Leaving Perth

More Pinacles | Barquing

The tourist bus stop is a solitary looking bus shelter outside Perth Central Station, hidden behind the roadworks and distinguished from the other bus stops with a small embarrassed looking sign reading ‘Tourist Bus Stop’. I have been told that my tour bus would collect me here at around seven o’clock in the morning and so I get there unnecessarily early to be sure. On arrival, it appears that I am not the only one to be cautious. The pavement surrounding the bus shelter is already filling with backpacks and bags. A small group of people are sitting around them, eyeing each other surreptitiously, trying to identify other members of their tours.
“Hello!” I say with my best attempt at joviality. The syllables come out in a slightly embarrassed squeak which undermines my attempt to be sociable.
I too am eyed suspiciously, but no-one answers and the bus stop lapses back into silence.
A car pulls up and an elderly woman leans out, her wrinkles worn into a frown.
“Is this the stop for Broome?” she asks brusquely.
The people at the bus stop eye her suspiciously too, then look at their feet.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, I think.
“Is that Adventure tours?” I pipe up, “I’m going to Darwin, but we stop in Broome, right?”
Silence.
The woman gets back into the car and drives off, the atmosphere she leaves behind seems curiously tense, as though my answering the question has breached some sort of unspoken protocol. I look at my own feet and metally prepare myself for nineteen days of this sort of behavior.
The next person to turn up, however, proves more proficient in the art of answering greetings, even if they are somewhat more muted by this time. A half-nod of acknowledgement is met with a broad smile.
Donald is pushing seventy, hails from the island of Mull and – thanks to dietary requirements – he has packed his own supply of porridge for the trip.
“Ten portions,” he tells me, “Cut with soya milk. Just add water.”
He grimaces.
“Will probably taste terrible.” He admits.
Donald turns out to be on the same trip as myself, and as the time edges closer to seven, the bus stop gradually fills with more and more bags and their owners, clustering in nervous groups waiting to be shepherded by the growing number of beaming tour guides, marching around the area armed with clipboards, tans and goatees.
Our own tour bus trundles in: a rickety looking machine with a hand-scrawled number plate. A crooked trailer doggedly follows behind, stacked high with canvas sacking, bulging with something-or-other bound beneath.
Our tour guide leaps out from the driver’s seat and beams at us. He greets us collectively with three clichés in quick succession, which for some reason, immediately sets us at ease:
“G’day mate. No worries.”
We sigh. This is what we’re paying for, we think.
The group is gradually building around the bus – none, thankfully from the reticent group I first encountered at the bus stop (most of whom I later notice nervously bundling into a bus marked ‘Skydiving School’).
Our guide introduces himself.
“I’m Cleggy.” He says, still beaming. “Alrighty.” He adds as an afterthought.
We let this information settle in.
“Cleggy?” someone repeats eventually.
“Yep.”
“Where from?”
“Surname.” Cleggy says, “Clegg, with a Y. Like ‘leggy’, Cleggy.”
“No, where are you from?”
A small pause.
“Oh,” he says, “Victoria.”
He grins a Cheshire Cat grin, tombstone teeth cracking open his face. He looks a little like The Dude from The Big Lebowski recast with a young Brian Blessed.
“You guys rock.” He says when we’ve boarded the bus. He consults a clipboard.
“Alrighty.” He says again, frowning, “We’re missing someone.”
I remember the woman who leant out of the car before and mention it, silently amazed with myself – will I ever just shut the hell up? He nods thanks and vanishes out of the bus, returning shortly afterwards with the woman by the hand.
“This is Lee.” He says, ushering her onto the bus and closing the door behind her. Lee – still looking rather morose – finds a seat and digs a pillow out of her bags. I have flashbacks to the train journey from Sydney, but quickly suppress them.
There are ten of us in the group, and four of this number are French. Three English (or rather, two English and one English/Australian mix), one Dutch, one Scott and Lee – who is Australian, round out the mix.
Lee describes herself as an “ex-farmer’s wife” who now lives in Perth. She’s seventy-five and wants to see parts of the country that she has never had a chance to see before.
“And I’ve never been on a camping trip.” She says.
One by one we are invited to the front of the bus to give a similar description of ourselves to the rest of the bus. To the best of my memory, Lee is the only one who punctuates her biography with a blue joke.
“This seat,” Cleggy pats the passenger seat beside him once the last of us has returned to the back of the bus, “Should be used in rotation by you guys.”
His expression goes a little wide eyed at this point.
“To keep me sane,” he explains, “There’s a lot of driving to do and I really appreciate someone to talk to.”
The bus rattles into motion and we rumble out of the city suburbs and into the countryside.
The landscape outside Perth is lush and green, the occasional lift in the altitude giving enough perspective to give some idea of the sheer expanse of scenery to take in. There’s a lot of it, much the same, flat and vast, pockmarked with scrub and tufts of grass.
Lunch is served in a sweetly ramshackle way alongside a beautiful stretch of turquoise sea. Wearing my walking boots rather than my sandals – a concession to the weight limit I assumed was important (but which was never referred to) – I stand just shy of the gentle surf and wish I had packed my belongings a little differently.
The water laps invitingly at my boot’s uppers. The sand shifts beneath their soles.
From the road, Cleggy grinds the engine, a none-too-subtle summons to return to the bus. I trudge back over the sand obediently.
We stop for the night in Kalbarri. It is too dark to make out the bay just yet, but we hear it as we unload the trailer, and can smell the salt in the air. It is still too early in the tour for the group to have any experiences to share with each other, so we tiptoe around each other during dinner and prepare to turn in early.
Cleggy stretches out a map of Western Australia for us to pour over, and indicates the route we are to take.
“The beaches to the North,” he says, punching the strip marked “Eighty Mile Beach” with a thumb, “have stingers, crocodiles and sharks. Also the water is warm – it’s tropical and probably warmer than standing outside the sea. You sweat in it, I don’t recommend swimming there.”
He moves his thumb further up the coast and jabs the caption for the town of Broome.
“Here,” he says, “Cable Beach has all the same problems: crocs, stingers and sharks, but it’s a better place to swim.”
There is a slight hesitation amongst the group.
“Why?” someone asks after a while.
“There’s a hospital.” Cleggy says.