Wickepin to Yealering 2003

Wickepin to Yealering, day 6, Saturday 18 October 2003. I left Wickepin at 9:26. It was cold but sunny and the wind was a fresh west to south westerly tailwind. It would have been an ideal day to try for Kulin and had I been able to book into the motel, or had it been a different day of the week with the shops open, I might have gone ahead with that original plan.

Lake Yealering

I headed up the straight road that led to Kulin, climbing as it did so for some way out of Wickepin, then I turned left to head north to Yealering. The wind was still helping me.

I rested at 1114, at another stone bench and seats beside the road. I hope there will be more of these. It was near the turn-off to go to Malyalling Rock. I had plenty of time and only an easy distance to do, so it looked like a good opportunity for a detour and some sightseeing. But the information board said that the distance to the Rock was 13 km. My map seemed to show that it was only a couple of km and it wasn’t large scale enough to make this clear. I went back and looked down the road. It was loose gravel, I couldn’t see more than a km of it and I couldn’t see any rock ahead. I was disinclined to do a round trip of 26 km on loose gravel and resumed my way to Yealering.

I arrived in Yealering at 11:13, 1129. The tiny town was silent and no-one was about. Nothing was open. I thought I would wait until at least noon before knocking at the hotel. I rode around to the lake, right there on the main road, next to the town, and sat on a bench to have a drink and look at the view, and enjoy a bit of sun because the wind was cold now that I had stopped riding. I took a picture.

Eventually I did go and knock on the doors of the hotel, and the windows too, but there was no response. I still hadn’t seen any person since my arrival. I rode around a bit more, had a look at some of the facilities beside the lake, took some pictures.

Then I went back to the hotel and this time tried going around the back. The proprietors were there, two young women, and they let me in, showed me my room and the bathroom and the back way out, and the door near my room that led to the broad upstairs verandah, and left me to it. I asked for the key to my room but they said they weren’t any. “There’s no-one here but us and the baby”. Well, but what about if the place is ever full? It seemed to be one of those hippy hotels, all men are brothers, property is fascist, blah blah. It was certainly one of those country hotels whose main function is as a family home for the proprietors (see Rocky Gully, 1996), with guests being an intrusion.

The rooms had no numbers either, they were identified by the colour scheme in which they were painted – rather strong colours, yellow, red, blue, purple. Mine was the green room. Each room had an elaborate muslin curtain in the appropriate colour. The beds were huge and heavy, roughly hewn from hard black wood, as was the only other item of furniture, a tall cruciform stand with four hooks and a tiny shelf, and a horseshoe nailed to the top. The bed was too wide for the mattress and the wood was the same colour as the floor, so I bumped into it the first time I came into the room and walked around it. I still had the bruise on my knee when I got back to Perth.

There was also a huge mirror on the wall with a heavy black wooden frame, presumably from the same trendy dinky-di country craftsman. There was no cupboard, no clothes-hangers, no bedside light or table. The whole setup was weird. A hotel designed to appeal to the eccentric aesthetic sense of the proprietors rather than to serve the needs of the guests.

Anyway I had my rest, then went to have a swim in the lake. It was only a short walk around the corner. I saw what appeared to be a wrecked car on the grass beside the lake, but it hadn’t been there before and there were four barefooted young people on the bench next to it so they must have driven it from somewhere.

The swimming area was a section of lake enclosed by an earth dam such as you see on many farms. I remember swimming in one at Bruce Rock in 1957, dodging balls of sheep poo. Stretching out into this pool was a rotten wooden jetty. There was a sign warning people not to swim if the water was above 24deg, not to put their heads under at any time, because of the risk of amoebic meningitis. I had seen this earlier and had asked the lady at the hotel about it. She said not to worry, the water was too salty anyway. She said it was good to swim in the lake, there were no nasties in it.

I waded carefully in through the slippery mud until there was enough depth to launch myself, then swam out to the end of the jetty. I swam a bit further and reached the far wall of the dam, climbed over that and had a brief dip in the lake proper. The water was clear but shallow and full of fine soft green weed. I climbed back over into the pool and swam slowly on my back to the shore. The water was so salty that the experience reminded me of what people say about the Dead Sea in Israel, you can sit in it.

When I got out, one of the young people said “Pretty cold, man!” I agreed, but said it was nice and refreshing anyway.

I went back and had my shower. The bathroom was clean and functional. I needed somewhere to hang my washing and here was no line or pegs. I hung it about the upstairs verandah. There were fairy lights hung around the borders of this and I hung my shirt on the wire. All the wires and lights were heavily festooned with cobwebs. I hung the shorts and backpack over a couple of plastic chairs in the sun. The chairs were dusty and had to be cleaned first. There was a big sign which lights up at night, saying ‘Lake Yealering Hotel’. It always used to be called the Commercial hotel and this name is still listed in the telephone book.

