Crossroads at Ravensthorpe
16th July, Esperance & Wave Rock (Hyden), Australia
We took the short drive from the centre of Esperance to Bandy Creek, a small harbour used by local fishermen, and also took a look at a place called Wylie Bay. This was marked on our local map of Esperance as another possible whale-spotting location, but it looked just too shallow for any of those big blubbery fellas to make an appearance. I tramped up to the top of one of the many sand dunes in the area to see if there were any whales further out but still no luck there.
Manda and I headed back in to the centre and I tried to track down somewhere that might be able to fix my camcorder. I had only bought it 7 months ago (when we arrived in San Francisco) but it's got very sickly recently, making a horrible grinding noise when the tape goes round, resulting in (at best) noisy recordings and (at worst) recordings that are completely unwatchable because the tape is skipping. It probably has something to do with the many times I've dropped it (fallen out of a cupboard at head height on to concrete, fallen off the cupboard in the van on to the floor, dropped on rocks in Tasmania ... it's had it hard!). I promise to look after the next one better ... assuming that this one is beyond repair (I suspect this to be the case, alas). The bigger problem for us now, though, is that until the camcorder is repaired or we get a new one, we can't do any filming. So, we might as well just get on the road and drive instead ...
After lunch we got back on the road once more headed for a place called Albany, but once we got as far as Ravensthorpe, we had something of a quandary - we had left Esperance without doing the scenic 'Great Ocean Drive' or seeing the Pink Lake. Should we go back? It was about 180kms back, and we would have to come this way again in a couple of days' time again if we did turn back. In the end we decided to keep going, but instead of heading for Albany, we changed direction, heading north towards a place called Hyden, where Wave Rock can be found. But more of that in the next post ...