Yesterday, we travelled the long distance from Albany to Esperance. We had over 480 kilometres to travel through a variety of wheat farms, mallee type scrub and bushland.
We broke up the trip with a number of stops to look at wild flowers and to have a stretch of legs. Many of the good wildflower spots seemed to be on the brow of a hill where the shoulder of the road was too narrow to safely stop, but we did find a couple of places where it was safe to pull over.
At on place, it initially looked as though there were only a few type of flowers but as we walked around we came across dozens of varieties in quite a small area. There were little orchards, some low lying flowers that looked like liverwurts, eucalyptus flowers and kangaroo paws amongst all the varieties that we saw.
We have been quite disappointed (and surprised) to find that at many places where we have stopped by the road, there have always been a number of beer bottles and cans thrown into the scrub. Perhaps these have been there for many years but it is disappointing to see the countryside as trashed as it is.
Some people do care about this however. We stopped at the little locality of Wellstead in the middle of nowhere and the community was having a ‘clean-up’ day. We saw a good number of people on the highway filling orange bags with roadside rubbish. Good on them!
Our lunch was in the larger town of Ravensthorpe where we stopped in the city park with our picnic supplies and ham and salad rolls. Nearby was a wall with a series of plaques illustrating key events in the town’s history. It was interesting to see how seemingly simple events (such as the local river mouth breaking through the sand bar to the sea in the 1920’s and the local Roads Board Office burning down in the930’s) were so significant to the local community.
We reached Esperance by late afternoon and had a quick around the town before finding our hotel.
wow! just beautiful.