus trees we'd ever seen.

Needing to take a break, we pulled into a side road leading to one of the caves in the area and parked. Accessible toilets were on the right and a nature center was on the left. Razelle and I each headed toward the object of our immediate interest. I asked lots of questions about all the unusual plants we'd seen so far. The woman who manned this center got out reference material for me to look through and we began to speak to each other in a mixture of Latin and (two forms of) English as she and I discussed the taxonomic relationships of these native plants to ones I knew from other parts of the world. Razelle watched this from the side with amusement. She saw two people with a common interest both in their element. The cave, unlike the toilets, was not accessible to the disabled, so we didn't visit it.

Driving onward, I now had a grounding in what kind of greenery was coming at us. This helped me enjoy the scenery even more than before.

Our ultimate destination along this coastal area was Augusta and the lighthouse at land's end. In this south-western-most corner of Australia is a tiny peninsula. You can park at its base, pay admission at the visitors' center and walk its length between two oceans to the lighthouse at its tip and climb up inside it.

We declined, but we did take pictures of the two oceans (the Indian Ocean and the Southern Sea).

The skies were welling up again with rain clouds as we returned to Augusta. You could miss this town if you weren't paying attention. We found an IGA grocery store and bought a few things for the camper experience and then headed out into the dark as the first raindrops began to fall. It was only 5:30 PM. It seemed a shame to stay put here for the night when our next destination was reachable within an hour or two of driving. Even though there were several caravan sites here, we pushed on in the dark and now pouring rain. Not another set of headlights were seen the rest of the night as I drove on through a national forest to a tiny town called Nannup. It had a caravan park, according to the literature. When we finally reached Nannup at about 7:30 PM the proprietor of the caravan park remarked that we were out late. It wasn't even 8:00 PM; that's considered late? It is around here -- because of the risk of running into an emu or a kangaroo in the dark. We'd seen neither, but I will take this information to heart from now on. Because nobody, I mean NOBODY, was on the road with us. Had anything happened to us during that drive, help wouldn't have come until daylight.

Setting up for the night was already easier than it had been the night before. We had a better idea where things were and how to accommodate each other in our cozy camper. Walking back and forth outside I noticed that the rain had stopped and the stars were out again. I immediately found the southern cross and smiled.