Back in the groove

1st March 2011

This evening I cooked up spaghetti with a tomato sauce; onion, garlic, mushrooms, white wine and plenty of pepper. It could have used capers and fresh herbs, but that’s the kind of stuff not worth buying if you’re on the road.

We spent the day hiking a section of the Bibbulman Track, a long-distance footpath that winds across SW Australia. This part leaves the little town of Walpole and runs through coastal heathland until it reaches the Nornalup Inlet, where it turns back inland and climbs a hill through a glorious sylvan setting of tall karri and tingle trees. At the top there is a lookout with a view back down to the steel blue waters of the inlet, which is where we stop for our lunch of donuts and apples before heading back. The forest is full of birdlife, and on the heath we glimpsed some kind of small arboreal mammal but not for long enough to identify it. A pygmy possum or a phascogale.

In the evening we went out again to do some spotlight walking. Almost all of Australia’s mammals are nocturnal to a greater or lesser extent, so spotlighting is even more crucial to mammal-watching here than it is in Asia or Africa. On this occasion, as often happens when we try it in a place where we have had no advice on what to look for or where to look, we see nothing. To be accurate, we see some kangaroos and some rabbits, but nothing new.

Anyway, hiking and mammal-watching are completely free and so today’s spend was only accommodation and the provisions for our self-catering: it’s only on this kind of day that we’ll be under budget in Australia.

As for being “back in the groove”, today felt very much like a lot of our time in South Africa. Cooking our own supper in budget accommodation, spending our days walking and looking for mammals, drive on every day or three. Pretty low-key adventures, but a nice groove to get into again. Roll on tomorrow.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2011 at 1:00 am and is filed under Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.