Day 29 ~ Esperance, the town that means Hope

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. ~ Hilaire Belloc

 

We woke this morning in a working port. Cruise passengers are not allowed to just walk off the boat. It’s not safe. There are humongous cranes and conveyor belts used to fill freighters with wood chips and a narrow gauge rail system that delivers iron ore to the port from 600 km away. We either have to board an excursion bus or the shopping shuttle that will take people within a few blocks of a Target store and strip mall.

Excursion bus it is!

Our first stop was to a life-sized replica of Stonehenge. The difference is that this one is complete, where the one in England is missing several large stones. Plus this was done with modern equipment and stone dressing machines, but everything is positioned so the solar effect is the same on the solstice. Even with large cranes to position the monoliths, it was quite a piece of engineering. Really put me in awe of those ancient stone masons and mathematicians who built the first one.

The real question is why. The one in Esperance is there to build up the area as a tourist destination. The one in England? Who knows?

Then we drove along country roads lined with Tasmanian blue gum trees (a rather disastrous scheme for a cash crop that went south when the wood chip market plummeted) on our way to Cape Le Grand National Park.

First up, the oddly named Hellfire Beach. It’s beautiful—fine powdery sand and pristine water. The walk down to it is a gentle slope on a brick walkway through a fragrant stand of juniper-like bushes. A wonderfully fresh smell.

On Lucky Beach (so named because only 100 yards inland there’s a freshwater pool that early sailors were delighted to discover!) we encountered several kangaroos, that showed no fear of people at all.

This spectacular rock is known as Frenchman's Hat. 

The beaches are spectacular, but the water is cold, the currents strong, and as I understand it, this is the season for box jellyfish—a particularly nasty little beastie.

I noticed that many homes had water catchment systems and asked our driver about it. (The nice thing about using supplemental O2 is that I feel no guilt about taking that first seat on the bus reserved for handicapped folk. I get a good view and am close enough to the front of the bus to ask questions. It’s one of the strawberries in my situation.) Anyway, he said the ground water in Esperance is crap. It’s so heavy with minerals it destroys a house’s plumbing in no time at all, so everyone uses rain water.

Esperance is about the same size town as the one we live in, so I found myself wondering what sort of excursions we’d offer if a cruise miraculously turned up alongside City Hall. We could have tours of the Opera House, a 19^th century building on our town square. They’d probably offer an excursion to take people to Mammoth Spring about 30 miles away or the collapsed cave that’s even closer. There could be trout fishing, hiking in the Mark Twain National Forest, or kayaking on the White River.

And we could always have a shuttle to Walmart…