David and Enid's Travels

Dolphins at Monkey Mia

We got up early this morning to watch the dolphin encounter at the beach. We arrived by 7:30 (there were already a couple of dolphins swimming close to shore, just a short way from the show area) and quite a few people already waiting. The environment people and volunteers arrived shortly after, and so did the dolphins, right on schedule at 8:00 am. The head lady narrated for quite a while (perhaps she was being repetitive for emphasis) and told us a bit about these dolphins. They are Indian-Pacific bottlenose dolphins. There were probably about 10 dolphins in all, though they only fed three of them, about two or three fish each. They pick someone from the crowd to feed each fish.

After the show was over we finished packing up the motorhome and drove it to the parking area to leave for our sailboat cruise. We spent about two and one half hours on the water on a large (60 feet or so) catamaran, looking for sea animals. I saw a loggerhead turtle just after we’d left the dock. We also saw some dolphins, and spent a long time looking for a dugong. Finally we found one, and got a couple of minutes view, but it never resurfaced where we could see it. On the way back we saw a sea snake, so there weren’t a lot of animals today.

This afternoon we drove in the four kilometers to Eagle Bluff viewpoint. It is a cliff about 100 metres above the bay, and below us we could see many rays and sharks in the crystal clear shallow water. The bush flies were terrible, but we’d bought head nets today at the service station where we bought fuel. That was a lifesaver, as with the net on they can’t continually crawl in your nose and eyes. They do however follow you into the vehicle, and we sprayed it with Raid after each stop. We must have swept up 50 or more flies tonight, and there are still a bunch flying around on the windows.

We also stopped at Shell Beach. The flies here were even worse, so we didn’t stay more than about five minutes, just long enough to take a picture. We then drove on to the sign to Hamelin Pools, drove in about two kilometers to where there was a Hamelin Station farm stay. However they didn’t have power, so we decided to leave. I drove to the north following the sign to the Stromatolites and the Telegraph Station. When we got to the end of the road we found that there are camp sites here at Hamelin Pool caravan park, so we have power and are running our air conditioner full bore. It is very warm tonight, and with all the flies outside we don’t really feel like being outdoors.

Sunset at Hamelin Pool

After supper I walked to the beach area to photograph the sunset and the stromatolites. It is about a one kilometre walk. At first you walk up a set of steps, quarried from blocks of the shell beach. In about 200 metres you pass through the old quarry where you can still see the cut marks in the compacted shells. The stromatolites are quite different than the ones which we saw a few days ago at Thetis Lake. A boardwalk extends out for about 100 metres into the shallow water. There are several different kinds of formation here, but it was getting rather dark so they were hard to photograph.

I had worn my fly net down to the beach, and the flies were thick. Somehow some got under the net, and when I tried to swat them, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in the back of my neck. I took the head net off, and discovered I had got a wasp under the net, so that was what had stung me. Whatever species they are, they have an orange body. It was painful for a moment, but not nearly as painful as a yellow jacket sting. There was a little boy on the boat trip today, and he had suddenly started screaming. He had been stung on the thumb by one of the wasps, and the captain put some kind of cream on it, and he stopped crying immediately. Perhaps it was some kind of an anesthetic.

Shark Bay

This place (apparently mia is the word for “shelter” in the local abboriginal dialect) has a rather strange name.  No one is quite sure where the “monkey” part of the name came from, though it may be the name of a boat, or pet monkeys early pearl traders had in the area.  In any case, it is on Shark Bay, a world heritage site.  As we drove in you can see the turquoise water of the bay from several places on the road.

We ate lunch just before we turned off the main highway at Overlander Roadhouse to drive the 150 km in to Monkey Mia.  There was a semi-trailer of sheep there, stacked four high, and with no tractor on the trailer.  It was pretty warm for us in the motorhome as we ate lunch, so I’m sure the sheep were suffering in the direct sunlight.  If the trailer had been moving they’d have been much better off, as they’d get some air flow.

We swam when we arrived here.  The water is very salty, and warm, but not hot.  Although there were almost no waves, there was a quite strong current moving along the shore.  You drifted in it quite quickly, and had to swim hard to go against it.

There are a number of boats anchored off shore.  Some of them had been out fishing.  We saw one boat which had brought in a number of large fish that they were cleaning.

The most annoying thing about today has been the flies.  Tiny little things about 5 mm long, they fly around you constantly, and especially like to land on your face and around your eyes, nose and ears.  They would follow us into the truck everytime we got out, so we took to zapping them with Raid after we got back in.

Kite surfing at Geraldton

We stopped at several of the small towns (resort towns really from what we could see) along the way looking for the good swimming and snorkeling spots described in our guidebook.  We really didn’t find anywhere, especially since the onshore wind was very strong today, so the ocean was rough.  There are a lot of very white sand dunes along the Indian Ocean Road, drifts of limestone sand.

