Another Country Diary Links to images and other pages are in blue. These entries are broken up into weeks, or when the page gets too image heavy.
26 October -2 November. More Songs about Buildings and Food Pt.3
Between 'wow' moments there was monotonous corridor of scrubby trees you'd sometimes see a flash of white that looked like sunlit water. Then you'd see that is was a salt pan. Sometime stretching off into a heat shimmering horizon, I went past a few big ones before investigating. Just a few inches deep, on a clay base that was still moist under the crystals of white  packed salt, the white was broken with  an occasional  contoured 'tide line' or spotted with a blemish like this rock.  They must have disturbed the even evaporation by wind or movement and they all left behind these patterns. I tasted the flat crystals and it was intensely briny, and metallic. The taste stayed in my mouth for a long time as I drove.
The first view is Esperance is of impossibly clean water, glowing from white sandy bays. The town of could be any one of a hundred seaside towns but the location is very different. It's home to a number of retirees, if the old couples strolling morning and night are an indication. It reminded me of places along the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne, a summer tourist town. It's main period of growth was late, in the mid fifties and that's why it's a modern.   The hundreds of islands that follow the coast are wonderfully named the Archipelago of the Recherche and the town and bay took its name from the French explorers ships, "L'Esperance" and the Recherche which sheltered there from a storm in 1792.  We stayed in an apartment/motel overlooking the bay. Jackie and Jarrod recommended The Taylor Street Tea Rooms restaurant for dinner and they were right. There are more pictures of all that here. (Popup window) The Tea Room's kitchen staff seemed to be having a ball, lots of noise and laughing that filled the nearly empty restaurant. The salt and pepper squid came recommended and was as good as Jackie said, but the highlight was desert (you only have desert on holidays), the 'lemon gin and tonic jelly with drunken fruit'. It was such a refreshing end to the meal that it moved me to ask if  I could photograph one. The girls behind the counter built me a new one. I'll send them a print. Thanks!
We took a long looping drive, past more picture book beaches to the windfarm just outside of town that supplies almost 75% of the Esperence's electricity. The towers are huge and when you walk underneath you hope the blades stay put. There's a definite edge of danger and a visual impact on the landscape, but it's the first commercial farm I've seen (and I'd be happy to see more of them instead of smoking solid fuel power stations).  There's another farm at Albany just as successful in supplying the towns requirements.
We took a slightly longer route from Esperance, so that we could see the Stirling Mountain range. Rising up from rapidly drying wheat fields I spent a lot of time jumping from the car as another curve brought a fresh angle on the mountains.
These paddy melons were at my feet when I stopped to photograph. These were the ammunition in summer fights with my brother, when we lived on the Murray as a kid. They grew along the river bank and seem to have an affinity with roadways, being spread by travelers I presume.
We drove through Albany, to Denmark. At the motel where we stayed, there were some old seaside photographs on the restaurant wall. I asked if they were from the family archives and they said, 'no, someone had found them at the local tip and rescued the best ones'. This family group really attracted me. There's a larger one and more images here. (Popup window) This is a great family group, you could write a novel about them. Look at the body language, and that dog, although held tight, has moved and is blurred. Everyone else is frozen with their personalities fixed since caravans were made of masonite.
Outside the motel room grew this Green Kangaroo Paw. The red tinged variety is the one I'm used to seeing and there's a picture in the wildflower images in the next section.
We headed down to a small but lovely rocky beach near Denmark. The peppermint gums were in flower, along the roadway, small white clusters not like the usual eucalypt excess.
About 40k out of Denmark is the Valley of the Giants tree top walkway. It lifts you into the tops of the very old Tingle trees and although it's a short walk, the overall presentation as a tourist attraction was well done (good graphics).  I'd never heard about the Tingle trees, you hear a lot about WA Karri and Tuarts. Reading the signs and posters, I'm wiser, these lovely big trees only grow in this wet warm pocket of WA.
There are different types of 'tingle' and the red variety has a distinctive buttressed base. They also have a lot of 'hangers-on' vegetation that grows near them, such as tingle wattle and ...
...these 'tingle flowers'. These look like bamboo leaves and they are so distinctive amongst the regular Australian bush undergrowth that they stand out immediately as 'foreign', but they've lived in this corner of WA for a long time.
		Pt.1 Perth,Fremantle, Northam   Pt.2 Kalgoorlie  Pt.4 Margaret River
Fred Harden
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