Visit to Grey
by Al Jansen
In April my relatively new friends Christine and Darren “turned left”, as they put it, from their home in Perth and kept on going, but not before they’d spent a couple of months living in a “shack” at a community called Grey which is just south of Cervantes (where the famous Pinnacles Dessert is).
I got an invite to go up for a weekend with their good friend Maureen and the four of us chilled out in the rather basic surroundings of a tin-roofed, cobbled-together construction with few of the home comforts we all take for granted. I never dreamed that I could shower in a few cupfuls of water! Toilet flushing was with buckets of sea-water, and then only if you really had to, and the kitchen was regularly visited by semi-tame lizards and a carpet python who I think was called George (but thankfully I didn’t actually see him that weekend!).
Happy hour on the veranda over-looking the ocean seemed to go on all evening (well at least until it was time for dinner and Canasta) so I can imagine just how hard Christine and Darren found it to continue with their trip. Since then they’ve visited some really remote areas that I wasn’t able to get to on my trip, so when they pass through Perth again on their way to Europe in April I’ll be keen to hear all about it.
They’ve done fantastic updates over the months but even in two pages worth it’s difficult to do anything more than whet the reader’s appetite, as I well remember.
- Beach and Shacks at Grey