P.A.C.E.

On my way back to the hostel in Headland my first evening I spotted the Veggie Van. What is the Veggie Van you may ask? In London one of my friends told me about a group of students traveling around Australia by bicycle ‘Pedal Australia for Clean Energy (PACE)’ supported by a vegetable oil powered van. He gave me some contact information but I never got a reply and their website hadn’t been updated in months so I’d no clue where they were or even if they were still going. Given that they started their trip some 5/6 months before I did, I thought it highly unlikely that I’d actually see them so had kind of forgotten about them since Sydney.

That evening after getting to Headland, I wandered about town around sunset, it was cooler and the sun had no more chance to ravage my skin. I took some pictures abmired the massive cargo ships gliding in and out of the port with their massives loads of iron-ore destined for Chinaand elsewhere. I also had a look down the beach to see if I could find any flatback turtles nesting but failed in that exercise. And it was on my way back that I saw the van. I knew they weren’t at my hostel so I went to the other one in town and got some strange looks as I tried to explain who I was looking for.

Only two girls Alex and Karina from the original crew were with the van. Some others were further on down the road by bike at Exmouth where I hope to be in a week or so from here. Neither of these girls knew the guy who told me about their expedition but they trusted I wasn’t some psycho tracking them down and we hung out for the night, trading war stories “No my scar is clearly bigger than yours and hurt more too” They were cool, hopefully our paths will cross again on the road. Preferably them pulling up behind me in the van with something cold for me. I didn’t get back to the hostel ’til after midnight to discover I was locked out. I never got the code for the door so I had to be quite inventive in my efforts to get in which I did eventually. We’ll leave it at that. I was too tired the next morning though to start so I had another day in Headland to explore.

Once again I went hunting for turtles and found none, I saw tracks from where they’d been up the beach alright. Either I was looking in the wrong places at the wrong times or just plain bad luck but I didn’t see them. There are lots more beaches along the way so hopefully I’ll see some. Turtles are cool, remember Finding Nemo?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 7:56 pm by Ross and is filed under Australia, Western Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.