Having moaned in my last posting that we were too hot and looking forward to the colder weather, we got off the bus in Carnarvon at 4am on Monday morning (after a 12 hour journey) and it was really cold! Brrr! I don't think we've been cold since Tokyo, back in February!
We were booked into a caravan park on Monday night, as the local hostel had no double rooms (shared dorms be damned!) and the lovely people at the caravan park had said that if our caravan was empty on the Sunday night they'd leave the key out for us so we could get into it when we arrived.
We trapsed to the caravan park, laden with big rucksacks, and joy upon joys, the key was waiting for us! We got in and slept (in our clothes) for a few hours. We were up early - no rest for us - to see if we could get a tour at the local School Of The Air, but were told to come back on Tuesday. Since we were up we went to Woolies and got eggs, bacon, juice and muffins and then went back to the caravan for a cooked breakfast - not too shabby!
The caravan's nice and would sleep up to six people, at a squeeze. Better than anything Tom and Pippa Fletcher ever had, I think. Best of all we have kitchen facilities inside, and so have been cooking and eating well in our time here! So nice not to have to share facilities with young "travellers" who seem intent on never washing up and leaving wet tea-towels lying in heaps so they'll never dry. (Now I think of it, that must mean that someone is at least drying up, but anyway.)
We spent Monday morning orienting ourselves in Carnarvon. It's a nice little town and there seemed to be enough here to entertain us for three days. My sister lived here for a couple of months while working on (I think) a banana plantation, I now find. In the afternoon we did a heritage trail walk around the town. The "exhibits" had mostly been destroyed years ago, but at least they made the effort.
That night I'm ashamed to say we watched the final of Big Brother. Reggie won, as expected. She's a simple girl from Tassie, and is the only Aussie I've heard say "Fair Dinkum" since we've been here.
Back To Skool
And so Tuesday morning we went to the School Of The Air (SOTA). We'd read about these, and there are five of them in Western Australia. SOTA are correspondance schools, which include an element of teaching over radio. The kids sit in their homes in the middle of nowhere (in just their pants, apparently, as it's usually so hot!) talking to the teacher ("Yes Miss, Over"). The Carnarvon SOTA has sixty pupils, spread over a vast distance.
We watched a video on the school, and then sat in on a class. The teacher was in radio contact with two 12 year olds and was going through some worksheets on gold prospecting in Western Australia. It was interesting to see (and hear) as the kids were really attentive. The sound quality was poor, and they're looking to upgrade to a fancy sattelite system.
That afternoon we went on a huge long trek ("Come on Candice-Marie!") to Babbage Island and out to One Mile Jetty. We saw old trains being displayed there, and a ring of odd, furry caterpillars. We were shattered when we got home. We had sausages, potatoes and vegetables for our tea.
Yes, we've seen some bananas
This morning (Wednesday) we were up with the larks again to go to a banana and mango plantation. It was a good 5k walk there, then we were early so walked a further 1k and back to a big satellite dish which our literature said helped to "intercept" Halley's Comet. When we got back to the plantation we went on an informative tour and saw the bananas growing (as you'd hope you would at a banana plantation). We then had a chocolate coated frozen banana each. Yum! We were shattered when we got home and fell asleep after lunch.