Our WA Trip - Part Seven - Wave Rock

Jen and I were going to have the car for just one more day, and we wanted to make the most out of it. So we took a day trip into the wheat belt of Western Australia to find the teeny town of Heyden and Wave Rock. It felt rather strange to be driving through the city after having spent the past week in so much empty countryside. We had to cross all of Perth and climb the escarpment in order to get to the farmlands. On the escarpment we drove through a state park - and it was forest! As in, there were trees! This was the first forest we'd seen in what felt like forever, so we enjoyed driving through it. There were tons and tons of grass trees as well - I took pictures of them when we were in Canberra - but I had been under the impression that they were rare? Apparently not so in WA! At any rate, it was a neat forest and driving through shade was a nice change.

All too soon, though, the forest gave way to more rolling, empty, dry farmland, and we were in the wheat belt. Back to the emptiness. We saw hardly any other vehicles on the road, even though we passed through a number of small towns. It was a pretty strange drive, especially when we neared the town of Corrigin. We passed a couple of old utes (pickup trucks) which had been posed in the wheat fields. One looked like it was doing a wheelie, another was posed as if to launch itself off a pile of hay. It was very odd. Then on the outskirts of the town itself, we found the Corrigin Dog Cemetery. Yep. A dog cemetery. In the middle of nowhere! Then when we got into Corrigin proper, we passed a display explaining about the "Dog in a Ute" competition. Each year the town tries to get the largest possible number of dogs sitting in utes in the town. The event raises money for local charities, and of course also brings publicity to this little town. Strange, but true. It was that sort of day.

Once we were out of Corrigin, we encountered a new driving challenge - random single-lane stretches of highway! Yep, that's right - for about 30kms or so, each time the road entered a valley (so your line of sight as a driver was good and long), the tarmac reduced to only one lane, with wide, wide dirt shoulders. These single lane stretches were several kms long each. This meant that if you were partway down one, and a vehicle was coming at you from the opposite direction, both vehicles had to ease off so their left tires were on dirt and their right tires were on tarmac, in order to not crash headlong. Craziness. We guessed that this might have been a way to save money on road construction, but let me tell you, it was a wee bit unnerving to drive!

It took us just over four hours to get to Wave Rock. We weren't sure what to expect when we got there, but wow, it was cool! Turns out that Wave Rock is just one teeny, tiny bit of a HUGE granite outcropping that sits much higher than the surrounding landscape. For those of you who have been to my cottage, think about the exposed bedrock that is found throughout the forest there. Well, this granite outcropping was hundreds of times bigger than the largest outcropping we have back home! It was also much, much higher than the lands around it, since the soil around the granite had been eroding slowly away for millenia. The wave itself is found on one side of the outcropping, and was formed by water pouring over the edge and eroding away the softer rock beneath. The result, as you can see from the pictures, is a shape that looks like a fossilized surfing wave.

It was pretty much mandatory for us to take "surfing" shots at the rock (after all, the Lonely Planet guidebook told us to!), so we did. However once again, the heat and the flies were getting the better of us. We couldn't stay still for long because the flies would flock to our faces like nobody's business, and while they don't bite, they are absolutely the most ANNOYING critters I think I have ever encountered! They go after moisture of any sort, so they try to crawl up your nose, into your ears, onto your eyes, into your mouth... you get the picture. NOT FUN.

There was a short nature trail for us to explore that took us along the side of the outcropping, so we did. We kept catching glimpses of these little "dragon" lizards that were living on the rock - every time we approached, they'd scamper away over the rock faster than lightning! At one point, we found a slope gentle enough to allow us to climb to the top of the granite, so we did. This turned out to be a good move - it was windier up on the top of the rock and so the flies were less! It wasn't until we reached the top that we realized just how huge this piece of granite was - imagine a piece of rock about the size of the Vaughan Mills Mall, and you'll have some idea. I remarked to Jen that I wondered if this was a little bit like what Uluru would be like. The top of the rock brought another surprise - inukshuks! Or at least, little piles of stacked rocks that sure looked like inukshuks. We couldn't help but wonder if other Canadians had been here too!

We wandered along the top of the granite for a while and then slithered our way back down into the forest and the flies. The next stop on the trail was the Hippo's Yawn, another rock formation on the far side of the granite from Wave Rock. Unfortunately the picture doesn't quite show this gaping cave the way I'd like - the trees were in the way. But it really, truly looked like a hippo's mouth opened in a yawn!

The flies at this point were pretty incredibly bad, so we hightailed it back to the car and headed to the Humps, another granite outcropping about 20kms from Wave Rock. Apparently there's a whole string of these outcroppings in this part of Western Australia. At the Humps there is a significant Aboriginal site called Mulka's Cave. The entrance to the cave didn't look all that exciting, but once we were inside, it was wonderful. Basically the cave was a naturally-hollowed-out space under a GIANT boulder (as in, the space inside was the size of my parents' house). It was wonderfully cool inside the cave and there were no flies, either! (We don't understand why the pesky Australian blow flies won't spend time indoors - literally, we were being harassed by flies almost to the point of tears while reading the signs outside the cave, but once we had stepped into the shade inside, it was like there was an invisible fly barrier. We've noticed this as well with tents, cars, and houses. Strange.) (We are not complaining that the flies won't spend time inside!) The walls and ceiling of the cave were decorated with hundreds of ancient Aboriginal paintings. Most of them were the silhouettes of hands, where the ocher had been sprayed on the wall to show the outline. It was really neat. Nobody really knows how old this site is, but the guess is 20,000 years at least.

There was another trail for us to take to hike around the outside of Mulka's Cave, and we gave it a go, but the files were just too much for us. Jen and I felt a little wimpy - here we were giving in to insects that weren't even biting us! But until you've experienced Aussie flies for yourself, you won't understand how annoying they can be. So we double-timed it back to the car and headed back to Perth.

On the drive back to Perth we stopped a number of times to take pictures of some of the strange things we saw along the highway on the way out. Corrigin was high on our list, what with the whole "dog in a ute" thing, but there were other random metal sculptures scattered along our route too. When we arrived in Perth, we tried to find a place to eat dinner, as Pat and Rob were out for the evening. Would you believe we couldn't find a restaurant in suburban Perth to save our lives? I'm not kidding. We drove and drove and drove all these different main streets, with no luck. We tried driving to spots on our map where shopping malls were indicated, with no luck. I mean, come on. In a Canadian city, if you were driving down a commercial stretch of road, you'd find some sort of restaurant on pretty much every corner! Perth is definitely not laid out in the same way. After about an hour of fruitless searching (good grief), we ended up back at the mall closest to Pat and Rob's house, since we knew it at least had an open food court. And that's where we ended up eating dinner - in the food court of a mall that was only still open because of the movie theatres close by. What craziness.