Today was a day filled with many different vistas.

My aim was to stay the night at Norseman, but had planned on other locations to stay at, if need be.

My primary destination for today was Wave Rock located in Hyden and on the way to no where.
It’s also a tourist destination that isn’t near anything else, you have to make a choice to decide to visit it.

The drive from Kalamunda to Hyden was interesting, coming back down from the Perth hills down through the dryer farm land than what I experienced on the coastal road up from Esperance was interesting.

Upon arriving at Wave Rock the first thing you need to do is buy a parking ticket. Which didn’t surprise me, I’d already read up on it. So I knew it was $10. Which isn’t really for parking, it’s essentially your parking and entry and for the upkeep of the site and all those sorts of things. I did find it a little surprising that the ticket machine only accepted coins. That’s a lot of change to be carrying around. While I had come knowing that I’d need to pay the $10 parking I didn’t, despite my best efforts have the change for the parking.
There is a kiosk on site (it’s actually attached to the caravan park next door) where you can pay for the parking ticket.
Across the road there’s a café which looked surprisingly busy, so much so I didn’t even both trying to park and instead got on with what I’d come there to see, Wave Rock itself.
There were I noticed no people around ensuring you paid for parking, and I witnessed many people arrive and not pay. I did not pursue this path, I paid my parking.

My relatives in Kalamunda had warned me that it was underwhelming.
In fact several people who I told that I was going to Wave Rock warned me of this.

I found it breathtaking.
That might have been just the walk up to the top.
The actual ‘wave’ of Wave Rock is viewable from only a few different points, which might lead some people to thinking that it doesn’t rise above its ‘postcard’ status.

I found it amazing, not just the wave, which is fantastical to look at, it looks almost constructed it’s such an unnatural, yet natural sight.
On top of the rock is even more fascinating, it being the tallest natural structure for hundreds of kilometres it’s a mini ecosystem on top of the rock, with shrubs, small trees and wildlife all living up there.

Once up on Wave Rock you can follow various paths around it to explore and to walk back down. To get off the rock there’s three different choices, there’s the pathway taken to get into the rock, which is a metal staircase built next to the dam that was built against park of Wave Rock in the 1930s for the nearby town’s water supplies.
There’s ‘the long way’ around which is about 1.5 kilometres if you explore the way off parts ofthe top of Wave Rock and there’s the ‘short way’. This is the path I decided to choose. Though not without some trepidation.
The path it suggests is extremely steep and there is no clear way down, except for a sign informing you to be careful of the steepness of the path.
I just started walking and it looked dangerous from my point of view, it’s steep and there doesn’t appear to be anyway down until you start walking. Even then it’s more a case of ’feeling your way through’ than actually having a clear path down. I started walking in a straight line and then decided to walk on a diagonal. But as I began a path sort of suggested itself, simply by way of which way it was easiest to walk along.

I had heard, while I was up on the rock from some people I met up there, who were amazingly also from Victoria, the first people associated with my home state I’d seen since driving across, having seen no Victorian number plates on the drive over. They informed me that you can actually drive along to the Hippo’s Yawn rock formation. Rather than walk the 1.5 kilometre track to get there.

So, that’s what I did, as while walking sounded...okay, the weather was flitting between looking like it was going to rain, actually raining and being sunny. I also had other things to do that day.

The Hippo’s Yawn is impressive, not as impressive as Wave Rock, but the Hippo’s Yawn is a different sort of impressive, a testament to the slow crawl of time, and how that crawl slowly eats away at the vast and the minute.
I think it looks like a vast monster getting ready to devour the landscape.
The ‘Hippo’s Yawn’ is a nice, tourist name for it.
But I think it’s more like a bunyip, slowly roaring at us and the world, getting ready to be swept away by water or ready to terrify us for gazing upon it for too long.

Departing Wave Rock I headed pretty much directly east.
There are, when you look at the map, it would seem two ways to get to Norseman from Wave Rock.
Head back the way you came through Hyden and then go up north-ish eventually going through Coolgardie and then south towards Norseman. Or you head back the way you came and then head towards Ravensthorpe and Esperance, then north up towards Norseman.

I had decided to do neither of these things as there is a third option, which is less prominent on the map.
That is to take Hyden-Norseman Road.
From looking at various maps, Google Earth and Google Street View it would appear to be an unsealed road that connects Hyden and Norseman.

What I discovered was it was in fact a semi-seleaed road, but a remarkably smooth one with sections of unsealed road.

