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.