Day 4
November 2, 2011
This has probably been my favorite day on trip so far. In our (four page and totally excessive...have I mentioned that?) brochure on Ceduna, it mentioned that we could go and visit a "Wombat and Australian Fauna Rescue Centre." I was immediately intrigued. I have a sort of Australian Wildlife Bucket List going, where I am trying to see all Australian fauna in some sort of "up close" encounter, and up until yesterday, the only animals I was missing were wombats and platypi, so I knew we would have to make a quick stop. We pulled up outside a non-descript house in a residential neighborhood, unsure if our malevolent GPS Karen has yet again led us astray. Then we noticed the baby emu in the front yard. We followed the signs around to the back of the house, were we joined an elderly couple also awaiting their wombat encounter. We met Val (may or may not be her real name...neither of us can remember), the chatty proprietress who led us into a rather non-descript back room, equipped with a fridge, a table, and a couple of large crates from whence came a suspicious thumping. Val spent seemingly ages chatting to us about the trials and tribulations of the amateur wildlife rehabilitator (I was interested, but I wanted to see some wombats, yall), before finally opening the crate and introducing us to Soul, who she cradled in her arms like a giant hairy baby. Wombats have got to be one of the strangest creatures I have ever laid eyes on. They are marsupials, but they sort of look like a giant guinea pig on some serious steroids. Wombats, though not higher off the ground than your average Jack Russell Terrier, are so incredibly solid that hitting one on the road can FLIP YOUR CAR, as the male half of the elderly couple enjoying the wombats with us seemed to macabrely enjoy telling me. Fortunately, Soul looked like he would rather eat my shoelaces than flip my car, so I let him do just that, until he got tired (rough life, bro) and fell asleep under the table. As Val prattled on about internal feuds within the wombat protector community (oh, they exist), I explored the room slightly. When we walked into the room, I had noticed a jacket hanging from the back of the chair with the sleeves and bottom sewn shut. While Val spoke about her rival in the wombat biz, I noticed the jacket start to twitch and suddenly a small head popped out the neck of the jacket. A joey! A tiny orphaned baby kangaroo named Annabelle, to be exact. We met other wombats, including an adorable and incredibly rare baby white wombat, but Annabelle had captured my heart. She nibbled my fingers, she tried to eat my watch, she reached two impossibly delicate arms up and grabbed my hand with tiny claws. If death from a cuteness overload is possible, I definitely came close.
We finally extricated us from Val's Wombatapalooza and hit the road. I wanted to stop in a local Aboriginal settlement to see a rare Giant Wombat, but Jamie was all wombatted out and voted we head to world famous surf spot Cactus Beach instead. As with most of our detours, we headed off down a poorly signed, bumpy dirt road that would hopefully take us where we wanted to go and not to an inbred family of hillbilly cannibals (I've seen the movies ok, I know it can happen). Fortunately, this time we were headed the right direction, and the drive turned out to be absolutely beautiful, past shallow pools rimmed with salt crystals, one of which was a brilliant purple, that stubbornly refused to be photographed. After about 30 km of bouncing down this narrow dirt road, we came to the beach. White sand, clear aquamarine waves rolling in perfect rhythm towards the shore, the whole nine yards. Of course, you'll just have to take my word for it, because obviously the camera ran out of battery the second my foot touched sand. Alas.
The final excitement of the day was entering the Nullabor Desert and seeing the head of the Great Australian Bight. The Bight, or Bite, as I humorously like to call it, is the largest coastal indentation on the continent in Australia. Get it? Because it looks like a bite and it's called the bight? How I laughed. Personally, I thought actually going to see the Bight would be pretty boring, plus I was slightly miffed my Bight/bite jokes weren't going over better, so I was pretty anti this detour, but I was enticed by the promise of seeing whales. When we arrived at the visitors' centre, however, we were informed by the surly man behind the counter that we had missed the whales for the day, and to add insult to injury, we had to pay five dollars for the privilege of walking to the end of the path. Rude. We paid up and went to have a look, and despite the utter lack of whales, I have to say that the Bight far exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations. Sheer cliffs jutted out of crashing waves and the air was salty with spray. Though it pains me to say, it was worth the five dollars.
We crossed the border into Western Australia without much fanfare that afternoon and collapsed into our sleeping bags. Tomorrow, we cross the Nullabor.
No comments:
Post a Comment