Thursday, April 13

We took an Uber to the Ibis Budget Perth Airport hotel, which despite its proximity was fairly expensive. We took another Uber to Cooee, a “modern Australian” restaurant.  We had delicious oysters, and a starter which had akoya, an unfamiliar sea creature, and samphire, a variety of seaweed.  A good fish course, a cheese plate, and some Western Australian wines (four shared glasses) rounded it out.

Friday, April 14

In the news this morning, cyclone Ilsa crossed the Pilbara Coast and entered Western Australia and began to disperse. It had been traveling down the channel between Indonesia and Australia, strengthening as it went; for a brief time it was even forecast there would be overcast skies at Exmouth; but the prevailing winds blew it onshore and it was gone before eclipse day. That part of Australia is fairly unoccupied. All the networks carried the same images of the destroyed Pardoo Roadhouse because that’s what there was, that they could get to. When the networks are all carrying the same photos of destruction, there wasn’t as much of it as they had hoped.

There was a nice coffee place across the highway from the hotel.  Afterwards we walked to a grocery store and bought some food for our week in a camper van.  Rice, linguini, oil, vinegar, mustard, eggplant pickle, WeetBix, sausage, eggs, butter, milk, coffee, crackers, cookies, fennel, lettuce, onions, salami, cheese, peanut butter, jam, bread — all the requirements. 

At dinner time we took the bus and train to meet our friends Elizabeth and Roxana for dinner at the house in Fremantle where they were staying.  We’d met them on an eclipse cruise in 2016 to Micronesia.  We joined Liz’ partner Paul, his sisters, and their husbands for a simple dinner of steak, potatoes, and salad.  And Western Australian wine.

Saturday, April 15

After another breakfast at the coffee place, we took the bus up the highway to the Britz outlet where we rented our excessively long camper van.  It was tall enough to stand up in, which was great, but it had a toilet and shower which we never used, because everywhere we stayed had them.  We plugged it in to 240v most of the places we went, though one place didn’t have power, and another didn’t want you to use it for heating or A/C.

We parked the van at the hotel, and took the bus into town to meet Liz and Roxana at the museum.  We went to the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art, where we’d met Thomas Rentmeister in 2012, who we now try to see whenever we go to Berlin.  This time PICA had an exhibition in the main floor which was pretty conceptual, featuring modified projectors where the film looped around in a complicated way.  The interesting exhibition was upstairs.  A motor was slowly moving some beams from which several wires were strung, feeding up to the ceiling and then down the walls, each supporting a piece of wood which was either charred or covered with ochre.  These were leaving marks on the wall as the strings moved them up and down.  Another piece had a historical book outlining plans for dealing with aboriginals, with ochre between its pages, and with water dripping on it so as to destroy it in a significant way.

We had a fairly large Japanese lunch, and headed back to the hotel and moved into the van.  We started driving north, stopping at Dan Murphy’s to pick up some Western Australian wine for the trip — we got four bottles, and some water. The clerks and even other customers were happy to help us pick wines out. I only picked one, which had a design on the label that looked like an eclipse. For one reason or another, we’ll drink it on the 20th.

Driving was pleasant, boring, uneventful.  It was pretty easy getting out of Perth with four lanes quite a ways up.  Then it became a two-lane road in good condition, with plenty of overtaking lanes.  I set the cruise control to 110kph and didn’t often have to pass in order to maintain the speed.  We made it to our first destination, the Western Flora Caravan Park, just as it got dark.  When we arrived, we were the only ones there, no sign of an eclipse rush.  We didn’t bother with dinner, just cheese and salami lettuce mustard sandwiches, and a Malbec from Margaret River.

I got up at three in the morning to take in the Southern Sky. Perfectly clear weather. Scorpio right overhead, not dragging its tail along the horizon like it does at home. The Cross, the clouds, the Milky Way…

Sunday, April 16

Breakfast was sausage, eggs, cheese, onion.  We had a French press in the van, making the best coffee of the trip.  More driving.  We stopped in Geraldton for a few missing groceries, Parmesan cheese and more water.

We crossed a major flooded River. I suppose the water came from central Australia where the cyclone rained itself out. The Highway department had put up signs “event ahead”. I supposed that was their way of saying drive carefully. Later on, we realized that the “event” was the eclipse we were headed to. The constabulary was prepared for the worst.

We drove on to the Wooramel Riverside Retreat, a basic camp spread out along the mostly dry Wooramel river.  No power or Internet, but we could cook just fine on propane, and the van had a separate 12V battery for the lights, water pump, and USB charging.  We had sausage and linguini and salad.  And some WA wine. (We aren’t good drinkers; wine lasts more than a day with us and fortunately it often improves.) We bought Anzac cookies for dessert and snacks. It’s that season.

