Salmon gums
We tried to sleep in to get our time readjusted, but didn’t too well at that and were up by 7 am. Since the information centre in town with its dump point didn’t open until 9 am we took our time to get away this morning. We pulled up to the service station to get diesel and saw again the same couple that we’ve run into now three times in the last two days. We talked a bit about where we’d stayed last night (they were in a nice spot about 86 km east of Norseman) and about our plans for the next days.
We had to wait quite a while at the information centre as the attendant was helping out two young European women. We understood that their car had broken down from what we overheard of their conversation. It sounded like they were abandoning it, as it was going to cost $1500 to fix, and so they were taking the train and the bus somewhere. I sympathized with them but they were young so I suppose they’ll cope! We needed the key from the attendant as they charge $3 to use their dump point.
Before leaving town we stopped at the Norsemen camels, a sculpture close to the centre of town. The camels are in the centre of a roundabout, are made of corrugated steel, and there is a different descriptive plaque on each of the four corners. We haven’t seen any live ones anywhere here except in the Australia Zoo.
We stopped for lunch at Scadden, a very small “town” (from what we could see not more than a couple of buildings), where they have a nicely set up picnic site. They had painted murals of the history of the area on the walls of the toilets, and on two of the shelters for the area’s centennial last year in 2010. There was also a written history of the town, and I was surprised to find that there was a large amount of new land made available for settlement in 1960, so some of this area was settled rather recently (or so it seems to me, the sixties not being ancient history in my mind, though they are of course very close to the mid-century mark for the area).
We had bought a couple of nectarines to eat for lunch at Norseman, but the store there didn’t have a great variety of fruits and vegetables (but we got a good half cauliflower for the most reasonable price we’ve seen in Australia). We bought most of our groceries in Esperance. We purchased a one month park pass since we plan to be in several of the national parks in Western Australia. We also saw a surf shop so enquired about a boogie (body) board. The clerk said they had nothing cheap (theirs started at $200) but told me to go to a sporting goods store just up the street, which we did and got the board for $55.
We drove to Cape le Grand national park. When we got here there was only one camp site left. It’s a double site, and there was already a motorhome here, but the man travelling in it (who is from Switzerland) was happy to let us in the other half. We tried out the body board in the ocean (which is cool but a lot warmer than it was in Tasmania) and though there isn’t very big surf here we did get some good rides on a few waves.