G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 31. This one comes to you from a place in Western Australia called Karijini. I remember it every day, without even reading my journals or looking at old pictures.
Our trusty Toyota Prado, the one that stoically stewarded us across Australia, still sits in our driveway not far from where I am writing this letter. The spare tyre attached to the back, the door hinges and seals, and other parts and pieces that I come across now and again, are all off-colour, stained by the insidious rusty brown dirt from our travels to Karijini and surrounds. And they probably will be forever more, and that’s not just an indication of my lack of interest in washing the car. Unlike in the depths of the Outback, it rains quite a bit in Melbourne, which I think does an adequate job of keeping down the dust.
31 letters in and we’ve pushed beyond just a few, it’s getting up there. Not really to an epic level just yet, but in candy terms we’ve gone beyond snack size. If you’ve been around for all 31, or are just tucking in, let me know what you’re thinking of it in the comments. It’s nice to get a letter in return from your pen pal every now and again, you know?
And a welcome to those of you for whom this is your first letter! Good on ya for reading. Letters From the Road is the story of a family road trip in Australia, told one weekly installment at a time featuring my journal entries written during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the letter.
If you’re not yet a subscriber, but you want to get some letters coming to your postbox? One letter, one story, once a week. Too easy.
If you’ve just joined us and want to catch up, you can find the other 30 letters here, in the jacket pockets of Danny Ocean and his eleven pals.
All the best,
Luke
14 November 2019 - Karijini Eco Village
Just finished eating my breakfast, two fried eggs and some plain Western Australian yogurt with two of Andrew’s fresh mangos diced up on top.
Now I’m sipping my coffee, noticing through my flynet how the brown dirt of the Pilbara is stuck to everything. Blissful.
Today we walked down some steps and into Hamersley Gorge, or Hammersley Gorge, depending on which sign you believe. It’s my favorite type of hike, Oscar said, ‘short but engaging’. There is water there, including a small, deep pool, shaded from the penetrating sun, and fed by a happy waterfall. At the other end of the gorge, deep water extended down past where we could see, and Katie, Oscar and I swam a good length of it.
It is very tranquil, even though the rock walls of the gorge are curved and folded in a way that says destruction, violence.
Karijini is a place of contradictions. Dry and wet. Tranquility and violence. Dusty earth, rocks and brown, but little hidden oases for you to find. It’s why I insist on dragging my family to places like this, for the surprise and wonder that comes with the contradiction.
They make you challenge your assumptions and not take people and places on face value, which ultimately adds some surprise and *hopefully* delight to your life.
Of course much of the surprise has gone out of life. We can blame the internet for that, I suppose, or blame ‘the crowd’. We’d been using an app called WikiCamps during our journey, and it works by crowdsourcing traveling information from its users, everything from places to get free drinking water, to tagging any place that’s even remotely suitable for camping along the side of the road. It’s indispensable when you are travelling in the Outback. It also means that some of your expectations have been set. So we knew generally what to expect out of Karijini. We knew we should go to Hamersley Gorge (5-stars) and that we should bring our swimmers.
Then you park your car in a tiny carpark that’s perched on the side of the gorge, surrounded by rocks and nothing. You descend some stairs and a steep path for 30 minutes, and then all of the sudden you’ve found Xanadu: cool, clear water, waterfalls, and white gum trees that seem to be there to shade your leisure, but are there for the water, just like you.
Until you see the banded iron rock layers folded and bent like taffy, have the cool water hit you and snap your head back into shape after being slowly melted by the heat, you can read all of the reviews you want and still not understand.
And it’s not just the natural landscape. It might be a crummy roadhouse where there’s a guy pulling a decent flat white. Or the relatively humble nature of the communities of the Pilbara region versus the shining kingdoms of the mines, fenced off from the rest of the world, generating power and water, their own rail lines to move their plunder to the coast. Fields of irrigated crops flashing into view between high fences, bright green contrasting against the reds and browns of the land.
On face value, the Pilbara is a lousy place for a vacation. It’s really painful to get to, it’s hotter than fake leather seats sitting in the sun, there are flies, and you cannot avoid the invasive blood-coloured dust. It’s a vacation, if you think of being a desert dirt farmer as a holiday. At places like Kermit’s Pool, Hamersley and Dale’s Gorges, we were more than happy being dirt farmers.
It’s hot here, does that sound familiar?
Katie at dinner: ‘I noticed this morning that I’ve got this weird trickle of sweat that runs down the back of my leg, and I don’t know where it comes from.’
Oscar: ‘We’ll christen it, Momissippi...’, he says, arms spread wide.
Katie: ‘I don’t know if it’s coming from my back, my armpits, my boobs...’
Me: ‘Going in search of the headwaters of the Momissippi...’
