Rame Head to Walpole. Had a very crappy night sleep just couldn’t get comfy and didn’t get to sleep until very late some time. I think I need to make a concerted effort not to go to bed too early otherwise it’s just too many hours on that little mattress and I wake about 3am and then every half hour after that feeling sore in the hips, legs and shoulders. So tonight I’m going to try and stay up until about 9. Ohh, 9 o’clock. Haha. Anyway where was I.
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.
So many pictures to choose from and this hardly epitomizes the Kimberly but I’m finding it hard to pick a photo which sums up the Kimberly for me so far, or perhaps my quality control standards and just a bit too high and I’m finding fault with some aspect of most pictures. Up here the sun is harsh and photos tend to be washed out with stark contrasts between light and dark. Everything’s harsh up here, the light, the weather and the landscapes. Harsh but beautiful.
It all started a while back when I visited boat harbour near Denamark, I noticed a few small interesting shells at one end of the beach and when I looked a little closer, there was an area at the end of the beach on the low flat rocks where shell grit was collecting. There were many broken bits of shell and corals, rocks and other rubbish in among it, but once you sort through the grit and get out the whole shells and interesting bits, you can be left with something quite beautiful.
