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Published: August 22nd 2012
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Day 50 – Saturday 18
th August – Lake McCloud Rest area (90kms north of Carnarvon) to Quobba Blowholes
The rest area was an Ok spot for the night but quite noisy after around 5am once the road trains had started motoring up and down the Great Northern Highway. Some of the cheekier drivers tooted their horns at the travellers in the rest area as they passed, enjoying the sport of traveller waking.
Anna and Luke wrote some postcards before we hit the road again that we were going to post in Carnarvon. We arrived in the sprawling town of Carnarvon at around 9.30 and found the visitors centre to get some information. Carnarvon and the area of Gascoyne is famous for growing bananas, grapes, cucumbers, tomatoes, mangoes, beans and grapefruits and these fruit and veg were on sale at the local growers market in the Civic Hall. We stocked up on fresh produce and spotted a blackboard advertising “celebrity chefs demonstrating local produce”. We recognized the celebrity chef to be Anna Gare from Junior Masterchef. She was making her famous salsa dip which was absolutely delicious. Her helpers were grilling veggies on the barbie – amazing sweetcorn,
interesting barbecued runner beans with a balsamico dressing and grilled pink grapefruit (strange but tasty).
From there we went to Woolies to buy more provisions and to Target to get Anna some new leggings to replace her holey ones. She even got a new bikini and board shorts as well. A nice souvenir from the trip. By 1pm we’d had enough of Carnarvon and decided to make our way to Quobba, which meant driving a few kms north of Carnarvon again and turning off onto Blowholes Road. 50kms along the road we came to the Quobba Blowholes camping area, but before we spotted the campground the blowholes were visible from further off. A large column of spray was shot in the air at regular intervals. It was very impressive.
We had to call in at the ranger station before setting up camp. As it was a weekend we thought we might have trouble getting a camping spot, with the locals joining the travellers and grey nomads enjoying the outdoors. The campground was looking very full, caravans banked up very close to each other on the cliffs overlooking the beach (just like at the caravan parks) but there were
still some spots free and we had a nice little sandy site just back from the beach. Once we had set up camp we decided to check out the blowholes from close up. The tide and swell made for excellent blow hole conditions and we watched some spectacular spurts of sea water shoot into the blue sky. The spray created rainbows which added to the beauty of the place.
Looking out to sea we spotted several whales in the distance. We were given a fantastic display of breeching by a couple of humpbacks near the horizon, then suddenly we spotted a couple of humpbacks right by the blow hole! They swam slowly away from the blowholes north along the coast and so we decided to get in the car and follow them, hoping to get another glance of them close up further along the cliffs. The drive was gorgeously scenic and the whales were numerous, swimming lazily in the deep blue sea. Occasionally waving a tail or flipper in the air and even more occasionally propelling their whole body out of the water in a breech. Nature’s TV.
On the way back to the campsite we stopped at
the lagoon beach, the recommended spot for snorkelling, about 1km from our tent. It was low tide and much of the coral and rocks were exposed, allowing us to explore the rock pools. Quobba has the highest number of clams we have seen on the whole trip, in a wide range of sizes and even colours. Anna let out a squeak of surprise when she was squirted by a clam which was defending itself when she gave it a quick poke with her toe.
We got back to our tent for sunset and cooked up the second half of the fish carcass on the campfire for starters. Main course was roast chicken and coleslaw, with jacket potatoes from the campfire. Yum. Luke was listening to North Melbourne beat Collingwood in the footy on the radio. A surprising but pleasing result!
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