G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, letter number 56. Good on ya for reading!
Letters From the Road is the story of the road trip around Australia that I took with my wife Katie and boys Henry and Oscar back in 2019.
The story comes to you in weekly installments, featuring the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the Letter.
This is going to be a two part Letter, because I got to writing and was having so much fun that it ended up being far too long for one Letter. It’s possible that all the Letters are too long, but this one was getting unruly and straying too far into TLDR territory.
And if you’re confused by the concept of a two part letter when this is a story that by design is told in multiple parts, so am I. Some things are not worth delving into too deeply. The upshot is that you will receive part 2 on the weekend for your reading pleasure.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 55 letters here, having their photo taken with a kangaroo.
Hooroo!
Luke
On Boxing Day we packed up our things and left Albany and headed east again. Our intended destination of Esperance was a long drive along South Coast Highway 1, nearly 500 kilometres (310 miles) that would take us a good part of the day.
And so began the final stretch of our journey east. 3,000 kilometres to Melbourne.
The road wound through quiet rural farmland. We stopped at the Jerry Roadhouse in Jerramungup to stretch our legs. The roadhouse was located at a good spot, the junction of the Gnowangerup - Jerramungup Road. This is something I’ve always appreciated in Australia, their widespread habit of naming country roads after the two towns that they separate.
Maybe this is not as useful in today's world of having everything connected to GPS, but doesn’t it give you a little bit of comfort if you're driving to Gnowangerup to know that you are on the Gnowangerup - Jerramungup Road? Or, for example, that if you need to get to Ruffy from Tarcombe that you simply take the Tarcombe - Ruffy Road? To me that is exceedingly more useful than State Route 256.
This discussion has made me very much to visit Gnowangerup, not only to see what’s there, but to figure out how to pronounce the name.
We didn’t stay long enough at the Jerry Roadhouse to ponder this much further, however, because for the first time in ages, we were assaulted by flies. Perhaps this was a bad omen.
Our next stop was in a prosperous if a bit dusty little town called Ravensthorpe. It probably owes its prosperity to the Mt Cattlin spodumene mine that is found two kilometers north of town. Spodumene sounds to me like some kind of potato or a chesty cold remedy, but is actually a mineral that contains lithium.
And if you’ve driven in an electric car, ridden a scooter, used a cordless drill, listened to a podcast on your wireless headphones, or done any one of thousands of other things that require rechargeable batteries, you’ll probably understand that lithium is worth its weight in gold.
26th December 2019, Boxing Day - Esperance
Stopped in Ravensthorpe. The roadhouse is the busiest place I’ve seen in days. It’s 36C (97F), which is refreshing compared to the 44C (111F) it was just a while ago on the road. Plus it just rained, and the smell outside is a refreshing mix of damp rain and eucalyptus.
‘The rain smells good,’ I told Oscar.
‘But it’s the bad type of damp sadness smell because of how warm it is,’ Oscar said.
In a true sign of prosperity, or desperation, if you ask some people, Ravensthorpe has their own Big Thing, A Big Lollipop that stands outside the Yummylicious Candy Shack. It’s a pink fronted building with a rainbow coloured roof that’s surrounded by wood chips and patio furniture.
The Big Lollipop was, like most of what could be found in the Candy Shack, something that seemed like a good idea at the time, but made you feel empty afterward.
We drove on, and two hours later, finally reached the town of Esperance.
Of all the places on our trip itinerary, Esperance is the one that peaked people’s interest the most. We would describe our route to someone, and upon getting to the point in the trip where we said that we’d be driving along the southwest coast of Western Australia, they would without a doubt stop us and ask, with shining eyes of anticipation, ‘Will you be going to Esperance?’
Esperance is the place everyone talks about. Literally everyone. How gorgeous. How beautiful. How wonderful. How amazing.
The beaches, the sand the colour of the water, the fucking kangaroos that hang out on the beach posing for photographs by sunburnt tourists.
I told Katie a while back that I wasn’t even sure I wanted to come here, overly high expectations, too much talk, all that. Tired of hearing about it.
How can it possibly live up to all the hype?
To say I had a bit of a dim and overly gloomy view of the place even before we got there was true, but it wasn’t helped by the accommodation situation. During our drive, while dutifully trying to find a place for us to stay, Katie discovered that the glorious Cape Legrand National Park and all of its campgrounds had been closed due to an active bushfire.
Cape Legrand is what got people gushing. Just outside of Esperance, it is a place of gleaming white sand beaches curving in perfect crescents, sapphire blue waters, and kangaroos lounging around on the beach such that you’d think they were being paid by the local tourist bureau.
With the National Park closed on short notice, no small thing to happen in the days after Christmas when campgrounds are full of people on holiday, the town opted to open up their emergency overflow campground to accommodate all of the people who all of the sudden had no place to stay.
With no other options, we secured a spot at the overflow site, setting up camp with a hundred others on a practice soccer pitch next to the local showgrounds.
We’re camped at the showgrounds, in town overflow. It feels like RAGBRAI*, camping in a big open field next to a shed that’s got toilets and showers.
Even the weather feels reminiscent of the warm muggy nights of ‘Brai, where the air is thick and you can see the big dark clouds of storms flashing off in the distance.
This was not a promising start to our time in Esperance.
*RAGBRAI, the Register’s Annual Bike Ride Across Iowa, is the bicycle tour that crosses the state of Iowa in the U.S. where you spend a week camping, showering, eating, drinking, feeling much pain in your nether regions and liver, in the company of 10,000 other people on bicycles.
After setting up camp, Oscar and I drove into town to pick up some food for dinner. Downtown Esperance is centred around the waterfront, which you might think would be a good thing.
First impression of Esperance: grungy.
Today Oscar and I saw a shabby IGA grocer, a foreshore with a nice view of a rusting freighter in the water, and passed plenty of fine dining options: a noodle shop, a kebab shop, and the Pier Hotel.
In a moment of inspiration, the Pier Hotel had maximised its prime location and ocean frontage not for a large sunny patio or maybe a deck with charming views of the bay, the rusting freighter and the port off in the distance, but for a large carpark and a bottle shop.
Standing for a moment to look at the water, Oscar and I could see the smoke from the bushfires off in the distance. It didn’t look promising.
After buying some provisions at the grocery store, Oscar and I made a slow retreat to camp.
Back at the refugee camp, we had a late dinner of pork and beans in the last light of the sun. Once it went down and darkness was complete, we stood with many of our fellow campers looking off to the east at the eerie orange glow of the bushfire on the horizon.
We had one more night in Esperance, and so another day to try and squeeze some joy out of the place. And we would, though from the most unexpected place: the Tourist Information Centre.