Coral Coast to Perth - we complete the loop!


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Oceania » Australia » Western Australia » Coral Coast
December 1st 2008
Published: January 15th 2009
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The lovely Turquoise BayThe lovely Turquoise BayThe lovely Turquoise Bay

Cape Range National Park
Our arrival in Exmouth signalled the start of the final leg of our trip around Oz! From Exmouth, the road heads south all the way down to Perth around 1200 km away, where we began our journey on February 1st. Of course nothing is that straight-forward, we had a couple of side trips planned on the way through!

Exmouth is a friendly relaxed kind of town and just north of the town is where the famous Ningaloo Reef begins. Ningaloo is Australia's largest fringing coral reef, approx. 300 km long and very close to the coastline - there are lots of beaches here where you can literally wade straight in to the water and see colourful fish and coral at your feet! We stayed 5 nights here so we were able to take things easy and also to enjoy the cooler weather there. The West Coast can be very windy in summer and we struck on-shore winds most days through to Perth, but at last we were able to sleep without the A/C on! The cooler weather followed us right down to Perth and stayed with us until just before New Year.

We took a great ½ day reef
Our camp visitors at ExmouthOur camp visitors at ExmouthOur camp visitors at Exmouth

Mum and Junior enjoy a drink at our caravan site!
trip with Ningaloo Ecology Tours - our guide Alex was passionate about the area and took us out on his glass-bottom boat to check out the coral and we snorkelled off the boat as well. We only had 5 people on this trip so it was very relaxed. And it just wouldn’t have been right to visit Exmouth and not try the local prawns - at the fish factory, a kilo of prawns came to the princely sum of $11.50 - delicious! We are really going to miss this when we return home to NZ.

We spent a day in the Cape Range National Park which is just 20 minutes from Exmouth. This part of the coast has a string of lovely beaches with pure white sand and turquoise blue water - one of the nicest is Turquoise Beach. You can snorkel straight off the beach here, and at several other bays i n the national park. We also followed the recommendation of our camp neighbours, a lovely young Dutch couple, and tried out the Oyster Stacks - lots of different fish and great coral. Unfortunately the water here was quite choppy by mid-afternoon but still a great spot.
coast at Exmouthcoast at Exmouthcoast at Exmouth

Tower Zero in background
The road ends 90km south of Exmouth at Yardie Creek, which is a pretty gorge with an easy walking trail.

From Exmouth we took the short drive down to Coral Bay, a place we have always wanted to visit. Yet another beautiful beach with dazzling white sand and turquoise water!! And the coral reef is literally a few metres from the shore. Managed some snorkelling here but it was very windy! We did a short 1 hour trip in a semi-submersible boat - quite cool cos you sit down inside the boat and look out through the windows at the bottom of the sea! So much easier than swimming, but less personal! We had an exclusive tour on this one, as we were the only ones - this off-season travelling is great! We found out from our guide that the Ningaloo Reef is known for its amazing variety of coral formations, but is not as colourful as the Great Barrier.

The wind followed us down to Carnarvon - a fruit growing area with lots of banana plantations and mango trees. We stayed a couple of nights so that we could get our hair cut and send off a Christmas parcel to the kids. We got as far up as Carnarvon on a previous trip to Perth in 1996, so from here on we were in familiar territory. We detoured off the main highway into the Shark Bay World Heritage park and stopped in Denham for a couple of days while we had a look around the region.

Shark Bay was placed on the World Heritage list in 1991 and is one of the few places in the world that satisfy all four natural criteria for listing. There is Hamelin Pool which is one of only two places in the world where living marine stromatolites are found and it is the only place where they can easily be seen from shore. Then there is Shell Beach, which has tiny crushed shell instead of sand, and Eagle Bluff, where you can stand on the cliff-top and watch sharks and rays swimming in the clear water below. And there are extensive sea-grass beds in Shark Bay which give the sea its distinctive multi-coloured patterns. At Monkey Mia the dolphins come in for a feed every day - we had been before but dolphins are always worth a look. Another memorable
Yardie Creek GorgeYardie Creek GorgeYardie Creek Gorge

Cape Range National Park
Denham experience was a meal out at the local “Fawlty Towers” - we won’t name the place, suffice to say there was some interesting drama starring an angry chef and a rather casual waitress.

But the highlight of our visit to this area was our day trip out to Francois Peron National Park, which extends north from Denham - it is 50km to Cape Peron on the tip of the peninsula on a 4WD only sandy track, and it was a fun drive! The coastal scenery at Skipjack Point and Cape Peron is spectacular - the contrasting colours of earth and ocean - and from the viewing platform at the tip you could watch turtles and schools of manta rays and eagle rays passing by. And we put our 4WD skills to the test when we came across a German couple who were bogged - and helped them get their 4WD out of the sand! Finished up with a hot tub in the 44 degree artesian waters at the old Peron homestead - great day out.

