Week 20, Monday 26 July – Sunday 1 August 2010

Week 20, Monday 26 July – Sunday 1 August 2010

On Monday morning we bid a teary farewell to our Grey Nomad neighbours at Neds camp and set off back into Exmouth to stock up on food and water for our trip inland.

As we left Exmouth we drove up through Shothole Canyon and Charles Knife Gorge – both very lovely and quite different. At Shothole Canyon you drive through the bottom of the canyon, all very wild west.

Shothole Canyon (and Priscilla being Gorge-ous)


At Charles Knife you drive up along the ridge and have a spectacular view of Exmouth and the Exmouth Gulf.

Charles Knife Gorge


We were persuaded by a Neds Nomad that we HAD to call in at the Prawn Factory on our way out of town and buy some fresh tiger prawns from Kailis Fisheries. Of course we did as we were told, except we opted for the cheaper and only very slightly smaller Endeavour prawns... Priscilla was attacked as we visited the shop, but we made it out alive!



Pushing on we had hoped to get to Tom Price in a day but spent too long lingering around the canyons so we settled for a free camp at Barradale River. It was very much like Galena Bridge – one ok toilet (with resident Redback spider) and a vast number of fellow travellers strewn across a floodplain next to an almost dry river bed.



We also had some very cheeky Miner Birds after our breakfast in the morning.



Tuesday was spent getting to Tom Price, a town that exists mainly to service the Rio Tinto iron ore mining operations in the area - Wiki says that "Due to the recent resources boom in Western Australia Tom Price is currently the most affluent non-metropolitan region in Australia, with the average Rio Tinto employee's wage being significantly higher than the Australian average". As we later discovered in Port Headland, WA has a number of towns which are effectively sponsored by the local mining company - Port Headland is BHP Billiton, Karatha is Rio Tinto like Tom Price. Even the tourist information centres seem to be adverts for these huge companies.

We stayed at Mount Nameless Caravan Park. It's a shame us stupid Europeans chose to name it such a stupid name, the Aboriginals already named this mountain (Jarndunmunha)...... , why didn't we just ask them the name of it?!

It was a pleasant campground where we managed to catch up on internet and skype home. It was also time for me to peel and de-vain the prawns we had bought – oh what a messy job!! Well worth the effort though, they were very tasty.



When we parked up in Tom Price we found a group of Short Billed Corellas taking a bath in the sprinklers...cute!



Wednesday we filled up the fuel tanks and headed into the Karajini National Park. We went straight to Dales campgound to make sure we could get a site, thankfully they weren't too busy but this is another campground that they recommend you get there early as we found later in the day people had to camp in the overflow field a little further away. After getting to our site in the Dingo loop we left our table and chairs to go out exploring for the day, driving to see Knox Gorge, Kalamina Gorge and Weano Gorge.

Gorges....








The drive around the park itself was lovely as well, great contrast between the red dirt road (which stains the green grasses at the end), the green of the grass and trees and the blue skies.





When we got back to camp we bumped into a couple we had met previously at Trephina Gorge in the MacDonald Ranges at the beginning of April! Alan and Wendy were with another couple back then, but had recently parted company so invited us over to their camp for a chat. It was great to catch up and find out their tips and plans... they had both recently retired and had planned to be on the road for 5 years, yes 5 years, how lucky are they!!!!!!

Thursday we decided to do the hike down through Dales Gorge starting with a very steep decent into Fortescue Falls and then across to Fern Pool, before walking all the way to the other end of Dales Gorge to Circular Pool then back up a craggy hill to the top and another kilometre back to camp.

Jennie happy at the start of the Dales Walk (I didn't look quite so relaxed at the end!)


Fortescue Falls from above


Of course Claire had to go swimming in both the waterholes (even though she forgot her cozzie and had to go in in her shorts and Jennie's rashie!!!) Jennie did not have the urge so enjoyed watching from the side!

Fern Pool Falls


Claire in Fern Pool


Claire in the Fern Pool waterfall


Claire out of the the water at last!


View of the gorge walk


Claire in the water at Circular Pool at the far end of the gorge


Claire jumping into Circular Pool


A ladder I had to climb up to get out of the damn gorge!


Phew, finally its over, Circular Pool from above


I did enjoy the 4 hour walk even if my feet did not. After removing my shoes and socks when we got back to camp I had a layer of skin on the inside of my sock, yuck! No photo, I don't want to put you all off your breakfasts!