We reached Geraldton by noon and checked in to the caravan park.  In mid-afternoon we tried to go body boarding at the beach, but the surf was too rough.  It broke hard into the sand, so that when I tried using the board I got sand all through my swimming trunks.  After that I decided to quit trying.  Enid was smarter and never tried at all.

The Pinnacles, Nambung National Park

We left Perth this morning after speaking to a salesman at the Winnebago dealership there; however we won’t be selling our home through them, and the conversation helped us to firm up our plans for the next weeks.  We will be spending about two weeks here along the Coral Coast, then heading pretty quickly back towards Sydney.

We missed the first turn after leaving the dealership and didn’t get on the correct highway right away.  After we twisted and worked our way through many of the suburbs of Perth along the Swan River, we finally got headed north and drove to the small town of Cervantes, which is just north of Nambung National Park where the Pinnacles are located.

We’d been told long ago, back in January, by the couple we met in the Snowy Mountains that if we got to Western Australia we should see the Pinnacles.  We’d also seen a picture of them in a tour guide and they looked interesting, so we made the out-of-the-way trip in to Cervantes.  What we saw dumbfounded us.  We’d expected to see a few columns of rock.  Instead we saw thousands of them.  They weren’t tall, most of them shoulder height or less, but they protrude everywhere as grey columns of eroded rock thrusting out of the yellow sand.  We’d driven through a thunderstorm on the way in, and the view was spectacular in the near-evening light with the storm clouds in the background.

After that we drove to Kangaroo Point to see the ocean.  It was very calm, but the beach was not very nice as it was totally covered with seaweed.  We next stopped at Lake Thetis to see the stromatolites.  These are collections of calcium carbonate excreted by cyanobacteria forming shallow mounds about half a metre in diameter.  They are believed to be about 3000 years old, one of the earth’s oldest life forms.

Perth under a full moon

Today we visited the aquarium in Hillary’s Harbour.  We spent a couple of hours there in the morning, then ate our lunch back in the motorhome, and returned for another hour or so in the afternoon.  It was nicely done and we enjoyed learning the names of some of the fish that we have seen while snorkeling.  They also have an underwater tunnel where you travel around on a moving platform while looking up into a large tank of fish including sharks and rays.  One of the rays was very large and it was interesting to watch it swim just above your head.  There were scuba divers in the tanks feeding the rays in the morning, and they held the small dead fish right in the mouth of the ray.

The Hurleys took us to Freemantle for supper.  We drove around the dock area for a while, then had fish and chips for supper.  After that they took us to King’s Park.  The moon was just rising over the city, and many people were there photographing the moonrise.

Hillary's Harbour, Perth

Yesterday, Saturday, we stopped at the dolphin interpretive centre in Bunbury in the morning.  When we arrived they said “you just missed the dolphins,” so we went into the inside displays and looked at them for a while.  We then went back out, and just as we got to the shore one of the volunteers announced “there’s one now,” and within a few seconds about three different dolphins showed up.  We waded into the water to about mid-thigh and watched them in the water as they came very close.

We’d been there for about five minutes when I realized that I had the cell phone in my shorts pocket.  Normally we haven’t been carrying the phone since we really have no one that will call us, but today we did because we thought we would try and phone the Hurley’s in Perth to let them know when we’d arrive.  I moved the phone out of my shorts, but it was already wet.  It would not turn on when we tried it.  We let it dry out in the window of the motorhome, and eventually it would turn on, but nothing else.  You couldn’t turn it off without removing the battery, and it never completed the boot cycle, so it looks like that phone is now defunct.

We walked part way around the inlet in Bunbury, then ate lunch before we drove to Perth.  We got to the Hurley’s (Mavis’s friends, whom we had never met before) in mid afternoon.  We visited a bit, and they were good enough to give us an old cell phone, which worked when we put our SIM into it.  That is very nice of them, as we were hoping that we wouldn’t have to buy a new phone for just one month before we leave.

They drove us to see a number of the beaches.  We stopped at Hillary’s Harbour, where we walked around to view the shops, and bought gelato (which was very good).  There is a very protected swimming area here, and a marina with a number of boats for sale (prices varied from half a million dollars to twenty thousand dollars, so there was a great variety).  After that we came back to their house and had a very nice barbecue supper.

Enid watching surfers at Prevelly Beach

We spent the morning at Prevelly Beach.  We were some of the first “casual” users there, though there were a lot of hard-core surfers out past the reef at the point.  We went to a swimming/surfing beach near where the Margaret River enters (though it actually isn’t entering now as the river ends before it reaches the ocean forming a calm lagoon.)  There were some small children with their families in the lagoon, and a company also rents canoes and kayaks so there were a number of them stacked on the shore of the river.

We didn’t go to the lagoon, but instead swam in the ocean.  There was about a metre swell, but the shore of the beach here rises quite rapidly, so that we didn’t find the surf very good for body boarding.  After we tried for a while we walked about a kilometre north on the very soft sand of the beach, until we reached a headland that we couldn’t get around.  When we got back there were quite a few people surfing and also a couple of body boards, but no-one really seemed to be very successful at riding the waves.  We went in several times over the next couple of hours, and also just swam and dived through the surf.  It was very nice and warm in the water, so it was a lot of fun.  One large wave broke over my head and knocked my swim goggles off, but fortunately I never lost my contacts.