Hyden-Norseman Road goes directly past one mine site, and it is up to that point that the road is semi-sealed for a lot of it.
For at least the first 50-70 kilometres it’s a sealed road. From then on it’s a ‘country sealed road’ in that there’s a single lane-ish of sealed road, sort of running along the middle with the shoulder on both sides unsealed. So if you’re the only one of the road; drive in the middle, when there’s someone coming you lean over to the left, the other people likewise do the same.
With the trucks that I encountered I pulled all the way over onto the shoulder to allow them to pass fully on the sealed section.

Dark clouds on the horizon of Hyden-Norseman Road.

Along the length of the road, after I passed onto the unsealed road proper I saw one car, a four wheel drive Nissan which I was behind for a while. I stopped once or twice to take some photos and to put some distance between me and them.
However, at some point I caught up with them, and overtook them. It was only when I looked behind me I noticed that they, after several kilometres of following me decided to do a U-turn.
This I couldn’t fathom as by this point we were some distance from anything, the last turn off had to have been at least 30 kilometres back the way we’d come. I was curious why they’d decided to do a U-turn, it’s not as though you could accidentally get onto the road.

The way onto it was either going through Hyden or, when following the road away from Wave Rock you came to a sign that says ‘Lake King’ and ‘Hyden’, the T-intersection doesn’t actually indicate that you can use the road to get to Norseman. Aside from a small ‘street sign’ that says ‘Norseman Rd’. But there’s no big white text on green sign-sign to indicate this.

So from that point on I was alone on Hyden-Norseman Road, and it was actually quite pleasant.
There’d been a little bit of rain that day so the surface was pretty smooth and lacking any dust, which meant I could maintain a constant speed without any issues.

However at one point as I was driving along, during which it had been a quite nice day I did spy some dark clouds on the horizon. The horizon towards which I was driving.
Eventually I did hit some inclement weather.
This did make things a little bit muddy, but nothing amazingly so.
Although by the end of the day my ute was more orange than it was black as a result of the slightly muddy conditions I drove along.

About three quarters along Hyden-Norseman Road I had a destination in mind.
McDermid Rock, another ‘it’s the tallest natural structure for kilometres in every direction’ thing.
This, like the rest of the road was deserted. The drive into this site was the only point that day that I encountered any corrugations.

McDermid Rock is bracing and surprising. It’s also rather amazing. It may have been because I was the only person on the rock and really knew I was the only person within at least 25 kilometres. It was a brilliant overcast-ish day that meant I could see all around me. It was also quite windy and cold, yet glarey with spots of sunshine. It was a very ‘all the seasons in one day’ sort of day that I experienced that day.

Congratulations sign on the top of McDermid Rock.

The small patches of vegetation on McDermid Rock was even more surprising than Wave Rock. On Wave Rock they were small ecosystems-worth of vegetation living on that rock. But there were also boulders and the layout of the Wave Rock meant there was some shelter.
On McDermid Rock it was much more exposed, yet there was still some vegetation, some small bits of an ecosystem. Water pools, stuff falls in, rots, becomes some basis for soil, things grow. It’s all quite amazing.

Unlike Wave Rock which is quite a steep ascent and decent McDermid Rock is quite gentle and once you get to the top the view is as rewarding, perhaps even more rewarding than Wave Rock because of the isolation. At Wave Rock you look around and see the caravan park, the dam, some signs of civilisation. But here at McDermid Rock there’s really nothing.
Perhaps it was because I was the only one there, alone with the view all around me, but it felt like a very unique experience.

From McDermid Rock was a relatively short and easy 100 or so kilometres to Norseman. As I approached Norseman the unsealed nature of the road gave way in fits and bursts to sealed road. In parts it seemed to have been a choice for safety; a long sweeping curve had been sealed but the straighter road on either side of it hadn’t. Then as I slowly got closer to the Coolgardie-Esperance Highway it became a sealed road.
I would assume that there’s a mine somewhere off of the road but there wasn’t one that I noticed along the sealed section of the road.

Outcome of Hyden-Norseman Road being a little wet.

In Norseman I considered staying at the Norseman Railway Hotel, which had been my initial choice when I’d come through Norseman. But I was rather tired and didn’t want to have to tangle with a shared bathroom situation or a ‘dog friendly’ motel situation (which the Railway Hotel seemed noted for). So I just went with the Norseman Eyre Motel, the motel behind the BP petrol station on the corner of the Eyre Highway’s end.

Carefully avoiding the sides of my ute which was now quite covered in an orange mud I parked, had a meal and headed to bed.