Well, for this episode of nomading, we have a guest blogger, yep you guessed it none other than Ailsie’s partner in crime/nomading…..
We left Coral Bay and headed south for Carnarvon. It was an extremely uneventful drive, covering what seemed to be familiar ground, sand dunes and mulga trees. It can get a little dull in the outback when there are endless stretches of the same scenery. Just north of Carnarvon, we headed out to the blowholes looking for a camp spot somewhere along the coast. It was blowing at about 50 knots from somewhere out in the Indian Ocean and the coast line offered very little protection, so we bailed on that part of desolate coast and headed for the deserted town of Carnarvon. Entering Carnarvon it seemed to have the same feel of towns in the Riverland of SA, lots of red sand, no water and plenty of fruit trees. We pulled up stumps somewhere in town and quickly decided that we would restock our supplies and get the hell out of there, before we got stuck.
About 150 clicks down the road, we headed to the west into Shark Bay, a place I had been wanting to go to for a long time for various reasons. Our first stop was the stromatolites, which are the oldest known life forms on the planet. They are filamentous cynobacteria which are able to survive in a hyper saline environment. While they are relatively unspectacular to look at, it is spectacular to wonder at how this simple life form changed the planet forever when they came into existence 1.5 billion years ago. What was interesting is that these stomatolites are ~4000 yrs old, which was a bit of a disappointment as I had assumed they were in continual existence at this site since, well almost the dawn of time. And apparently they only grow in one other place in the world, Cuba, but my mate Ben discovered some decidedly similar filamentous algae in the South East of SA several years ago with a dirty great big geological survey scar running through them, apparently they are Thrombolites and are not nearly as impressive, but they looked the same to me. But I digresss…
After a night at Hamlin Pools (don’t stay there, stay down the road a km or two at Hamlin Station), we went into Denham, the most westerly town in all of Oz. On our way we stopped at Shell Beach, a beach entirely composed of mollusc shells, which are about eight metres deep. A pretty amazing site, especially for our palaeontologist friend Matt who would probably have been able to tell us more about the site than we would really care to know. We pulled up next to the harbour in Denham and spotted a dugong eating a tasty lunch of see grass, while we listened to the donkeys run around in Melbourne. After some lunch, we headed out to Francois Peron Peninsula. We had a couple of lovely nights out there camped on the beach, where we saw old man emu running about with eight chicks teaching them everything he knew. It is a spectacular part of the coast where the red desert dunes meet the aqua sea. We wanted to explore further but on our day of departure a storm was brewing so we decided to leave, rather than get stuck like a cork in a bottle in one of the clay pans out there. We retreated to Monkey Mia, where we got to see several rangers and hoards of tourists harassing wild dolphins that come in daily for a feed from the rangers, which is funny because I thought you weren’t meant to feed the wildlife in national parks. We also got to see the thick-billed grasswren in and around the car park, but I reckon most of the tourists missed this little beastie. This is apparently one of the rarest birds in Australia, but we saw at least six different groups in the car park and the surrounding sand dune area on our morning walk. The whole Monkey Mia experience was a little disappointing as it was purely focussed on harassing dolphins and failed to mention anything about the surrounding marine park and Project Eden, which is a large scale reintroduction program for a number of extremely threatened species of mammals which are virtually found no where else but in the offshore islands of Shark Bay. These include the bilby, mala, western barred bandicoot, numbat, and various other species that most people have never heard of (e.g. Shark Bay mouse), but I won’t bore you with them. After a night at Monkey Mia next to some loud obnoxious pratt who new everything about anything, we departed for Steep Point which Troopy was very excited about.
We tracked back towards the south and then turned west on Useless Loop, an exciting sounding road. After what seemed an eternity of driving to nowhere, we hit some bad corrugations and the road deteriorated significantly. We drove over the first dune and then into a big sand pit, along a beach and past some large fishing groups until we got to our campsite, a lovely spot in Shark Bay, overlooking Dirk Hartog Island (the first recorded landing place of Europeans in Australia in 1609). We decided on two days here, which was a good idea, as it was a lovely spot to chill out and unwind after a bumpy trip in. On our day there we ventured out to Steep Point, which is the most westerly point of the Australian mainland. Troopy made it virtually all of the way as well, but fell short by bout 50-metres as the track ended prematurely for motor vehicles. Now she has made it to the most easterly, northerly and westerly points – let’s hope we can make it to Wilson’s Prom and the southerly point over summer. After our second night at Steep Point we ventured back to the bitumen and camped at Hamlin Station for a night (a much better camp site than at the Pools on the way in) before heading south to Kalbarri, which will be part of the exciting story of our next blog!
Click here for Shark Bay photos
No comments:
Post a Comment