KatieTheKat

First, so this is not completely confusing, allow me to comment that there has been a change in plans - as it turned out, my telephone rendezvous led to more than I ever could have hoped for - a chance to work as a volunteer with sea turtle monitoring and interpretation programs for a month! I will be living in a hostel in the town of Exmouth and getting up around the crack of dawn to go look at turtle nesting sites and well I'm not really sure what else but I should find out in training on Monday morning. The trip to Exmouth was around 19 hours long, and I decided to set off right away yesterday morning, arriving here in Exmouth at 3:30AM.

Now for the sad and gory story of the kangaroo that some might prefer not to read..

I suppose it was really bound to happen, judging simply by the sheer number of kangaroos that emerged after the sun had set. With my own eyes I surely saw around 100 of them, which leads me to believe that there were quite literally hundreds of them in the narrow strip surrounding the highway. I suppose really Greyhound has no choice but to drive at night when journeys like the one I undertook yesterday are really quite small on a Western Australian scale. Our driver seemed to be quite expert at his manoeuverings - though the first few brakings and swervings may have
knocked a few people off their seats, things were pretty smooth after that. And really the kangaroos did not make it easy. They would sometimes hop across the road right in front of us, occasionally zigzagging madly down the centre line until they finally veered off to one side. And when you thought they had all cleared the way suddenly a little one would go hopping off after another that had already crossed. At first I thought it a little odd that the driver would often dim his headlights
as he passed them, but through further observation I came to see that this did seem to result in less erratic, panicked behaviour on the part of the roos. So, as I say, between having to travel at that time of night, having to consider the safety of his passengers on board (many of whom were sprawled out horizontally across two seats and very few of whom chose to wear the supplied seatbelts), and furthermore having to keep up sufficient speed to stay more-or-less on schedule, our bus driver
certainly had a difficult job of it. But oh what a terrible, heart wrenching sight it was. After a couple of narrow misses, we had just resumed speed when very suddenly a mid-sized roo darted out from the shadows into the full glare of the headlights. It was only a few metres ahead and, though our driver braked, there was suddenly a sickening thud as the frightened creature was rammed side-on by our heavily-fortified transportation machine. As there was little that could be done at this point, we slowly rolled over the body, which surely was still trembling with the vitality that would slowly ooze away there on the hard road while we continued along snugly to our destination. At least it was hit in the center of the bus so we did not feel the wheels rise up on one side of the bus and hear the cruching of bones as described by a passenger who had come from the North and whose bus had collided with 3 or 4 roos and nearly a cow. Though on the other hand, perhaps the wheel rolling would have meant a quicker though certainly not less painful death. As our bus rolled on, I thought of that poor kangaroo lying on the road, no hand or
paw to comfort it or ease its pain, the sound of the flies buzzing around its wounds. As for our bus, there was no trace of the incident on the gleaming metal cage protecting the windshield from such encounters. Thankfully, the vigilance of our driver prevented any further such catastrophes, and many other kangaroos lived to hop freely for another day.