After that I went out and tried to use the telephone to book the Quairading motel, wanting to be two days ahead from now on. The telephone was dead, not a sound, no display on the LCD screen. There was no obvious damage. I went back into the hotel and asked the red-haired girl behind the bar (she didn’t look old enough to be behind the bar) if there was another one in town. She said no, that phone was the only one in town. She didn’t offer me the use of the hotel’s phone. I decided to leave it till later.

I set off back to the lake, took a picture of the road junction. I had noticed on the tourist map that there was supposed to be a Walk Trail starting near the swimming area, and I thought that might be fun. But all that was there was some scrub, no trail. I set off anyway in an easterly direction, up the long, dried-up, deserted golf-course.

I started to feel very depressed. This happens to me sometimes and was perhaps triggered by the silence, emptiness and air of decline in this place, also by the eccentricity of the hotel, the uncertainty of getting fed between now and Corrigin, the abandonment of my original objective. Anyway I wandered a long way up the dried yellow grass until I reached the deserted golf clubhouse, which nevertheless had signs of life in the form of a notice to members about rules for the use of the course.

I pushed through weeds to the Corrigin Road and wandered back into town. I took a walk around the wheat silos which are a feature of the town and which can be seen for many kilometres in some directions. I saw a bird with a little tuft of feathers sticking straight up from its head, and an elegant little body and a distinctive way of flying and moving. It seemed to be some kind of parrot or cockatoo, possibly a cockatiel, but I couldn’t get around to the sunny side of it to see its colouring and get a proper look at it before it flew away.

I went back to the facilities beside the lake and saw the former croquet club. The little clubhouse, like a bus shelter with wooden lattice work, had faded monochrome pictures of women croquet players having their afternoon tea there in the 1940′s. It also had a history of the club. It never had grass due to the restricted water supply for the town, so they prepared a flat area of fine gravel, stuck the hoops in and played on that. It went into decline in the 1960′s so they boosted membership among men and younger people which enabled it to struggle on until the early 1980′s. At this point membership had declined so much that the club went into recess for a year, and, as the text said, ‘sadly, it never re-opened’. The hoops were long gone but the clubhouse had been carefully preserved and recently painted. Spectators’ seats were still on the edge of the playing area and bore the names of long-dead stalwarts of the club.

I took some more pictures of this quaint little town and of the lake as evening drew on. Now it was time to see about dinner.

I went back into the hotel and asked if I could use the telephone. There was a huge noise from the juke box in the bar, being enjoyed by just one man. The phone was on a long wire and I dragged it into a corner and jammed my fingers into my other ear, then made the call to the Quairading Motel. There hadn’t been a motel when I last stayed there, just the old run-down pub.

My booking was successful and I then tried to see the dinner menu, which was on a chalk board high up on the wall in the dark bar. I asked if the light could be turned on and was told that the light didn’t work, but there was a printed version of the menu hanging just next to me. I ordered the Steak Diane with the Nachos for an entre. The girl went away for a while and came back with the news that there was no Diane sauce, and no corn chips for the nachos. So I ordered the prawn entre, and was told that there were no prawns either.

I eschewed the entre and just ordered the porterhouse steak. I asked where I would eat this and they suggested right there at the bar, or in a gloomy room next to it with no lights and a lot of clutter. I asked if I could eat in the dining room and they agreed. I paid for my meal and the room at the same time. The room was $40, quite expensive compared to Wickepin or anywhere else where you just get the basic room rather than a unit.

There was just a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling of the dining room. No tables were laid, at least not with dining things. The tables were cluttered with other stuff including children’s toys, which also lay around the floor. The girl hastily threw some cutlery on the table for me. I wished the next morning that I knew where she had found it because I couldn’t find any.

The meal duly arrived. The steak was all right but there was too much gristle. The vegetables were just dried stuff out of a packet. Anyway it filled the spot. I asked for a glass of water and they brought it.

After that I went to the bar for a while. It was quite noisy and busy on this Saturday night. Then I went up to my room for a while to read, then came down at 8:30 to see if the rugby was on. It was, on a big TV screen high above the bar. There was no-one there but the two women who ran the hotel and their boyfriends.

The girl behind the bar asked if I wanted a drink. I asked for a lemon, lime and bitters. I was told there was no lemonade, no lime and no bitters. I looked around and saw a bottle of Stone’s green ginger wine, so I ordered a glass of that. The girl said “What?” I said, it’s right there on the shelf behind you. She poured me a small glass, then riffled through reams of paper to find out what to charge me. Eventually she said $8. This was way too much, she must have thought it was a liqueur, but I just paid and let it go. Most people would spend more than that in an evening at the bar.

The rugby was good, I had my Walkman radio to listen to the better radio commentary. England were playing South Africa in a qualifying round match in Perth and it was being broadcast live to the country. The other two men in the bar were keen rugby followers and the girls didn’t mind, so it was an enjoyable evening.

I went to bed and slept quite well.

Reading at Yealering: 1129. day’s ride: 32 km. Aggregate: 298. Km/day: 60. Kph to Yealering: 18.

Wickepin to Yealering 2003

Other days on this Tour:

Places Mentioned in this Post:

Want To Provide Some Feedback?