Cape Leveque. WA

Imagine if you will: you're up at 6am all excited about the big trip planned for the day. You booked weeks ago so as to not miss out. You are waiting patiently out the front of the van park as the sun breaks the morning sky. A rusty, dirty, pile of Toyota nuts and bolts clunks to a halt across the road. Apart from the filthy, nondescript 4x4, there is an equally dirty and scruffy looking trailer attached.
No one in our party moves: we are expecting a luxury air-conditioned coach. This could not be ours. Eventually a man ambles across to us. he is dressed in nondescript khaki shirt and jeans. He fails to introduce himself and we are obliged to enquire of him if he has really come for us - in that.

Crestfallen, we approach the orange box used as a step up into the less than salubrious looking interior. Bent double I follow Judy to a pair of seats and drop into one of them. The driver, still speechless, assumes his place and coaxes the engine into life for what would become a heart stopping moment each time we set off. And we are off. Well, off to pick up more and more wide-eyed tourists until the Super Trooper has a complete compliment of 13 souls.

By the time we reach the highway, my back is aching and I use a towel as a lumber support. All too soon we hit the dirt, and I really mean hit. The bangs and crashes and shuddering rise to a new all time high for discomfort - and stays that way for the next two hours. The 'road' is atrocious, not helped in the least by the big rains they had here  a week or so ago and the helpful way it was 'graded' by someone who knew not what they were doing. I cannot see a damn thing except the head of the bloke in front. God it's awful, please let it end soon. It ends at Beagle Bay. The driver, who has remained silent the entire time breaks that silence to tell us where the loos are and to offer a communal roll of toilet paper, as they just don't have such things out here. We reluctantly clamber back aboard for a short drive to the world famous missionary church with the alter made of pearl shell. It's nice enough, but again, there was nothing. No little chat, no friendly local to show us around. We had morning tea in the car park: tea and stale packet anzacs. I wondered at the time if there was indeed a bay to go with the Beagle Bay tag, or perhaps even a beagle. The beagle was a possibility, in these communities one find lots of really odd looking, mostly mangy, criss-crossed dogs.

Did I mention the fact that the roof mounted air conditioner leaked water down the drivers side pillar and onto his seat belt, so that he drove with a drenched seat belt across him the entire time?

Back on the road, oddly bitumen now that were are out on the cape, and another hour and a half later we rocked up to Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm. Finally, a guide took us in hand and gave us a good talking to about the farm and about pearls and stuff. This was more like it. Then we were seated at a table and the young lady launched into our 'Pearl appreciation' lecture. Ladies drooling all around as she handed out pearls of all shapes and sizes from rubbish to the top notch $5000 job. Then she started handing out big fat strings of pearls for the ladies to hold up to their necks and gaze longingly at their husbands / boyfriends / department of finances.  With all our new knowledge we are then allowed into the gallery itself and they were happy to show and tell any and all of their goodies. Judy decided that they were all to big and gaudy and we wandered of to get our promised 'scrumptious' meal.

(Close your ears and cover your eyes my children) The smell of the lunch arrived first and had a few of us edging toward the loos. Surely not. Surely they wouldn't assume everyone would want to spend 6 hours being shaken around like farts in a bottle and then settle down to a lovely meal of curried chicken and cold rice. Yum - not. I toughed it out, I was so hungry I even ate a bowl of salad and three pieces of gritty carrot cake as an antidote. Not to mention 2 litres of water. Oh, and how would we all like to clamber back into the tin-can again please. Not that we could find it, he had parked some way up the track from where we had been disgorged and he hadn't mentioned it.

Two hundred metres later we were bogged as the thing failed to take the slight sandy hill on the way out. Having the trailer meant backing up to get a run at it was dodgy. We got help from the pearl farm, and eventually their mechanic just jumped in and drove the thing up and over, no worries. Helps if its in 1st gear not 5th. Oh, and did I mention that the 'thing' didn't have a hand brake? He had to jump out, grab a rock and jamb it under a wheel before it rolled back out of his reach.

We went to a Trochus Hatchery. Someone decided it'd be clever to breed Trochus shell, staple diet of locals, and restock the reef after the Indonesians wiped them out a few years ago. It was really just a way to get a donation from everyone and possibly sell us a bit of junk jewellery or some other useless artefact made out of polished Trochus shell. We had all but drifted out of the shed when a German? guide turned up and insisted on giving us the chat. They have all kinds of fish in the ponds that they try and breed and do research on. Except for one tank that had had 12 Barramundi in it until last week. Now it had 12 holes in it, no water and no fish after the local teenagers came in and speared the lot. It's all theirs so, hey, who cares?

We then headed down another even more ruined dirt road  to the Cape Leveque camp ground and made it after stopping to help some idiot in a Magna that had buried itself in the sift sand. We couldn't help (we had nothing: no shovel, no recovery straps, no portable tracks, no winch), he was sitting on his sump with his wheels off the ground. We left with a promise to send help, only grateful that we had made it through ourselves. We dropped the trailer off in the camp area, and then went down onto the beach for our promised dip. The dip, I'm pleased to say was very refreshing and very welcome. But wait, there's more.  We were driven back up to the camp ground and down the other side to the Western Cliffs, to view the sunset in all its glory. I don't think anyone was that fussed, we were all wondering how we were going to make it back home and what could possibly go wrong in the pitch black of night.

Finally after our obligatory warm cup of tea and now fresh biscuit, we headed out on our return journey, it was 7:15pm. Here's how it goes, we made it back to the main bitumen road and ground along at top speed for an hour and a quarter. We hit the dirt road and bashed and crashed and careened along at 50kph for the next 2 hours. Finally we emerged onto the highway and to the high-pitched metallic grinding sound of a gearbox tearing itself apart, headed for our various homes. We pulled in to our van park at 21:45, 14 hours and 15 minutes of torture later. Never again.

Never.

The driver added a tree to the roof for luck, we needed all the help we could get.