Lunch was accompanied with the sounds of Donavon from the sixties coming from a Wicked Camper van nearby (it looked like a Wicked convention as there were at least half a dozen other Wicked vans in the parking lot).  Enid and I felt quite at home with the music; the surfers in the vans however were considerably younger!

After lunch we drove north to Bunbury where we cleaned up the motorhome at a carwash, and got everything else cleaned up to go to Perth tomorrow.

Lake Cave

We walked to Lake Cave this morning, approximately a 30 minute walk from our campsite, for a tour of the cave.  After a 60 metre walk down on the stairs we were guided around underground for about an hour.  It is not a large cave, but has a couple of large chambers where there are many stalactites and stalagmites.  One pair have formed a column with a base suspended over the “lake” (a shallow pool of water) that reflects the crystalline ceiling of the cave with its many stalactites and straws.

After a stiff climb back up we ate at our motorhome, then in the afternoon David walked down to the ocean.  It was about a five kilometer round trip.  There is a 50 metre high cliff over the beach below.  The road goes a long route more gently down, and he walked down that way, and up the cliff (which was the wrong way around as it was a steep climb back up).

This afternoon we took photographs of our motorhome in preparation for trying to sell it.  Again tonight the campsite is virtually empty, and so it has been very quiet all day.

Karri trees (Eucalyptus diversicolor),Gloucester National Park

We stopped outside of Pemberton today to look at the tall Karri trees.  They are the world’s tallest hardwood trees, some of them as tall as ninety metres.  We stopped first at the Gloucester Tree.  This is one of the original trees used as fire towers, and is spiked with a climbing tower to a platform at over 60 metres up.  They actually encourage you to climb the tree, though signs warn you to be careful (I can’t see that ever happening in North America – we’re far to concerned about lawsuits).  We didn’t climb the tree (well we did go up about ten feet just to take a picture!)  Before lunch we walked a couple of short loop walks that go through the forest.  There are a lot of very massive trees that dwarf you when you stand beside them.

We also stopped at the “Bicentennial Tree”.  It was a very rough gravel road to get there (when we opened the doors on the cupboards in the motorhome tonight everything had bounced around).  This is a tower that was constructed 1n 1988 to honour the bicentennial of European settlement in Australia.  The viewing tower atop it is 75 metres from the ground and it sways over 1.5 m when it is windy (it was windy today)!

We stopped at Conto campsite in Leeuwin Naturaliste National Park.  It’s quite a large campground, with several loop drives, and is almost totally empty.  We only saw one other camping setup when we got here, though a couple of vans have since pulled through and left.  Just a few minutes ago about twenty young people with backpacks,  about grade six age, walked through on the trail behind our site.  Their packs looked pretty big compared to the children.  They are obviously on a bushwalking trip from school and camping out overnight.

Snorkeling in Greens Pool, William Bay National Park

We left Albany this morning and drove to Greens Pool (an ocean lagoon) at Williams Bay National Park.  It was cool and actually rained a bit at about 6 am this morning, but by the time we got to the ocean it was quite nice.  We decided to try snorkelling in the pool, and it turned out to be the best snorkelling we’ve had since we were on the Great Barrier Reef.  The pool is very sheltered from the ocean by large rocks.  Within the pool the water was quite calm, though there were some small waves from the strong south easterly wind (the wind did cause us to drift while we were snorkelling).  There were many fish, and lots of very interesting seaweed and sponges.  The fish are large since spear fishing is not allowed here.  We snorkelled for about 45 minutes until we got too cold and came out of the water to warm up.  Half an hour or so later we were back in the water, went to a different part of the pool and swam around the rocks observing many large and varied kinds of fish until we were once again too cold to continue.

We then came back to our motorhome.  A woman was peering in through the window.  She was curious and thinking about buying something like it with her sister.  We showed them around the inside, and told them how much we liked the layout of this motorhome.

Elephant Rocks, William Bay National Park

After lunch we walked to the Elephant Rocks.  These are large granite boulders over 10

Elephant Rocks, William Bay National Park

metres in height, and they have been eroded and polished smooth into shapes that do look very much like large elephants, some complete with trunks.  By this time it was very windy so we decided not to snorkel again.  Although the water wasn’t extremely rough, it would have been more difficult than it was in the morning, and because the water temperature isn’t really warm, even for us cold blooded Canadians, we decided not to go in.

Instead we drove on to Shannon National Park where we have camped for the night.  It is a very nice campsite, and has running water and showers.  They use a wood burning boiler to heat the water, and someone else had lit it so we had a nice warm shower to wash off the ocean salt.  It even has picnic tables, which is really rare in the Australian parks. There are a lot of currawongs here.  A couple sat on the tree above the picnic table screeching at us.  Then they flew down and started to eat the bugs off the front of the motorhome.