I have no experience of mad dogs, but I do of Englishmen (being married to one) – and it’s simply not true that they go out in the midday sun. Not often, anyway, and certainly not by choice.

It was too early to check into the Wave Rock Motel in the town of Hyden (population 400), so, in 36-degree noonday heat, Roy drove straight through  to the site of the famous rock itself, 4km further on.

Against all common sense, we paid $12 each to enter the Wave Rock Wildlife Park at the back of the Wildflower Shoppe and café and have our picnic lunch there, before a mandatory trudge around the animal exhibits.

Such places can be a bit dispiriting, and I suspect that this one may have seen better times. Most memorable were a remarkably buck-toothed alpaca (he could have eaten his hay through a tennis racquet), a white kangaroo, and a bird called George that, the brochure promised, would dance if you said “Dance, Cocky, dance!”. It was too hot for dancing, but George did squawk “Hello!” a few times.

Though there was no sign of the day cooling anytime soon, there was no putting it off any longer – it was time to walk the couple of hundred metres over the road to Wave Rock itself.

Though there was only a trickle of tourists like us, they were enough to stop you getting a really good pic of this 14-metre-high, 100-metre-long marvel of geology. Also, morning would be a better time for photographing it. (And no, my suggesting a return first thing in the morning would not have gone down at all well. Roy had Had Enough.)

Hippo’s Yawn

Having put poor Roy through all that – I thought he’d done very well in trying circumstances, even doing his best  “hang ten” pose – I left him at peace in the Wildflower Shoppe café with a copy of the West Australian and a flat white, while I headed off to explore the area.

I wasn’t going to get to Mulka’s Cave, which is another 18km down the drag, so instead I did the 3km loop to Hippo’s Yawn. You follow a path around and to the left of Wave Rock, marked by some pretty good information boards. I didn’t spot one of the animals they mentioned; probably staying out of the blistering heat.

Next morning, bright and early (for us, that means at 10am, hotel kicking-out time), we headed south from Hyden for the coastal haven of Albany – you can’t imagine two more different places!