William Bay to Rame Head. What a day, after having a day off yesterday today was 8 hours of hard slog all day. The beach along Mazzoletti was very soft, and my pack weight has ballooned out to 16 kg with 5 days off food and no water, so 18 kg with my standard 2L of water so much for being light weight, how did things get so out of control.
Albany to William Bay. I should perhaps begin with the basics. I’m setting off to walk the Bibbulmun track, a 1000 km walk trail in Western Australia from Albany to Kalamunda near Perth. The next few blog posts are going to document this walk over 50 odd days.
Day one. I left Albany at about 9am and headed out of town. Met a lady from Europe who was on her last leg of an end to end hike. She was finishing her E2E (end to end) and looked very calm and contented sitting watching over the bay at Albany. I hope I’m that happy at the end of my journey. The next section out of town was quite boring, a redirection due to the fires we’d had here recently meant that instead of walking a lovely trail through the bush I had a trek of 6 or 8 kms along roads to the Albany wind farm.
Fungi are still prolific around the south west and I see them everywhere while I’m out walking. I love taking their pictures though it’s not a pretty sight, me with my backpack on and walking poles flailing around as I try to get down low on the ground trying to take pictures, then getting back up again with 15 kg on my back? Yeah, not pretty. I’m still weighing up possibilities as to what I’ll do in the coming months. My original plan was to ride the Munda Biddi mountain bike trail from Albany to Perth, then walk back down the Bibbulman track to Albany, total distances of about 1000 km up and then 1000 km down.
Life on the road means that sometimes you are camping in a few unusual places. You may be at a magnificent picturesque location by the ocean miles from anywhere, or you may be in the city or suburbs among throngs of people. Since most of my more recent travels have been in the troopy, I’m starting to appreciate the ease with which you can camp the night in places that you couldn’t hope to stay if you had a caravan or similar.
The troopy was booked in to have a suspension upgrade at the end of January so I either had six weeks sitting around Ballarat over the Christmas new year period, or I could get my act together and do a road trip. I’d also been getting some serious hints from the local possums where I was staying at the caravan park.
OK, I just had a moment to work out how long I’ve been living in the troopy and it’s 7 months. That’s long enough to have worked out most systems and glitches for living day to day. I’ve been through a wide range of climates, from stinking hot in Darwin and Alice Springs through to freezing cold, wet conditions at Tingha and all weather in between.
This post is purely about more photos I’ve taken around Alice Springs. That’s the great thing about macro photography, you can find all sorts of possibilities within a small area, you don’t need huge spaces, just a good eye for finding interesting angles and things that look nice in the right light and the right angles.
As I’m spending some time in Alice Springs there’s going to be a whole lot of photographs to post up. The plant life around here is stunning, sometimes obviously beautiful, other times small and indifferent until you look closely, in the right light, at the right angle. I’ll be adding to this blog post for a while as I take more pictures.
After my minor car dramas in the Kimberly and a whirl wind overnight stop in Derby I arrived in Broome where the reddest dirt meets the bluest sea. And it does so quite literally, the contrast of the red against the ocean is striking. It’s not all red dirt though, Broome is blessed with some beautiful white beaches.
