Australia day 4

30 June

We woke up late this morning, meaning later than sunrise. By 8:30 AM we still hadn't seen much activity in the caravan park. We went about a routine Razelle and I are settling into and by nearly 10:00 we were heading for Albany, the paragon of civilization because they have a McDonald's (with free Internet access)!

We drove through the Valley of the Giants again to get there and to marvel at the immensity of these trees. We've seen so many of these by now, but I know we won't see anything like this again in Australia (even if the Blue Mountains above Sydney have forests like these the trees there won't be this massive). We reached Albany by midday and scanned the horizon for those golden arches. Albany looks like a very attractive historic place well worth spending time exploring. We found McDonald's and spent an hour and a half connected to the Internet. I accomplished a lot in that time, including making on-line reservations for a hotel in Alice Springs and getting addresses and phone numbers for Jewish institutions in Perth in preparation for our weekend there. Of course I checked my email and Razelle checked hers and, naturally, I posted to the blog. In this day and age, it seems a shame that so much vacation time needs to be spent looking for and sucking on an Internet feed. The time it took to do this (multi-tasking with five screens open at once, no less) is too much. By early afternoon, with an early winter sunset not very many hours away, we went looking for Whale World.

Until 1978, Albany had been a major whaling port. No whaling takes place here anymore, so the whale oil rendering plant has been turned into a tourist attraction. Razelle and I got there just as the last tour was scheduled to leave. I raced around the camper locking it up while Razelle got tickets. When I caught up with her we found that the entire group was just us two. Our guide was happy to show us the works and to accommodate Razelle's limited physical abilities. We learned a lot about whaling. You had to have a strong stomach for this kind of work. The information on whale biology and behavior was more appealing than the description of how whales were dismembered and which anatomical chunk when into which cooker. They had a 3-D movie on the life of whales and a separate presentation on sharks. A pigmy blue whale (kind of an oxymoron, no?) beached itself in Albany in 1975. It skeleton is on display.

It began to rain hard as we left there in the last waning hour of daylight. Our final must-see destination was the memorial to the light-horsemen of Australia and New Zealand who fought in WWI and left for war from this port for battles that included the capture of Beer Sheva, and some of whom are buried in the cemetery near the Beit Yatziv youth hostel in Beer Sheva. We arrived as the last rays of sunlight colored the parting rainclouds with shades of orange and red.

The path was too steep for Razelle so I climbed it alone. I tried to photograph the monument but the light got poorer by the minute. It saddened me that I couldn't do more to document my visit here. The hiatus in rainfall was short-lived, only long enough really for the few pictures I took. Cold rain began to fall again so I descended in the rain to our camper in the parking lot. 

Back in Albany once again, we stopped at a Hungry Jack's (Australia's name for Burger King) for veggie burgers. There were a lot of teenagers there, acting the way you'd expect teenagers to behave. Razelle and I had to remark about how much rowdier they were (read "more normal") than the same groups of teenagers were in Singapore. It also amazed us that Singapore, and Mumbai for that matter, seemed like places we'd visited long ago instead of only during the past week and a half.

The caravan park at Emu Point on the eastern edge of Albany looked like a good place to settle for the night. Finding it was no easy task. I eventually programmed the GPS we have to get us there. Without it, we'd never have found the place. It is the most neatly organized caravan park we've stayed at yet. We pulled in and set up like we've been doing this forever (has it only been four nights?).