The camp was packed with Australian campers and their kids. There is a hot spring there, too, though not as hot as our hot tub and far more crowded with strangers. It was here that we first began to run into eclipse watchers other than by design. There was a fellow who had been to Zambia in 2001!

Monday, April 17

Breakfast was WeetBix and PB&J.  We kept driving, and made it to the Coral Coast Tourist Park in Carnarvon.  It had powered sites, and WiFi throughout (plus usable cell signals), laundry, and showers.  We picked up a rotisserie chicken, and had that with rice and eggplant pickle augmenting the leftover linguini from the previous night.  More WA wine.

As we drove, we saw more and more “Major Event In Progress” road signs, with the speed limits dipping to 80 or 60 for turnoffs and roadhouses.  Seemed a bit strange, but whatever.

Tuesday, April 18

The man next to our slot seems to live at this trailer park. Old and sunbaked and stacks of bottles. Nobody travels with bottles. We ate breakfast and continued driving north.  Signs encouraged us to keep topping off the tank so we’d have gas to get back in case they ran out.  We topped off at the Minilya Roadhouse.  Google Maps was paying enough attention to draw the road in yellow.

Australia has flies.  They really like flying in your face, especially when you stop by the side of the road to pee.  Some of them are “March flies”, and actually bite you.  There were hardly any mosquitoes, though. Overall, the Australian insect population seems to have dropped as much as the American, or maybe there never were grasshoppers here. Do schools teach, that if you took a road trip in the 1950’s, you had to scrape off your windshield three or four times a day or you couldn’t see? It just isn’t like that, now. I drive to Oregon and back without cleaning my windshield. Dave is more fastidious but – well, he’d drive to Kansas as a child.

The termite mounds are dense up here, like haystacks dotting farmland, except that haystacks are all uniform marshmallows of white plastic now.

We came to a checkpoint where they were actually stopping cars. An absolutely unintelligible Aussie junior cop asked if we were going to Coral Bay. We weren’t, so forward we went. Turns out the major event is the eclipse. Usually in America if there is a horse show or a Grateful Dead Tribute concert, they don’t have signs 400 miles away warning you, but in Western Australia, there aren’t that many junctions. You could say, in a sense, that Geraldton is about six blocks from Exmouth because that’s how many viable alternate routes branch off in that two-day piece of driving. And some of the roads are unusable. The bridge at Fitzroy Crossing was flooded out a while back, and Cyclone Ilsa had closed roads as well. The recommended route from Perth to Darwin, if you’re piloting a truck, is via Alice Springs. That is like driving from San Francisco to Detroit by way of Brownsville. I bet the Australians fix their roads before Caltrans fixes Highway 84, which was closed on March 11 when the roadway slid into the creek. (It reopened to one-way traffic on July 27.)

We topped off again just before Exmouth (which WA residents pronounce ex-MOUTH not ex-muth) at “cheapest gas in town” in a little industrial area.  It was crowded, but not gas-shortage or Weimar inflation crowded. The manager had set up an additional pump. She said: “Go round and young Jack’ll take care of ye.” Young Jack had a portable pump connected to a barrel of diesel.

After driving through town, there was a checkpoint making sure we had reservations, shortly before the turnoff to the Yardie Homestead Caravan Park, where we’d planned on staying two nights, because they’d said they were booked on the third.  Turned out they were expecting us for three nights.  Oh well, our plans were made.  This was the place which restricted us from using power for the air conditioning or heating water.  Sigh.

The crowd was not particularly astronomical. I think these people might just come here every year. The signage is sixties, the inhabitants are decorated with tart stamps prison tack and only the occasional 8 inch diameter telescope. Young moms abound, herding young kids with obsolete hair and the pugnacious self-sufficiency of hand me down orphans. Eclipses take you to trailer parks everywhere.

Dinner was leftover chicken and rice, and WA wine. They do have a cafeteria at the park but we had food to eat up and only a few days to do it in. Don’t waste food.

On Monday Liz and Roxana had flown up from Perth to Learmonth, the airport south of Exmouth, and were whisked off to Sal Salis, an exclusive super-expensive “glamping” resort on the ocean in Cape Range National Park. Why do tour buses whisk people off? Are they brooms?

Travelquest had bought up all the tents at Sal Salis. Those who had reserved independently had been sent letters revoking their reservations. There are advantages to hanging out in salt-of-the-earth trailer parks.

We were in fairly constant communication with Liz and Roxana. They told us the tours they were planning on for Wednesday, so that we could meet them.

Wednesday, April 19

At dawn, a flock of corellas occupies the tree outside the bathroom. I don’t know where they go during the day. Going out before dawn in Australia is rewarding, not just for the stars.

