AUSTRALIA

In spite of this wonderful landscape (Photo OZ 7: Kimberleys) we loved to see the western coastline, bathing and snorkeling and finally finding some surf (Photo OZ 9: Running the sanddune) . Next to Broome we stayed a few days in our hammock, long walks along the beach and met again our travelfamily the Fogarty`s. An excursion to the Karijini Nationalpark gave us imaginations which were really powerfull aswell the roadtrain, which crossed our way and destroyed our frontwindow.
Of course we were in Ningaloo Reef Nationalpark, with it`s great snorkeling from the beach and made our first experience with the underwaterworld. Marveled at the dolphins at Monkey Mia, Shark Bay (Photo OZ 10: one-million dollar view) and essentially went down to Perth along the beach.

SHARKS

The Aussies make a contemptous gesture. Shark attacks are seldom. Nevertheless everyone comes up with a lot of stories. Chris tells about 6 meter sharks as big as a barrel which chop you into two halfes with one bite. Afraid of sharks? Ridiciolous. Sharks everyone eats at the Fish & Chips-shops. „We eat them and they eat us" But never eat Fish & Chips in sight of the ocean. You may be spotted by a shark which is up for a revenge.
We are in Red Bluff. 70 km we suffered on a bad deep sandy and stoney track. It`s 140 km to the next shop in Carnavon. But we got to a marvallous bay with turquisgreen water and a famous surfwave. Two dropout families live here and run an alternative campground. For some weldingwork we could stay for a week. On a walk over the cliffs Moni spotted this massive dark patch who moves slowly longside the cliffs. It looks about 8 metres long. Gotta be a whale. We happily congratulate each other for our first whale. We had meet three german boys and Tokyo liked them too and they were up to do some babysitting so we can go snorkeling. Maybe we meet the whale. The sea is quite rough, the ground is stirred up and we don`t see much. The sight vanished after three metres in cloudiness. No whale. Later we meet Phil, one of the dropouts. He says:" Hey you were there earlier on, on the cliffs. Did you see aswell the 12 foot tigershark?" No, we saw a whale and something in our backbone freezes up. 12 foot is not quite eight meters but if that shark would have suddenly appeared out the cloudiness, he didn`t had to bite us anymore - we would have died on heartattack before. After the white pointers the tigersharks are the most dangerous. Phil calms us down in showing us photos of monstrous sharks which had been hanging round the bay. In the 20 years people come to surf nothing ever happend. The shark doesn`t like the taste of humans. They like fish and there`s plenty of fish here. Phil shot some wild goats and gives us the guts. We want to feed the sharks and put everything in a wheelbarrel on top sitting Tokyo. With Photo and Videocamera equiped we want to see the show. Nothing happens only the guts look pretty ugly while they drift away. That calms us down but we are disappointed, too. Christmas was coming and we needed a break, so we stayed in Freemantle two month in the garden of a puppetiers, along with Elton the Robot, everybody was working a little bit.

The southwest of Ozziland was in our opinion like a dream. Inland huge karritree-forests and the sea very clear, sometimes powerful and the beach with big round boulders, absolutly beautiful ( Photo OZ 11: dream rocks). After that we crossed the Nullarbor with ist longest straight piece of road (Photo OZ 12: Nullarbor). In Port Augusta we celebrated half the way around OZ, drove along the Murray River where we met Frank, our first visitor from Germany and went on to Melbourne. Melbourne was very nice, we met people again and got loveliest invited. Aswell we visited Ted Kühlwind who brought the first Deutz`s to Australia and he took care after us and Jabbawouk.