Perth (7 nights)

It is strange being back in a big city after so many months in pretty isolated places and only the occasional town (even Darwin isn’t really that big).  The price of food and fuel has dropped dramatically and there is more selection in everything.  We are in a camping ground 10km south of Fremantle, adjacent to the Woodman Point Regional Park which is a woodland area full of walking/cycling tracks, playgrounds and a jetty off the beach.  It used to be a munitions storage area after the war with the old ‘sand bag’ bunds still there, albeit the bags have disintegrated leaving cemented contents.  There are a few kids staying here so the boys have been having some fun.  A troop of them found some broken up pallets out the back where the caretaker keeps his mulch etc and made a bike balancing course.  I kept waiting for him to come along and tell them off but he hasn’t so far….unlike the City Of Melville Council who, as reported on the front page of the local rag, dismantled a similar set up made by local kids on a corner reserve.  A neighbour dobbed them in, the council CEO stating that “On assessment, the unauthorised structures were deemed to present public safety concerns”.

We have been busy visiting various attractions and smooching around Fremantle.  The Maritime Museum included a tour through the decommissioned HMS Ovens submarine, very confined spaces and tiny beds.  The shipwreck exhibitions are housed in the old Maritime Museum and these are really interesting, so many wrecks on the western coast due to proceeding too far east before turning north to Jakarta.  Part of the Batavia is there with some of the treasure found, what a gruesome story that is!

Inside HMS Ovens submarine

The Perth zoo was worth a visit, love those meerkats!  Unfortunately we didn’t get to see some of the elusive Australian wildlife that we didn’t see in the wild, like quolls and numbats, they remained elusive at the zoo!  But we did see others such as the frilled neck lizard that are hard to find in the wild.

Meerkat on the lookout- cute!!

We checked out Kings Park on Sunday morning, it was a sunny day and it seemed all the young families in Perth were at the Synergy Playground, a massive play area that the boys assessed as being for “little kids”.   The Botanic Gardens are also in Kings Park so checked them out too.  Then off to the Perth Mint, they don’t make coins for circulation any longer but make coins for collectors.  There was a gold bar pouring demonstration, they have been melting and pouring the same bar for 20 years, about 5 times a day and it still weighs the same!.  They had some replica gold nuggets found in Australia in the past, the last being found in the 1980 and weighed around 30kg.

Botanic gardens display of Everlasting daisies

the boys holding the massive gold nuggets, wishing they were real!

Yesterday the boys went to an aquarium at Hillarys boat harbour and I biked to Fremantle then got the train into the central city (ended up in the basement of a car park building looking at parking monitoring equipment after asking a parking warden about the system they use!).

Today is our last day so we went into Fremantle for a last smooch, love the old buildings and narrow streets, cafes galore and quirky shops!  Start the last leg of the trip tomorrow, first stop Brusselton.

love this old ad for Swan Lager on the side of the old pub shown below

great bookshop in Freo

Progress report

We are currently in Perth where temperatures are much lower than we are used to, about 20!.  Been to the zoo, the Maritime Museum and the Mint so far.  We will be here until Wednesday so will post our adventures before we leave here.

I have added some pictures to the Shark Bay post (we had rubbish wi-fi when I did the post initially) and posted the Kalbarri and Cervantes stopovers below. 

Cervantes (1 night)

The landscape changed dramatically south of Kalbarri, we hit the wheatbelt so much greener and lusher, even some paddocks and sheep (creatures not much seen up north, although oddly there were some as you drive into Exmouth!).  Bends started to appear in the road and even small hills.  We called into Geraldton for lunch and checked out the HMS Sydney III memorial, a warship that sunk in 1942 after a battle with a German ship.  We stopped off at Cervantes for the night a seaside town close to the small Namburg National Park where the Pinnacles Dessert is located.  There are very strong Spanish and French connections with the town and we spotted a ‘Leon Street’, we pulled over to take a photo as you do.  In the quietness of the morning and the deserted residential streets there just happened to be a lady sweeping the footpath right next to the sign and a couple sitting on the veranda of the house right next to the sign observing all this action outside their house, the most seen for weeks! 

Leon Street

Pinnacles, with beach dunes in the background

Pinnacles

The Pinnacles were dramatic in the stormy morning light and again peace was shattered with the arrival of the Murray boys!

Kalbarri (3 nights)

Kalbarri is a small town on the coast and is surrounded by the Kalbarri National Park.  The key features of the park are the gorges and rock formations associated with the path of the Murchison River.  Natures Window is a popular spot where a rock has a hole in it and the view through the hole is pretty cool.  There is also a coastal element to the park with the stunning Zuytdorp cliffs (Zuytdorp was the name of a ship wrecked off the coast of Western Australia in 1712).  The flora of the park is also amazing with great wildflowers all over the place!  The boys were very pleased to have a jumping pillow and playgrounds at their disposal for a few days at the camping ground.

