Advertisement
Published: November 19th 2006
Edit Blog Post
23/10/06 - 3/11/06 Perth - Broom
Day 1
06:45 pick up from Perth and heading north. Our first place of interest was the Pinnacles Desert, Nambung National Park, an absolutely spectacular scene of huge Limestone pillars standing against Yellow sand dunes and clear blue skies. Some smooth and some jagged and sharp, the rocks have been created by a long process of wind blown shells, lime rich sand, acidic layers of soil and plenty of weathering. However it happened, it looks great! We hunted for the most phallic one we could find and I hugged it for a Photo moment. (No comments from budding Freudians, thank you). On the road into the park, we stopped for a snake on the scorching tarmac, and all hoped of the bus to take a look. It turned out to be a Brown snake, the 3rd most deadly or so; photos with long lenses only!
Snakes featured again in the day, but harmless hand-reared pythons, as we stopped at an animal park to pet and feed the snakes, ‘roos, dingoes and emus.
Day 2
Another Long drive.. (ok I’ll stop saying that. Just take it for granted. Every drive was a long
drive) to the Z bend gorge and ‘Nature’s Window’ in Kalbarri National Park… and back on the bus!
Day 3
Monkey Mia beach, the Swiss dolphins (regular as clockwork with their feeding patterns) the Indo-Pacific Bottlenose dolphins are officially wild but come in for daily feeds of fish and face the paparazzi spread along the beach. I preferred the personalities of the B-list celebrity Australian Pelicans. Huge birds waddling around the beach and watching all the tourists watching them.
Onto Hamelin Telegraph Station, Shark Bay for lunch and one of only 3 places in the world where you can see Stromatolites. The living rocks that produce oxygen. The story behind these rocks is that allegedly hundreds of millions of years ago the world was covered by a huge Stromatolite empire. Thanks to these Oxygen producing single cell organisms, the earth’s atmosphere went from 1% to 20 % oxygen, thus allowing growth of all other living things. I don’t think that they had ears, but nonetheless shouted out “Thanks guys - keep up the good work!”
Walking back from the stroms, we saw our first ‘wild’ kangaroo lounging in the sun under a bush. Our night was spent
Western Brown
One of the most venomous snakes in the world! at Warroora Sheep station with allegedly 12000 - 14000 sheep (I saw about 4) and millions of stars. Strange furry moths flapped around our torches, and in the morning we awoke to find 2 white and 2 brown horses milling around our rooms. They stared at us with huge eyes and pleaded for breakfast.
Day 4
Early start to Coral Bay and a 5-hour snorkel trip onto the Ningaloo reef to hunt for manta rays. Simple plan; a spotter plane locates the manta rays in the water and radios the captain of our boat. We head to the location, jump in the water and swim like mad for a few minutes trying to keep up with the manta(s) before hailing the boat, taxi style, arm in the air to come get us and drop us in again by the rays. After a handful of times staring at a large diamond shadow in the water and being exhausted by the swimmathons, we relaxed on the boat watching eagle rays and turtles, then jumped in again for a more relaxing snorkel with the Reef sharks in their cleaning station. This was pretty amazing!
Day 5
No Bus journey!! A Relaxing
Phallic rock
We hunted for the most phallic Pinnacle... and then I hugged it (Freudian students, please keep any comments to yourself) day in Turquoise bay, chilling on the beach and snorkeling with more sharks and sightings of a banded sea snake, blue spotted ray, and yellow fin tuna. An 80cm Shark swam right underneath Jen, who tried to pretend it wasn’t there! The drift snorkel at Turquoise bay involves walking along the beach and drifting back down in the water, remembering to exit before the sandy point where the rip tide sucks the water out the inner reef and into the outer ocean beyond. Sounds scary, but we all pulled it off without incident.
Day 6
We headed into the iron rich red soil of Karinjini national park. Our first night in Swags under the open stars. All ‘business’ had to be done in the open bush with toilet paper discreetly brought back to camp and thrown on the fire. Our dinner, big pots of stew sat on the glowing coals and ashes of our camp fire whilst the open pan of veggie food also simmered on the fire’s edge. Someone came back from their bush business and promptly through their paper straight into the dish of vegetables, claiming that the change from darkness to the bright fire blinded them
from seeing the food. This excuse was also used for the cigarette butt that closely followed the paper into the vegetarian food. Jen too found this very amusing until she had to actually eat the food - she didn’t have seconds!
Days 7, 8
Karijini National Park, riddles on the bus and pictures drawn on the windows with marker board pens. Beautiful walks in Dale’s Gorge to fresh water pools, Fortescue falls and the Fern pool, where the Rainbow serpent lives according to Aboriginal legend. A sign asks all visitors to use the pool quietly so as not to disturb the serpent. Weano Gorge had a ‘Spider Walk’ where hands and feet were needed to shuffle along the gorge walls above the river. This was a very hairy experience but well worth it as the hidden pool was amazing. Following this was the ‘ladder’ walk, which was equally as scary as you hung on a rope trying to grip the slippery rocks under your feet beside the waterfall above another equally enchanting pool.
In the evening a kamikaze preying mantis ran into our campfire area. After showing us his preying pose he suddenly darted straight for the fire
and jumped straight on barbequing himself!
Day 9
Onward to Port Headland and 80 Mile Beach - Running water and showers!! The a/c on the bus died. AAARGHHHH!!! The campsite at 80 mile beach had signs advising not to swim in the tropical waters. The beach has tides that travel at 15 kph, sea lice, sharks and salt water crocodiles! It was the season for Turtles to lay their eggs, crawling across the beach and up into the sand dunes by moonlight. We watched the sunset at 6 pm and about 8 hours later watched the most amazing moon set in the same spot in the sky. It glowed red orange, huge on the horizon, looking like a foreign planet and then disappeared just leaving the stars themselves as the only source of light. I have never seen a moon set that I can remember and although we saw loads of turtle tracks (some 1 meter wide) and alas no turtles, it was worth staying up for the moon set alone. At about 3:30 we headed into our swags for a mere hour and a half’s sleep before the sun and flies would awaken us at 5 am.
Day 10
350 kms with no air con took us the final leg into Broome and 2 relaxing days, air con rooms and sunset camel rides on the Cable beach with an eski of grog and nachos and dip. After a goodbye meal to say cheerio to those not continuing up to Darwin, we went out and partied in town to a live band and on our final relaxing day, stocked up at the supermarket for another 7 days on the bus heading further north into the Kimberly, the Bungle Bungles and on to Darwin.
Those traveling the other direction had stories of 40 degrees heat at sunrise and roads closed with torrential rain. What would await us in one of Australia’s most extreme landscapes…
Advertisement
Tot: 0.356s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 33; qc: 160; dbt: 0.2702s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.5mb