Ravensthorpe

Ravensthorpe is where it all started to go wrong for me and it’s the reason why I’m about two weeks behind in my  photos and blog. I discovered the joys of sciatica. Anyone who has suffered suffered from it will know exactly what I’m talking about, to those who haven’t, consider yourself lucky.Unfortunately it really put a dent into my travels for the last two weeks, the most annoying aspect is that I was about to hit the Fitzgerald River National Park, something I’d been looking forward to and one of the few aspects of the trip that was actually planed as a definite destination. But I’ll get to that later, for those still wondering what sciatica is?  The sciatic nerve runs from near the base of the spine through the buttock and down each leg. Lower back injury or lumbar swelling/degeneration can cause pressure on the nerve resulting in severe shooting pain down the buttock and one leg. The sort of pain that doesn’t go away, where there’s no comfortable way to lie in bed the searing pain shoots down your leg almost continuously.

Of course symptoms can vary depending on the person, what I’ve had has been fairly debilitating, I’ve been unable to sit in any seat except the car seat that has good lumbar support, in fact I’m typing this while standing at the table in my van two weeks later as I still can’t sit in these caravan seats.

Walking has been difficult, I’ve been limping around, gingerly getting in and out of the car to take photos and sleeping has been sporadic at best. Still it’s improving, and I should  just get on with it as I have a lot to catch up with, I’m now back at Denmark and I’m only posting about Ravensthorpe.

It was good to be in some interesting countryside, after hundreds of kilometres in the wheat belt areas things had been looking very much the same, but when you get to Ravensthorpe you discover big gnarly mineral rich hills which means there’s more variety in soil types and nutrient for plants, so the diversity really starts to pick up here. It’s also only 50km from the coast and has a slightly higher rainfall than most of the inland areas I’d been travelling through.

Looking at the difference of the grevilleas around the area, well and everywhere for that matter you notice many differencesnot only in shape and colour, but little things like the hair distribution over the flowers which is very diverse.

I was free camping while I was at Ravensthorpe, a little spot about 8km north of town which was basically just a large parking area on the edge of a wandoo forest. all down one edge of the large parking area were thousands of holes in the ground.

I’d love to know what was using them and I spent a long time watching and wandering around, the holes would have covered an area of at least an acre mostly in the light leaf litter. My first guess would have been ants, but I didn’t see one and they were a little close together for ants. Native bees perhaps, I’ve seen them using holes in the ground similar to this, but once again, I didn’t see anything go in or out of any holes, in fact there were’s a lit of insects here apart from bush flies, and there were plenty of them around.

More verticordias down here, I’ve seen them in all shapes, sizes and colours from Kalbarri all the way down to the south coast and they rarely disappoint.

This plant looks more like it belongs in a desert rather than a reasonably lush diverse plant area.

While this eucalypt flower reminds me of fireworks.