After breakfast, we disconnected the van and drove down to Turquoise Bay to meet Liz and Roxana and Paul and his sister Beverly, on their tour.  It was a crowded parking lot. Shortly after we got there, we saw the Sal Salis vans drive up.  We walked over and met them, and walked down to the beach.  It was stunningly beautiful.  Waves broke way offshore, and a flat pool of ocean was there to explore.  There was a fairly strong current to the north.  The whole Sal Salis group swam together from south to north.  Ray went in for awhile, seeing many pretty fish.  While he was out, some swimmers carried in a man who wasn’t breathing, set him on the beach and started CPR.  A defibrillator showed up shortly thereafter.  Meanwhile, I went in myself for a short snorkel above the coral.

It turned out that the man didn’t make it, and that he was one of the eclipse guides for their tour.  He had had a heart attack, having previously had heart trouble.  The second tour of the day was canceled.

We went back to the camp to rent a set of fins, and arranged to meet Liz on the beach just outside their exclusive accommodation (all beaches in Australia are public).  The place had a few cabana seats on the beach, and Liz kept running to the bar to get more things to drink, juice at first but gradually turning into WA wine.  Over a period of about four hours, people just kept coming out and joining us, and we stayed there for several minutes after sunset.  There were close to twenty people by the time we left.  We met a couple from Los Altos, and some folks who’d seen lots of eclipses.  One of the tour leaders gave us some leftover eclipse t-shirts with a nice design.

(One concept I discovered there was “swimming pool fins”, fins which are small enough to pack in carry-on suitcases.  I think I’ll get some.)

We got a fish and chips takeaway from the camp cafe and had it with leftovers from the night before.

Thursday, 4/20

We got up, checked out, and headed into the Exmouth town center.  The caravan park was only on the edge of the path of totality, but Exmouth was adequately close to the center line to get almost the maximum duration of eclipse.  We stopped there for breakfast, at a nice little cafe called “early birds”.  Then we continued driving south to the industrial area where we’d gotten gas before.  Driving past the gas station, we found a little bluff with a few cars parked on it, and from the bluff we saw even more cars parked along a little road which went to the beach.  Assuming no clouds showed up, and none had, it was a beautiful day, it looked like it would make a good viewing spot.  We saw a cruise ship sitting offshore, maintaining its position on the centerline. We met a man from Belgium with a big camera, and another man who had driven from Adelaide.  We walked down to the beach — there were much bigger waves on the beach because there wasn’t a reef like there was on the west shore.  Several cars were parked down there.  A Japanese man had seven cameras with various lengths of lenses set up. We gave a pair of cardboard eclipse viewing goggles to a girl from Exmouth.

The eclipse started right on time around 10:04, and the moon gradually took a bigger and bigger bite out of the sun.  We found some things with pinholes to make projections.  Finally, totality arrived at 11:29, and we were treated to a bright eclipse with many prominences, and many corona points.  Jupiter was easily visible near the sun.  And about 60 seconds later, it was over. I didn’t see any shadow bands nor was there a view of the moon shadow, as the air was dry. May be the giant cruise ship (also Travelquest, I’m guessing) got a more comprehensive view. Carved one more notch on the butt of my gold-handled cane.

Everybody started leaving, and soon we did too.  Another nice thing about being at the south edge of town is that we’d avoid the exodus to some extent.  We did pause at a termite mound right at fourth contact to see the moon leave the sun completely uncovered.   Two other cars stopped there as well, to take photos of the termite mound.

We returned to Carnarvon and the Coral Coast Tourist Park.  We went back to the Woolworth’s and got some Australian lamb and some chicken thighs to get us through the next three nights.  The lamb was delightful.  We opened the South Australian wine with the eclipse-like label on it to celebrate.

Friday, April 21

We had WeetBix and PB&J in the van, but coffee in town, saving the last bit of ground coffee for the next morning.  The van demanded oil. It’s also been demanding a service, but we called Britz and they said not to worry. We drove back to the Western Flora Caravan Park, getting there a bit before sunset.  The guy gave us a little jar of honey, and said he’d set out some eggs in the kitchen.  Gosh, what a classic good-looking Aussie bloke he is. Tan, fit, swell pits, sleeveless shirt, guileless attitude. But as the roads improve, people headed toward Perth will just keep going three more hours, where in past years, they would have stopped. Don’t know what future Western Flora has.

Saturday, April 22

We had eggs and cheese and onion and toast for breakfast, prepared in the camp kitchen.  We drove back to Perth, and topped off the van with diesel.  We also needed to top off the propane tank, which proved to be not only time-consuming, but also impossible.  The first place we went didn’t dispense it anymore, the second only did “swap and go”.  The third place, a Boating Camping Fishing store, offered the service, but we weren’t able to detach the hose from the tank. So we just decided to return it unfilled.

After all that trouble, we’d missed our slot at the place to rent a car to drive down to Margaret River.  We called them and they said they’d be there in an hour.  We drove the van down there, and discovered they were already there.  We moved the stuff into the car, drove to the van rental place and returned it. It hadn’t been a bad place to live for the previous week.