A trip like ours is similar to enrollment in one of those outdoorsy adventure courses, one where you’re camping, cooking outdoors, and learning to eat food that’s fallen onto the ground. During the day, there would be some form of hiking and scrambling, scrambling and hiking. Swimming if you’re lucky. Only in an outdoors course, you get to finish and go home at some point. Our adventure course was like a dream that repeats itself over and over again.
In any case, we did do other things aside from hiking and scrambling. For Katie, it was knitting inappropriately warm wool sweaters. Next time I will request that she put that effort into producing singlets so that I could regularly burn the shirts I’d been wearing every day. Henry would read one of his many books on birds and then draw pictures of rufous honeyeaters or tawny frogmouths in his notebook. I was forever taking notes on my phone, which is why you’re receiving letters in the first place. For Oscar, as I’ve written to you before, his free moments were spent with his nose in a book.
15 November 2019 - Karijini Eco Village
Oscar continues to decimate the book population. He’s finished a book called Jonathan Bloom, Kid Detective (or something like that), the second and third books of the Hunger Games, The Amber Spyglass. He’s now devouring an ancient copy of Oceans 11, the book adapted from the original movie from the 60’s. Frank Sinatra’s picture is on the cover.
Oscar’s book tally is up to 13 on our Australian leg.
It was probably inappropriate, Oceans 11, a story revolving around crime, casinos, dames, drinking - all things not found in the kitchen cupboards of a 12-year old, and not exactly the plot lines of a book like Jonathan Bloom, Kid Detective. Coming from a guy who takes 6 months to read a book, however, I can admire someone who reads 13 books in 46 days - an absurd 3-½ days per book - and I’ll look beyond whether they are ones filled with stories of ‘blowing all the fuses in Last Vegas’. It is important we encourage kids to read.
Today is the hottest of the three days we’ve been here. But it’s overcast. There are clouds, and enough of them to block the sun.
A few days ago, I finally sent an email to Matt. It was a bunch of random nonsense, stuff he’d normally enjoy, including a couple of allusions to him being in the hospital, sick, etc. I was also copying him on a few emails to our renters about the fact that I’d be taking over from Matt for a while.
And two days ago, he sent me an email.
He did not respond to my stupid jokes, feign any interest in DingDogs*, or tell me how he is feeling. He simply said that he had the rent check and had sent it to the bank. That’s it. Business as usual, nothing to see here.
This was the first I’d heard from my friend Matt since his cancer diagnosis and a stint in the hospital to have his head cracked open to remove a tumour from his brain. For several months prior, he and his wife Kyla had been looking after our a rental property we had in Denver. The response I received from him was completely opposed to what I would have expected: no status update on his health, the size of the pills he would be taking for chemo or even a word about the large scar on top of his head, instead just a note that the check is in the mail.
I couldn’t understand this, but there were many things that didn’t make sense on this day: we drove to another gorge where water could be found, this one requiring a bit of a walk to access. There we experienced the quiet of a place that’s hard to get to and in the middle of nowhere, all of the sudden sounding like the local swimming pool.
Today: swimming at two spots in Dale’s Gorge. There’s some tour bus group of what seem like high school age girls, and they’re noisy as fuck.
16 November 2019 - Leaving Karijini
12.44 and 44C
The flies in the Pilbara have no shame.
At Pender Bay they were nicer, more beachy chill.
On the Tanami they pestered.
In the Pilbara, the flies try and drive you to madness so you feel that your only escape is to run off into the wilderness and you eventually get lost and die searching for water. And I imagine that for good measure they’ll continue to swarm you even after you’ve kicked it.
The brown dirt in the Pilbara gets into everything, it invades the colour of the land, like a storm cloud moving in to blot and distort the blue sky. It’s sticky too. You’ll get it on your feet, and just rinsing yourself in water is not enough. You need to scrub. I think I’ve figured out why.
Getting out of the car today was like hopping into a convection oven. The heat smacks you, then the wind blows and renders you dry and crispy. Combine these conditions with the brown dust, and we’re all like little clay pots being fired in the Pilbara kiln. Baked solid, brown and smooth. Our car and the trailer are highlighted in brown, as are we.
With that, we set off from Karijini and the Pilbara with souvenirs, things we could wear, though they didn’t come from a gift shop and they weren’t one of Katie’s sweaters. The bronze patina we’d received living for three days in this oven of a place seemed like it might last a lifetime.
But if there was anywhere we could have a go at a transformation back to our former selves, it’d be our next stop, the reefs and blue waters of the Ningaloo.
*A fantastic idea for a onion ring crossed with a corn dog that you can read more about in letter #20.
As per the comments request - both me and Seba are impatiently waiting every weekend for the next letter, informing the other one instantly when it arrives. Keep writing, it's great
This one was plenty funny :) Except for Matt being elusive.