Natures window

The wonderful Shark Bay

We have just been at Shark Bay, a world heritage area for its natural beauty, earths evolutionary history, ecological processes and biological diversity.  It is one of the few sites in the world to meet all those criteria.  When you drive into the area there is a cattlestop with a predator fence stretching either side to control the number of cats, goats, rabbits etc entering the area.  As a vehicle passes over the cattlestop a dog barking sound is triggered, another control measure.

We camped at three very different places while there, firstly the quirky Hamelin Pool caravan park, (music playing in the bathrooms!) then the stunning Francois Peron National Park in a bush camp and finally the Monkey Mia resort, all are posted below.

Monkey Mia (2 nights)

Despite the name this place is all about the dolphins!  ‘Monkey’ came about most likely because of the monkeys that the early oriental pearlers kept as pets.  “Mia’ is the Aboriginal word for hut or home.  

Every morning at 7.45am five adult female dolphins are hand feed off the beach, people line the shore and some get chosen to feed a dolphin, the boys were pretty happy when they got selected! More than the five usually turn up and they are all very sociable, they cruise past the strange humans in a line with an eye on them, checking them out. 

We basically just hung out there for a few days, swimming, lying in the sun, walking the nature trail, a talk about turtles the first night and on the last night we took a sundown cruise on the catamaran Shotover, nice!

Sundown cruise in Shark Bay

Francois Peron National Park (2 nights)

Accessing the camping spots in this national park is via a single lane, deep sand road.  Although we have been on plenty of unsealed roads, so called 4WD only roads, this road is REAL 4WD stuff.  We learnt a lot about when to use high ratio and low ratio, how to dig out of the sand (not fun in the heat!), about the need to reduce tyre pressure on the vehicle and the trailer to gain traction (all were down to 16 psi) and about retaining momentum.  We also learnt the hard way about the need to secure any heavy items in the back of the vehicle as they may move when the momentum being maintained is too hasty and then deep, cannon like corrugations suddenly appear, and the item may, for example smash a back window of the vehicle.  Needless to say the drive out again was much easier with this new found knowledge.

Luckily the grey hair causing drive in was worth it!  We camped at Bottle Bay near the top of Cape Peron and had a site a stones throw from the beach.  It was good for a quick dip but the presence of sea grass, and as another camper told us there are sharks lurking about, made snorkelling a no-go.  Fishing however was good to go, Leon proceeded to catch us four Whiting for dinner.  They are small fish so it was helpful to have the campers next to us offer up some Snapper! 

The proud fisherman

A key feature of the park is Skipjack Point overlooking the north west corner of Shark Bay Marine Park.  There are two viewing platforms and info boards explaining what you might see.  That day the water was dead flat and we saw the lot!  A dugong, three bottlenose dolphins, a small tiger shark, a turtle and two eagle rays.

On e of the viewing platform at Skipjack Point

View from the platform

On the drive out we spotted a very long snake, several goannas and a blotched blue tongue skink, perfect as reptiles are latest thing for the boys.

Hamelin Pool (2 nights)

Hamelin Pool is at the south end of Shark Bay and there are a heap of living marine stromatolites that are a sample of the earliest record of life on earth.  There is a viewing platform reaching out in the water so you can see them close up without walking on them.  They exist here so well due to the hypersaline conditions in that part of the bay, caused by an underwater bank restricting tidal flow. The caravan park where we stayed actually had a few stromatolites set up in a tank so you could see them side-on and see the oxygen bubbles they create raising to the top.  All very interesting.

The Stromatolite boardwalk

some of the stromatolites and a few fish

Also at the caravan park there is the old Hamelin Pool Telegraph Station, morse code travelled up and down this line until it was no longer needed in 1950s.  But then in 1964 when the first Gemini space capsule was to be tracked across Australia the station was used at a critical moment because the phone line got zapped in a lightning storm.  Good old Mrs Lillian O’Donahue spent 4 hours relaying important info backwards and forwards through the station, I was pleased to find out she was given a special award by NASA!

From Hamelin Pool we did a day trip out to Zuytdorp Point where there are the False Entrance Blow Holes.  It was pretty full-on driving through the sand dunes to get there and the boys, being boys, threw rocks down the blow holes, they got a fight when one came back up when the hole blew!!

False Entrance Blowholes

dramatic cliffs at Zuytdorp Point

Carnarvon (2 nights)

We are camped in the town of Carnavon in a caravan park tucked away in the corner near a shed and what look to be permanent residents.  There are high fences on the boundary as the airport is close by and in the distance across a bleak landscape we can see the satellite dishes from the ex NASA communication station, feels like we are in a compound in the desert.  The other crazy thing at the caravan park is the thick rope they have laid across the road to as speed humps – ingenious and cheap!

Anyway, today we visited Quobba Point where there are impressive blowholes and a sheltered beach (called a lagoon) where the snorkelling is excellent!  As we were watching the blowholes a humpback whale cruised past, spouting and carrying on, it was the closet we have seen one so far.  Whilst snorkelling we saw lots of sea urchins and some were bigger than a soccer ball.  It was very shallow and as the tide went out we had to be careful not to scrape our knees on coral or rocks.  The coral colours were magnificent as they are closer to the light. 

before the blowhole blew, everyone nice and calm

as the blowhole blows - kids disperse, John still calm

There are lots of old ‘shacks’ (corrugated iron style – kind of like the Selwyn Huts) along the beach were local people stay for holidays, fishing trips etc.  You can also camp there but you need to have a chemical toilet with you, which we don’t.

classic shack!

