Advertisement
Published: June 22nd 2017
Geo: -24.8837, 113.657
Woke again to blue skies and sunshine. Gee we are going to miss this weather. We had 360+ kms to drive today but we had to call in to see Coral Bay on the way. What an extraordinary place. We could have spent a week there no problems. Its like a little bit of paradise shut away from everything. It is on the Ningaloo marine park and the reef forms a natural lagoon with crystal clear water and white sand. The reef is about 300 meters off the beach. There is a small shopping area where we had our pie and cake fix after a walk along the beach. Hmmm maybe we should have done it the other way round.
Well we had stayed longer than planned which made us late getting into Carnarvon, about 2.30 pm.
After quickly setting up the van we took off to see some sights.
Carnarvon has a population of about 10,000 and has a huge fruit & vegie enterprise. Bananas everywhere. The town is situated on the Gascoyne River which was just a huge amount of sand when we passed over it. According to the info in the book, this river is usually dry but the
water sits under the sand in underground reserves. The water filters through the sand to underground aquifers from which the town draws its water.
We went to the mouth of the Gascoyne, which ironically had heaps of water, then onto the 1 mile jetty where we just made it in time to get on the train (lazy buggers we paid $7 each for a return ride) out to the end of the jetty. When we got there, the end of the jetty was blocked off and in disrepair. We all had to get out for a short while and stretch our legs (we had been sitting there for about 10 minutes). That was a good trip and the train driver was a great tour guide with lots of history about the town.
After the excitement of the train trip, we decided to take a drive up the hill to see the OTC communication satellite dish. Unfortunately this was closed due to time so we could only see it from behind the gates.
This dish was used for the 1st TV broadcast overseas, the tracking of Haley's Comet and the televising of the landing of man on the moon.
Carnarvon has a lot of museums
and it would have been good to spend some time looking through them at the old machinery but we ran out of time.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.065s; Tpl: 0.017s; cc: 8; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0293s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Sue
non-member comment
It's only a mile, you could have walked that pie and cake off !