Fred Picnic

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Another Fred Eaglesmith Charity Picnic at the Springwater Conservation Area near Aylmer. Good weather, good music, good fun.

The Rizdales, from London, played this year.

Fred's band, with the fabulous Ginn Sisters continues to evolve with new players on bass, mandolin and electric guitar.

Rizdales

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The Rizdales performed at the Fred Eaglesmith Charity Picnic. The album under the photo captures some of their performance.

Home County

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Photos from the Home County Folk Festival held in Victoria Park London, Ontario. Beautiful weather to enjoy work shops and hear some new music.

I was most impressed with the very young Ariana Gillis pictured at left. Her dad performed with her.

Pinery & Grand Bend

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My friend Charles wanted to take a photo trip out to the lakeside -- we visited Grand Bend and the Pinery Provincial Park.

Kate and I often go to Grand Bend, I've only been to the Pinery a few times.

Charles took pictures with his 35mm film camera. Today he's travelling with a well used Olympus; he's usually on Nikon cameras. He'll never go digital.

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

 
(1 Apr 2011, Exmouth WA) This termite mound greets you as you arrive in Exmouth. Termite mounds are as common as dirt -- and are made of dirt. They're very big and hard as concrete. This one, which stands about 6-8 ft high, has been decorated. There was an area we drove through near Port Hedland where a great many mounds had been decorated with hard hats -- quite funny to see. I'm told that termite mounds, like icebergs, are an indication of a much larger structure under ground.

At our hotel we discover that termites are trying to build mounds all over the building. The laundry door was open and several were started on the walls -- hard red dirt structures with grubs inside. I discover this when I try to break one off the wall. You'd almost need a hammer and chisel. They're all over the place and this really creeped me out, you had a feeling that if you stood still too long one would start building on you!

One good thing about termites -- genuine didgeridoo's (the native musical instrument) are made from live trees that have been hollowed out by termites. I suppose they're edible too but I'm not going there.

The weather, having recently seen some cyclones, meant that the country side was very lush. That meant that locusts where everywhere feeding on the lush growth. The emu like that I'm sure -- they'd eat them! In Coral Bay the locusts had stripped the palm trees. One of the divers we met told us about a plague of "desert frogs" they'd had recently. Apparently the frogs burrow into river bottoms when the weather turns dry and will appear years later when the rain comes. After the recent rains a ton of frogs appeared.

Whale Sharks

We swam with the whale sharks just outside the Ningaloo Reef at Coral Bay on our return trip to Perth. That's Kate swimming about 4m from one of the sharks -- it's about 5m long, big ones grow to about 20m, so this guy is quite small as they go. Nevertheless they are big fish, hence the name -- whale shark.

We had an especially lucky day swimming with these peaceful sharks who live on krill and micro-organisms they catch on their gills as they slowly cruise through the water with their mouth open. Their teeth are vestigal so they can't bite you. We swam about an hour or so, in short and long spurts, with 2 or 3 different sharks. The guides tell us we had one of the longer swims they've ever experienced.

Coral Bay is a great place to experience the Ningaloo Reef. You can swim out about 300m or so and you're right in dense reef of all sorts with lots of fishies. You can also take a glass bottom tour of the inner reef or a longer tour outside the reef to see the whale sharks. It's expensive but if you get to see some sharks it's well worth it.

The Ningaloo is a "fringing" reef that's right there immediately off shore --- the waves crash over the reef maybe 1km or so from the shore. By comparison the Great Barrier Reef is some 35 or so miles out from the shore! I am not keen about long boat rides with folks chundering. I'd much rather to swim out from the beach and find a reef right there.

The morning started with we tourists meeting at the dive shop. There were about a dozen of us, the skipper and 3 tour guides -- Macca, Shane and Pru. We're early in the season and have a small group. Late in the season they'll have two boats of 30 people each. This makes for a big difference when you swim with the sharks as only 10 people can swim near the sharks at any time.

We rode a bus for a short drive to the marina about 1km or so down the beach. We were to Coral Bay back in 2004 but didn't go snorkelling with the sharks as the weather made the water too rough. This time the weather was on our side and we've been told that they've got to swim with the sharks every day for the last few days.

The marina wasn't here back in 2004, we recall driving down the beach and drift snorkelling back then.

Before we go out to chase the sharks we have a little test swim so the guides can gauge how good we are. It's on the reef and a bit of chase the guide -- she's swimming ahead and we try to catch her. It's quite tough to keep up. I have my flippers and am struggling to keep up but do, others are falling back. Kate is trying flippers (she has never used the before) but isn't getting the hang of them, she finds they slow her down. Back on the boat Kate persuades the guide that she can swim better without them. As you can see from the photo she swam free-style without flippers and did quite well.

The sharks are cruising outside the reef in deep water. Spotter planes find them and relay their location to the boats -- this helps to explain why it's so expensive. We spent about an hour or so racing about before spotting the sharks we swam with.

