Easyrider Tour up the West Coast
Do you ever have a ‘chapter’ in life? Rather than the hum-drummery of wake up, work, go home, eat, pub, TV, whatever and every day just merges into the next. Every now and then you do something special, with a definite beginning, middle and end. My trip up and down the West Coast of Australia felt like a chapter.
DAY 1
I booked a 4 day Easyrider (Sleazy Rider, Easy Driver -they all have Pseudonyms) trip from Perth up to Exmouth and planned to get off after 3 days at Coral Bay to spend a while chilling out and learning to dive. A few hours North of Perth we got to The Pinnacles, strange rock formations formed by millions of years of rain blah geology crap.
Pretty spooky though.
The real reason everyone comes to the Pinnacles is because Billy Connelly drove through here on his big trike and then ran naked through them in his ‘World tour of Australia.’
We spent a long day driving that first day. At some point we passed through a town called Geraldton where Mick (the driver) said, “take a good look at these traffic lights guys, there’s no more for another 3000k’s.” (Lands End to John o Groats is only 1583km)
We watched the sun go down as we pulled into Kalbarri. Kalbarri was our first taste of ‘real’ Australia. Mick introduced us to the concept of ‘The Mullet Pub.’ A Mullet Pub is full of locals, generally fisherman or farmers (there aren’t many IT Consultants in these parts – er, unless they have backpacks on.) There’s generally racing on the telly, a pool table or two, a dart board and the pub itself is more of a single story warehouse with beer posters on the wall than the mock Irish pubs you get everywhere else. They generally also have bottle-shops attached to them for after hours ‘take-outs.’ Oh and they’re full of blokes with mullets.
DAY 2
We were up bright and early (6.30) to head to ‘Z Shaped gorge’ for some early morning abseiling. As we came down the road to the gorge, a low mist hung in the air, which was surreal and eerie, in what felt like the desert.
The cliff face was 25 meters high (no problem after the 75m Bi-centennial tree!) I realised as I backed over the edge, I’d never actually done abseiling before (not counting the roof at school), and the bit where you lean back over the edge actually quite scary!
Soon enough though, my brain fed me a bit of Adrenalin and I was giggling and jumping my way down the cliff.
As I got to the bottom, Mick lent in close and said, “Both the girls have agreed to go down forwards next time like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. You’re not gonna pussy out are you?” I think my post-adrenalin-grin told him what he needed to know. There was no need to play the ‘girls are better’ card because hey it’s me, I was thinking of asking anyway.
I later found out that when the girls got to the bottom he’d promised them beer if they came down forwards.
I wish I had tits.
I really enjoyed running forwards down the cliff, (well you don’t do it every day do you?) this time accompanied by full on belly laughing. Laughing caused by a combination of the adrenalin in my brain and the harness pushing on my guts!
The bloke with my camera managed to get this cracking pic of me as I stopped just above the ground and gracefully hung there, as elegant and purposeful as Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.