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Published: November 16th 2009
Day 202 - Denham to Galena Bridge (Murchison River)
Somebody has stolen the ocean! We wake up to find the lowest of low tides this morning, quite incredible really considering that part way through the night I made Darryl get up and check that we didn’t have water lapping at the caravan door because it sounded so close!
Yet again with such beauty surrounding us we have to question why humans think it acceptable to leave rubbish strewn about the place when they leave. Glass bottles, plastic containers and all manner of toilet associated items, all easily cleared into a refuse sack and deposited in the next bin to be found but that is apparently too difficult for some. It drives me mad.
Our journey today will deliver us closer to Kalbarri but en-route we have plenty more world heritage attractions to see for a second time around. For much of this section of our trip we are re-tracing our much quicker steps taken during January 2008 when we spent a couple of weeks driving between Exmouth and Perth.
Shell Beach hasn’t changed much, which is a good thing! It’s here that millions upon millions of tiny
cardiid cockle shells get washed up on the beach. One of the few species to survive in this densely salted water, the mass build up of shells here has been continuing for around 4000 years! The shells are put to good use locally, they are quarried at Hamelin Pool as bricks for use in heritage buildings like the church we visited yesterday and apparently the loose shells are used, as an example, within the poultry industry as a source, once eaten, to assist chickens in producing hard coated eggs. Well I didn’t know that (but Darryl did)!
It’s quite refreshing to be somewhere two years on and not really notice a major difference. There are the patches of ‘writing’ in the shells on the beach, we seem to remember scrawling DASH Racing 2008 on our last visit but refrain this time, but the visual area is still beautiful and somehow managing to cope with the hundreds, potentially thousands of feet that traverse it every day.
This is another area intent on getting rid of the ferals and they’ve enlisted a huge electric fence to help! It runs for 3.4km and is 2.4m high! Goats, sheep, foxes, rabbits and
cats are all a threat to the native animals such as the Bilby and mallee fowl. For the most part the ferals are being stamped or at least kept out but cats are still an issue and are the most destructive predator to the smaller rodents. We’ve not been lucky enough to see a bilby or mallee fowl on our trip, perhaps if we had camped up on the national park we would have increased our chances but fingers crossed the numbers continue to grow and by the time we return they’ll be in abundance!
Further along the road we travel until the turn off that will take us to the possible foundations of life itself, the stromatolites. These living rocks were responsible for releasing oxygen into the atmosphere leading the way for air breathing life forms to evolve. Sorry, we should have started this section with “and now for the science bit”! They’re actually quite awesome to walk above in a ‘gosh, they look terribly like normal rocks’ sort of way until you let yourself slip into the world of these fragile and very slow growing layers of history then allow yourself the pleasure of ‘Wow’ing when you
find out they take 30 years to grow one centimetre and they’ve been present on earth for 3.5 billion years! You see! WOW! They’re not ‘just’ rocks!
Shark Bay gained its world heritage status through three exceptional natural features; the vast sea grass beds which at 4,800km2 are the largest and richest in the world, the dugong (sea cow) population (probably minus 1 if what we saw was actually a shark enjoying one for breakfast on our trip to Cape Peron) and the afore mentioned stomatolites. It seems that this most westerly point of the Australian continent is very important in deed which again adds to the argument that more care needs to be taken regarding the coastline in particular where camping is available.
We wander back to our starting point at the Hamelin Telegraph Station where we stop for a Mrs Mac pie, a coffee and a delicious strawberry milkshake! We ask about being shown through the museum here but sadly there are only two staff on so the chap said it would be too much of a struggle, shame really as Bill Bryson refers to it in his book “Down Under” and although he said it
was small and airless he delighted it its treasures and in particular recounted a large photograph on the wall of a linesman standing at the top of a ladder, buck naked, repairing a telegraph line! On the wall in the café section of the station there are copies of the appropriate excerpt from the book (pages 416 and 417 if you have it - it’s a great read!) but the single side of A4 finishes mid sentence before it explained why the linesman was working naked! It read “He was naked, Mike told me, because he had just …..”! Just what?! Another couple also enjoying some refreshment started to look for the next page in the hope of finishing the sentence and when it couldn’t be found they started to guess the missing words! It was all quite a hoot and none of us guessed correctly but I knew I had the book in the caravan so dashed out to get it and returned to put their minds at rest! The end should have been “swum the Murchison River with his ladder and didn’t want to get his clothes wet. I didn’t say anything but the thought crossed my mind
Tracks of the past
The signs say it's been 60 years since wool wagons rolled over the stromatolites to the waiting ships for loading. The ruts made quite an impression.wet clothes would dry in minutes in the desert, whereas boots - the one thing he had kept on - would remain wet for hours.” Bless Bill Bryson, he’s a legend. We all had a bit of a laugh and were all happy that the mystery had been solved!
On that note we left Shark Bay behind us, we’ve enjoyed a good few days here (where haven’t we!) and were happy that we’d made the right decision to check it out again.
We made a quick stop at the Overlander Roadhouse for fuel and then we were on our way to the free camp spot over the Murchison River - I wonder if we’ll be lucky enough to encounter a naked linesman?!
The landscape is much greener and more colourful along the side of the highway these days, although there’s nothing other than track roads out to remote stations along our route but it doesn’t take us long and we’re soon pulling into the very spacious rest area.
We’ve picked one with facilities and I trot off to make use of them as soon as we arrive. There are flyers around the place for the Kalbarri
Tudor Caravan Park and I read them as I tinkle. I was just getting ready to leave when the door sprung open and a chap stood startled in front of me, I’d obviously not locked the door properly and in he came! It turned out to be John, the owner of the Tudor Caravan Park just coming along to deliver more leaflets and to spread the word about his discounts! Bless him, he makes the journey from either Kalbarri or Geraldtown, depending on where he is, to both the Nerren Nerren and Galena Bridge free camp spots to advertise the caravan park and entice patronage. He carries with him a pile of veggies, tomatoes and cucumbers; giving them away to whomever he meets along with the advert with the promise of a discount should you actually turn up. Good on you John, we’ll certainly check the park out when we get to Kalbarri.
Our evening here was a quiet one, we ventured out to watch the sun go down across the river (even got a honk from the driver of a road train I was taking a photo of!) which was lovely and it was nice to be back
alongside freshwater as apposed to salt. We chatted to a young chap doing ‘the tour’ on his motorbike, the amount of gear that he has to carry is pretty immense but good on him for giving it a go and he’s loving every minute of it. Yesterday he drove up to Steep Point, the most westerly point of mainland Australia only to find that the corrugated dirt road ran out 50kms towards the end and turned to sand dunes! It was a struggle but he did it and that’s the main thing.
From us both camped on the banks of the Murchison River, goodnight, sweet dreams.
Dar and Sar
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