Round and Round I Go: A Trip in the Kimberley

Somewhere on that burnt red off-road track, after my sleepless and sick night of camping in Broome, when my feet burned from sand fly bites and my stomach burned from Sambuca and smoke, I decided I needed to get the hell out of the west and back to an urban yoga oasis. At that moment, in one of those frank stupors that are most often but not presently drug-induced, I decided I had truly come to terms with myself, knew myself deep down in the pit of my heart.

I wanted a yoga studio and organic food. I didn’t want anything to do with marathon beer drinking or sand flies. On the bumpy road, I could feel all the rolfing I’d ever done being undone. Bougie organic and yoga – this is me and it’s okay. The outdoors is for suckers. At that moment, it was crystal clear in my mind, even if I was a bit out of my mind. At that moment, at least, I was sure.

So I plotted in my head: six days to get to Darwin (stop in Kununurra? I hoped so – mental note to text Ian), take the train down through Alice Springs, onward to Adelaide where I would fly up to the Byron Bay airport (Balina), and do yoga on a beach with the bougie hippies for a week or two.

Though the plan had been vague at the beginning, this logistics process had become more necessary because the whole trip has had one very specific constraint on it from the start – a round trip ticket back to the US.

This is an entirely self-imposed constraint and was not part of the original travel plan. When I’d first conceived of the trip, I’d intended to buy a one-way ticket to Australia and when I was done being here, I would head up to Southeast Asia. It was to be freedom at its best and most whimsical.

Then, all my friends decided to get married and I wanted to go, so I got a round trip instead with plans to spend most of June on the East Coast of the US, first in DC, then on an eight day hiking trip to New York, where the second wedding would be.

What happened in between my landing in Sydney in early April and my taking off in early June, was mostly up for grabs. I got the train ticket to Perth in advance, and I knew I eventually needed to catch the Ghan in Darwin, but between all that, it was a blank slate waiting to be etched out.

After four days on the Indian Pacific train line, I arrived in Perth. I had emailed a friend I’d met in Mexico City at the last minute, and he had offered up his extra room to me. I had not expected this, but accepted whole-heartedly. We hung out all weekend and it was like we’d known each other forever, rather than for a week in Mexico City six years ago. We had real jobs now (or, had had), and a few burgeoning wrinkles. We were both to turn 30 this year.

“Why Perth?” He’d asked, over breakfast. I, still horrified at paying $14 for poached eggs, was just drinking a flat white for my meal.

“Not Perth, exactly,” I said. “Just Western Australia in general. I wanted to go where there was lots of land and few people. I want to hole up somewhere and write a lot. And sit on a beach.

“But it’s extremely expensive here,” I added. “More than I expected. I don’t know what to do.”

“Fly to Bali for a month,” he said, with a very reasonable tone. “Sit on a beach there for a month. It’d be much cheaper to hole up there and the flight from Perth is cheap.”

I seriously considered this. Round trips to Bali were about half the cost of the Perth-Broome-Darwin, no matter which way you sliced it: bus, plane, or automobile. The idea only gained more steam when a friend of a friend took me out on his boat and raved about his sail from Fremantle to Bali and back.

But I never did get my act together, maybe purposefully. WA was so hospitable. Ian kindly offered me his family’s holiday house in Dunsborough for a week, and said he liked having people around his house in Perth so I should stay as long as I wanted. But in Dunsborough, I couldn’t help myself – I again entertained cheaper options. I responded to an ad on GumTree, toying with the idea of driving back across the country with a girl in her Jeep. Again, cheaper than traveling in WA.

After my week in Dunsborough (many tens of thousands of words put down on paper and a great while spent on pranayama and asana – I can hardly believe I really did manifest that place to “hole up and write”), I came back to Perth, did domestic things around Ian’s house, and planned to stay through Krishna Das’s kirtan and workshop.

At that point I would cut the umbilical cord I was growing in the south of WA, and head up north on a flight to Broome, skipping, unfortunately, all these wonderful places like Geraldton, the farthest west one can get in Australia; Monkey Mia, where the dolphins swim in the bay; the Ningaloo Reef, a magical reef way less touristed than the Great Barrier; and, Karinjini National Park, which the German girls said was the most beautiful they’d ever seen.