We had a good run down to Kalbarri from here - most of the main tourist destinations along this coast are spaced out and it was a fair day's drive at around 400km. We stayed 4 nights here at the Anchorage caravan park which has average facilities but a great outlook right across the Murchison River. Kalbarri is one of our favourite places- this was our third visit and we enjoyed it just as much as before. Why do we like it so much? Well it pretty much has everything - a nice wee township, a magnificent wide bay, white sand beaches, the Murchison River gorges, wildflowers in the national park, dramatic coastal cliff scenery, one of the best bird parks in Australia, and Finlay’s Fish BBQ restaurant!!

Finlays is an tourist attraction in itself - a unique dining experience. A very rustic setting in an old fish factory, with assorted shelters, barbed wire, nails, corrugated iron and an open campfire. There is no service, no tablecloths, no drinks (BYO) and the napkins are a roll of toilet paper on each table! But the fish is delicious and so is the damper. And it is run by some very friendly laid-back people. Very Australian!

Rainbow Jungle has the best collection of Australian parrots we have seen in our travels, and like Finlays, we have been there on each of our visits to Kalbarri, and it is always a great place to visit. And we love the lookouts at Kalbarri National Park, especially Nature’s Window. We got chatting to a nice group of people up there and it turned out 2 of the girls live at the student hostel where Joy works in Canberra! Small world. Actually there are a lot of great lookouts in Kalbarri - along the coastal cliffs, over the bay itself, and in the gorges. Perhaps the town could adopt us as their ambassadors - I think I have done quite a sales pitch here! But it really is a great place to relax for a few days.

We drove down the new coast road to Northampton, which has a great collection of old churches and buildings, then onto Geraldton, which is now a sizeable city. We mainly called in to see the new HMAS Sydney memorial which was very moving. All 645 men on-board the Sydney perished when it sank off the WA Coast in 1941 and the wreck was only found in March 2008. The story behind the beautiful seagull sculpture at the site is that during the dedication of the site in 1998, a large flock of seagulls flew in formation above the crowd. So the sculptor decided to incorporate 645 seagulls into the ‘dome of souls’ she was designing; a gull for each of the men who lost their lives on the HMAS Sydney.

Just south of Geraldton is the rather interesting historic site of Greenough. It is a well preserved 19th Century town with a great collection of well preserved buildings - we spent a couple of hours there wandering around and were impressed by the work of the National Trust in restoring this village so well. Then it was on to Cervantes for the night and a visit to the Pinnacles at sunset. The Pinnacles are limestone formations in a desert-like setting of sand dunes - there are hundreds of weird and interesting shapes and sizes.

Well we were on the home straight - and a fitting way to end our journey was by a visit to a very unique place (in Australia anyway) - New Norcia, Australia’s only monastic town. NN is a small settlement about 100k north of Perth which is completely owned and run by the Benedictine monks. Even the NN Hotel is owned by the monastery, and serves its own special “Abbey Ale” (not cheap but a very nice drop)! It is a really special place to visit and also interesting on a personal level, as Blu’s father Maurice spent a year at St. Ildephonsus', the secondary boarding school for boys. The best way to see NN is by a walking tour, as they take you into all the main buildings apart from the monastic quarters. Rikki our guide did a great job of guiding us through the history of NN and there are several quite beautiful European style churches and chapels. The NN art gallery has a large collection of old European paintings and the 26 paintings that were extensively damaged by thieves in a daylight robbery in 1986 have now been restored. We were also able to look up Maurice’s record in the archives, adding another piece of info to our family history collection. This unique town will no doubt become a more important part of WA's history as its historic value becomes more evident over time.

17 December - and so it was on to Perth, where we began our 50,000 km journey in February. We pulled into the caravan park in Forrestfield, thinking we would end it where we began, but there was no room at the inn, so we had to go to Banksia down the road instead! We have now been based at (brother) Geoff and Carole’s place for a few weeks, and are in the process of selling up our caravan, 4WD and camping gear. We spent Christmas Day and Boxing Day with family in Perth and in Bunbury and we are now getting ready for our return home!


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Shark Bay World Heritage Park


16th January 2009

NZ here
Well just read your latest blog. You guys have done so much and covered 50,000 miles since setting off wow!! That is huge. We look forward t seeing you when you are back safely in godzone. When are you due back or have you not got a date yet?? Thanks for the funny get well card - pleased to say all is going well. Walking inside with no crutches and 1 crutch when outside just in case I stumble. It was 4 weeks on wednesday just gone (14th Jan) since i had the double hip op, so not bad eh! Keep well and happy Alison Andy and kids xx
25th January 2009

Hi to NZ here!
Hi A and A Just read your message - thanks! Not long now till we are back in Godzone indeed! Hope the weather will be warm enough for us - ha ha! Look forward to seeing you and your new hips soon! Love K and B

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