We bought a "bag" to take our snapshot camera into the water. It's hard to judge what you're shooting but we did get some pretty good photos. A proper underwater camera would be nice but we're seldom taking pictures under water. There were some guys with good cameras and we bought a DVD that the camera man took of the trip. Should be interesting.

If you're ever in Coral Bay West Australia and it's at the right time (they come after the coral spawn in late March) do spend the money and go swimming with the whale sharks. It's an experience only a very few ever experience.

Perth to Broome

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This photo album documents our drive up to Broome and back from Perth in Western Australia. Our intention had been to drive to Darwin and drop off the car there. Heavy rains had washed out roads in the Kimberley region so our plans were thwarted at Broome.

Much of this is documented in other blog entries, this is a capsule summary of our travels. The picture at left is a fellow walking along the road in the very empty country near Exmouth. Note the green and the bug mask to keep the flies at bay

In Western Australia there's a large bit of sand dunes near the Pinnacles. We stopped there briefly and at the Pink Lagoon near Kalbarri. We visited the National Park at Kalbarri just north of Geraldton and south of Shark Bay -- it's all very dry ruggged country with not too many people visiting. Western Australia is a vast area, lightly populated and very rugged.

We stayed in Exmouth for a bit to explore the Ningaloo Reef and Cape Range National Park. That's the top western corner of the state. We got in a lot of swimming in many fine bays in the park but it was alway too rough to go out on a boat to find and swim with the whale sharks (we did that on our return). It's a fringing reef close to the shore and you can easily swim out and explore the coral without a boat. We did so from the many fine bays and access points

We saw lots of critters in an around the park. Huge termite mounds are every where. Emu are large and quite amazing. And brumbies (wild horses) are common too. We did see a Perentie one day in the park -- they're huge lizards about 6' long. "What the fuck is that crossing the road!" Quite an amazing sight to see. A bit frightening too!

We drove up into some higher ground around Exmouth for the views of the area. Shothole Canyon is only a bit off the main roads, gravel road access and well worth a visit. It was hot and dry, very much like Death Valley or Arizona. But there had been the wet season so things were pretty green.

From Exmouth we headed inland to Karajini National Park. There only a few roads you can take, they're pretty good, but the gas stations are few and far between. You need to fill up when you can. At a gas stop one of the road trains had a bit of run in with the awning over the gas pumps. He'd got himself into a position where he couldn't go back and couldn't go forward. He ended up wrecking some of his truck and some of the gas station shelter. He'd have been a long way from the next place that could fix him up.

The red dirt of Western Australia is a bit of a "gold" mine -- the red is iron ore. At Tom Price and Mount Sheila there's a huge mine, huge trucks for mining the stuff and long trains to carry it to ports on the north shore where it's shipped to China and other places. They can just dig it out of the ground and send it off as raw ore to be processed elsewhere. It's that high in iron content.

At Tom Price (the only town near Karajini National Park) we stayed at the very expensive but tired and spartan Karajini Lodge. Their clientelle seemed to mostly be miners who don't live here but fly in and out for weeks long work stays. The dining hall (don't go looking for a fancy dancy restaurant -- you're in the outback) was efficient but again spartan. Thankfully they did have wine.

We did explore some of the rugged canyons and gorges in the park. We swam in a small river at Fortesque Falls but roads were closed to much of the park -- it's the rainy season. This meant for some glorious fields of wild flowers.

Between Karajini and Broome we had arranged to stay at a rest station around Pardoo which turned out to be even worse than the worn lodgings at Tom Price. The hotel rooms were converted cargo containers (you know the steel boxes they load onto boats, trains and trucks) and just not good enough for us. We decided to drive on (always a bit of a risk because there's not to much to drive on to). We ended up staying at a caravan park at 80mile beach arriving just around sun set. This was quite lovely, a nice park model trailer all to our own with a beach that went on for miles and miles.

The next day we arrived at Broome to discover we could go no further towards Darwin. We stayed at "The Pearle". I've documented much of our stay in Broome elsewhere and won't repeat that here.

Our drive back to Perth after our visit to Broome had us drop in to Coral Bay and the Ningaloo Reef where we were finally able to swim with the whale sharks. That was a memorable experience. Another interesting thing about Coral Bay was the locusts. With the recent wet weather there had been a plague of frogs, when we were there it was a plague of locusts who had stripped all vegetation bare. It doesn't rain very often but when it does nature responds.

Geraldton is a large town between Coral Bay and Perth -- we caught a sunset. The next over night was in Yanchep National Park just outside of Perth. We had a very nice room and were able to explore a bit of the park land -- they had some Koalas to view. But the most interesting part was to see all the Kangaroos come out at dusk to graze on the lawns around the hotel. There were a ton of them.

From Perth, where we dropped off our car, we flew on to more adventures down under.