Progress report

We have about 7 weeks of travelling left and a week in Melbourne, then home.  We are currently in Carnarvon for a few nights then off to Shark Bay.  Below are the posts for Cape Range and Coral Bay, both most excellent places!  Still having good weather, about 27 degrees here, expecting things to get chiller the further south we go.  Not sure when we will next get internet, you just never can tell.

Coral Bay (3 nights)

Coral Bay is another good base for enjoying the Ningaloo.  The town consists of several camping grounds, hotels, a backpacker hostel and dive/tour businesses and a handful of shops.  On the first day there we snorkelled off the beach and Enzo and I hired a glass bottom canoe and went for a paddle in the bay.  The second day we went out on a boat called Utopia, it was AMAZING to snorkel closer to the reef where it is deeper and the coral structures are more dramatic.  At the first spot we were lucky enough to see two turtles, one sleeping and one swimming through the coral eating algae; we also saw six grey reef sharks feeding.  The next stop was to swim with the Manta Rays, we swam with Isobella, she had a wingtip to wingtip span of 4m, amazing to cruise along with her as she fed.  Finally we snorkelled at another impressive site, we saw a cuttlefish, a yellow stingray with blue spots and many other awesome creatures.  On the trip back to shore we saw turtles swimming around the boat.  The photos below were taken by out guide on the day and provided to us on CD, much better than the ones we took on our cheapie.

Green sea turtle

turtle again

surgeon fish and others

this picture shows the scale of Isobella against a human

Isobella the Manta

Grey reef sharks

We were camped in the older part of a camping ground where the sandy aisles between the rows of  sites were narrow and the sites themselves were compact, obviously designed for the era when caravans were little and cute.  This set-up made for free entertainment when people arrived in their SUVs towing very long luxury caravans.  Accessing the sites involved directions being shouted by the female, the male trying to understand what she was saying, tempers flaring and domestic issues resulting.  Some people travel with their dogs, generally little yappy ones, but here in Coral Bay I saw a couple travelling with their two cats.  They must hang out in the caravan during the day but first thing in the morning they put them on long leads so they could get some exercise, it was very weird!  The kids liked this campsite as there were heaps of kids (including screaming babies in the middle of the night!!!) to play with and a jumping pillow!

The munch bunch on the boat

Cape Range National Park (7 nights)

This National Park is a great base to enjoy the Ningaloo Marine Park and its various sanctuary zones where the marine life is protected from fishing etc.  There are camping areas along the length of the park, we camped at the South Kurragong camping area where there are 12 sites; all were generally full at this time of year.  Kurragong is one of the beaches where you can fish and when our retired teacher buddies Graham and Jacky arrived, Leon and Jacky proceeded to go fishing together several afternoons, no fish for tea though!.  Being the only kids at the camp for most of the time a lovely lady called Ingrid (recently made a grandparent) took to spoiling the boys with hot chocolate, popcorn and chocolate cake!

Jacky and Leon fishing

The South Kurragong Camping area, view from the sand dunes

Our camp site, John securing the guy ropes to the fence!

We met some more great people at that camp site and at 5.30pm each day people gathered for sunset drinks at the picnic tables looking out to sea.  Most nights humpback whales were cruising past beyond the reef spouting and leaping etc, dolphins, reef sharks and turtles were spotted within the reef area, amazing spot! One morning I walked along the beach and saw an octopus fishing - mesmerising!.   In the morning just around sunrise there were kangaroos hanging out on the beach, during the day they stayed in the dune areas watching the humans no doubt, and in the evenings they hung out by the sealed roads as they were warm.  A pair of zebra finches took a liking to our roof rack and started marking a nest one afternoon.  They are tiny little birds and looked quite cute carrying big twigs up to the rack, only to be very disappointed when we drove off in the morning to explore another spot.

Sunset drinkies

One of the amazing sunsets

There were plenty of spots to snorkel along the coast.  At Kurragong there were forests of spiky blue coral and a great range of fish, Enzo was lucky enough to have a turtle swim past him!  At Turquoise Bay you can drift with the current, there we saw a ‘painted mask ray’, a huge creature with big eyes.  Oyster Stacks is shallow so you need to go at high tide, the coral there was very pretty and you can get very close to the fish.  South Mandu beach was also good for snorkelling and John and I recognised this as the beach that we visited on that inaugural trip and had given us a taste of the Ningaloo as part of a day tour we took from Exmouth.  So there we were, exactly where we had vowed to come back to!

The only downside to the stay was the wind that started at either 11pm or 4am and lasted through to about 3pm.  The 11pm start-up was not conducive to sleep for people in tents (caravan envy!) so we were pretty jaded most of the time, the positive side being the calm sunset for socialising. 

These funky green crabs were scuttling around the rocks at Kurragong.

The funky green crab