Which brings me back to Broome, and that awful four-wheel drive morning that was undoing all the rolfing I’d ever had done. Visions of a compacted spinal cord flew through my mind, my feet burned terribly from the sandflies, and my driver was, well, not my favorite person in the world that morning given his drunken ministrations the night before. I was nauseous and right then and there decided I needed out of WA.

But this too shall pass, it turns out, just as it did many other times. Once I disengaged myself from the cloistered couch surfing house, it passed. I spent four days at the Markets, hanging out with the two other Yanks at the hostel, and predominantly, on the beach. I daresay I found the magic of Broome.

When you look up and down the massive expanse of Cable Beach, from the Gantheaume Point lighthouse some 8 or 10 km away, up to where the camel rides happen and four wheel drives taunt the encroaching tide, you might see fifty people stretched across the sand.

For the locals, that’s a lot. I’m not sure if I can fully convey the surplus of land here. Imagine fifty people spread across four miles of beach; even imagine most of them clustered around the lifeguard station. Now think of your closest beach. Think about how you struggle to find a large patch of sand to sit on, undisturbed by others. It’s easy if it’s a cold, windy day on Ocean Beach, but who wants to be there then?

It’s difficult if you think of pleasant beaches: maybe Playa del Rey in the summer, or Bondi. But not here.

They tell me I came at the right time. The Wet is just at its close and The Dry – the winter months when the temperature drops to a hospitable 32 degrees – is coming in, bringing with it the tourists. As far as Wikipedia tells it, Broome averages 15,000 year round, but 45,000 in the high tourist season.

In Kununurra, where I am now, this means that the routes to the camping and the waterholes are now passable with rough and tumble four wheel drives, and that the waterholes and falls themselves are glistening and lush. They will dry up within the month. The Kimberley, the region that houses both Broome and Kununurra at its extreme edges, is an empty, often inaccessible land in the north of WA that holds secret shapes and spirits in its landscape and turns a hyper-real violet at sunset.

When I arrived in Kununurra (thanks again to Ian’s incredible willingness to give and share – I’m staying with his sister), I was still thinking of rushing through the NT to get to Byron. I was planning it all the way until my hosts started describing the natural wonders of the area: the Bungle Bungles, the Katherine Gorge, Litchfield and Kakadu.

The struggle returned. Had I really come here to do the same yoga I could do at home, at Harbin, or even in Southeast Asia, where I plan to go after a few months in the US?

This was about being outdoors, about disengaging from indoor office life, about moving and feeling good, and stopping from time to time to hash it all out by pen and by word processor.

“Katherine Gorge, you say?”

“Oh, yes,” said my host. “And Kakadu. That’s worth at least two or three days.”

I calculated, I re-calculated, and gave up the silly yoga ghost. Seriously, yoga is everywhere, yoga is all the time, and yoga is inside – and all that hippie dippie stuff. But Western Australia and the Northern Territory are just physically and financially a trek to get to, so once you’re here, what are you doing rushing away?

Travel is as much about being somewhere as not wanting to be there, and wrestling with that internal tension. In many cases, it’s about putting yourself in a place you’re not sure you want to be and seeing what turns up.

My friend Sarah has been writing about this over on Travels with Jonah; I read it today and it resonated with what I’d been toying with above.

Kununurra sold me on WA. Maybe it was the counterbalance camping trip – ladies-only camping without a beer can in sight, but two bottles of cold white wine and a red for the stew (cooked in cast iron on the fire, mind you). Maybe it was the glorious swimming hole, or the hot springs (yes, I found hot springs in a country I thought bereft of them!), or the way the boab (“baobab,” same thing) trees come to shining life at sunset.

On Wednesday, I’m jumping in a campervan with the German girls I met in Broome and we’re headed up to Darwin. And, eventually, I’ll make my way back down through Alice Springs to Adelaide and Sydney in one giant cross of the country. No Byron Bay for me; not this time.

Plotted on the map, the trip will read like a cross, or better yet, like a sharp-angled infinity sign, from here to there and back again. With these constraints, and with some attention to the original intention, I’ve stayed on course, outdoors, and pretty happy once I remembered I was on my own trip and not on some trip designed by some drunk guys in Broome.