Camping on the beach - Nico and gang do Kalbarri

After a three day test run down south with Chuck and Maya to surfing and wine mecca Margaret river that featured some friendly Taiwanese who'd just bought a broken car, getting shown up in the waves by a 14 year old girl surfing champion, climbing a 75 meter tree with a wicked view, snorkeling for stingrays, and an overly friendly possum at our campsite, the full group assembled in Perth for our full departure (once I'd finished up my final project at UWA and had a surprise goodbye party courtesy of Tim).

Our first destination was Kalbarri national park, a small corner of the coast cut with beautiful gorges and clouded only by the bad weather we had when passing through.  Though the park was nice and our impromptu ballroom and salsa dance party at a hostel outside the park (with a middle-aged Australian man and a Dutch girl) was certainly entertaining, what should have been a simple day and a half drive to Kalbarri ended up being most memorable as an introduction in dramatic fashion to what were to become two of the strongest recurring themes of our trip - getting help from very friendly Australians and doing stupid things.  Though the help has come from Aussies of all shapes and forms, like the  young recently divorced tyre mechanic in Geraldton who directed us to free camping on the beach in the one spot that the rangers don't check - "I've used it quite a few times in the last couple months" - and the disembodied voice that called out to us with an offer of a covered clothesline as we hung our wet clothes on a tree in a caravan park (we found where it came from on the third try), most of it has been from elderly folks with big hearts and accumulated wisdom from several trips around the country.  We were about to meet the first of those now.

As we approached what we thought would be a free campsite at Sandy Cape, we noticed a sign requiring payment for the night.  Confused, we decided to check out the site first and drove to the far end where we thought we'd have the most privacy.  Noticing a entry spot to the beach, we decided to go for it; why have a car with four wheel drive if we're not going to use it?  Despite my very limited 4wd experience, I knew to instruct our current driver to put the car in 4 low while I locked the wheels.  For the first 20 seconds,  it was awesome.  Then the car stopped moving.

We got out and, sure enough, we'd driven far too close to the water and the tires were stuck deep into the sand.  The driver got nervous, so it was up to me to try to get us out.  I tried to back it up as far as I could, but we reached a point where the wheels were spinning, the engine was coughing, and we just weren't going anywhere.  And the tide was inching closer towards us.  The panic was too.

Suddenly, four figures appeared out of the night.  An older couple and a younger couple who'd heard our noisy attempts up at their campsites and guessed correctly what was going on.  The men got our shovel out and started getting to work while the women chatted on the side.  As they pushed and I continued to try to reverse, one asked, "Did you put the engine in 4 low or 4 high?"  "4 low, is that wrong?"  "No, that's right; just sounds like it's in 4 high."  Sure enough, the driver had put it in the wrong gear.  Fixing that, finally things began improving.

But that still wasn't enough.  After a few more minutes, Terry, the pensioner, told me,  "If you don't want the ocean to take your car, you've got to let air out of the tyres."  I'd known that reducing tyre pressure was important for driving on rocky roads; I hadn't realized that it was even more important for driving on sand.  Finally free, we thanked our saviors and went, a little shaken, to a site right next to the beach that Terry directed us to.

In the morning, we got some visitors - Terry and his wife had walked over to check on us and invite us to their trailer for morning coffee.  When we'd packed up and drove over to find them, the wife was standing on the road waving us over and Terry had his pump to refill our tires already out and ready to go.  They shared some travel tips along with the coffee, loving every minute of it, until finally saying, "What are you doing staying here listening to us?  Drive off, explore, have some fun!"  Comforted that the magnitude of our stupidity was outweighed only by the generosity of our hosts, we did.