Friday morning we set off out of the Karajini and headed north to Port Headland. Port Hedland is a very strange place that seems to exist only as a port for the big mining companies to export their salt and iron ore! Huge structures tower over the town all with big BHP Billiton and (for the salt factory) Rio Tinto logos. We stayed at a strange but cheap campground, another slightly weird one where we think a lot of the transient workers lived.

Onwards on Saturday following the coast road east towards Broome. We realised it was too big a jump so stopped at Barn Hill station, which was recommended by Alan and Wendy back in Karijini. We drove about 10km's off the main road down a sandy, and a bit corrugated track to find an oasis waiting for us! As we parked up to head into reception the Gnomads were out playing lawn bowls, barefoot on the beautifully coiffured grass lawn! All very strange but a welcomed surprise!

We found our spot on the headland looking out over the sea, very lovely but sadly another windy flappy morning! The beach was lovely here and we were almost persuaded to spend another night as Sunday night was Roast night with a band!!! But on Sunday we decided to head into Broome and not bother with the Roast :-(

We didn't have the best of starts with Broome, after a bit of a mix up at our campground at Roebuck Bay. Eventually we sorted ourselves with a nice (if very windy) spot overlooking the sea.



As we settled in for the night, almost Cyclone like winds set in... We were in for another flappy night!!

More soon!
Love to all,
Jen, of Jen and Claire Fame

Week 18-19, Tuesday 13 July – Sunday 25 July 2010

So, we're back in the land of thongs and roos, and surprise surprise, already playing catch up on the blog. So one blog for two weeks, here goes...

We landed back in Perth on Tuesday 13th and Coralie and Andrew kindly collected us at the airport. We collected Priscilla from Padbury (after home made chicken soup from Coralie, yum!) then spent a couple of days at a motel in North Beach cleaning, re-packing and re-stocking. The fun part of all this was discovering the mice in the garage who had made our portable bbq their home, bedding down in the (now shredded) toilet tissue that we'd left in the bbq as a rattle insulator! Mouse poo and wee everywhere, little blighters! Very amusing to see them poking their noses out of the bbq though!

We set off back up the coast on Thursday. I'd had a crazy idea that we might get to Carnarvon in a day (about 900kms), which I'd scaled down to Geraldton (about 400kms). Leaving Perth in our typically organised fashion at about 2pm after re-stocking, this plan was scaled back again to a stop at Gingin, a mere 80kms out of Perth. Hohum! We stayed in a basic, but clean roadhouse caravan park, and woke up to the sounds of kookaburras laughing and a flock of galahs in the trees above our heads in the tent the next morning. We took this to be Australia saying, “Welcome Back”.

On Friday we stopped on our way through Geraldton for more supplies, and camped the night at Galena Bridge just outside Kalbarri, where we'd stopped on our way up North before. The next day we made it to Carnarvon, and finally some warmer, if very windy, weather. We stopped two nights at a caravan park there, getting used to being back in the tent again, and taking a little trip out to see the blowholes at Quobba, which were pretty impressive (as much for the noise they made as for seeing them).





We pushed on up to Coral Bay on Monday, which was a lovely spot. We took a stroll down the beach, thought about snorkelling (the reef is accessible just off the beach), but decided to leave it until the next day. We had an expensive and frustrating night at a campground in Coral Bay – young Aussie backpackers set up their party just behind our tent (Sean, your friends are right, the story about half price waffles on a Thursday really isn't very funny), and the next morning the wind was howling again, and snorkelling no longer looked very attractive. So we upped sticks again, had a little tour around to the boat harbour, and set off up a dirt track towards Yardie Creek at the southern end of the Cape Range National Park. We made it as far as a campground at Point Cloates before deciding to cut back to the tarmac to make sure we got to Exmouth in time to camp and make the early start for Cape Range the next day. Not before seeing some rather large termite homes though.



We re-stocked in Exmouth, then headed out to Yardie Homestead at the northern end of the park – the closest camping spot to the entrance, where I read up on Cape Range and Jennie did her research.



Cape Range National Park gets so busy that you need to queue up in the morning at the ranger station and wait for people to come out to get a camp spot! We'd heard we needed to get there about 8am, but the lady at Yardie Station put the frighteners on me, and we wound up setting off at 5.30am to sit and wait in a queue for 2.5 hours! Jennie had made a flask of coffee though and we ate a tin of fruit in syrup for breakfast.



Typically, it wasn't so busy that day, and we'd have easily got in if we'd been there for 8am, but being there so early did mean we got our pick of the campgrounds, so we got to stay at Neds Camp, which I'd read was good. And it was. We turned up and paid for one night, and wound up staying for 5! It was really lovely. Very windy still, which is a bit tricky in the rooftop tent, but beautiful. The campground hosts also hold a happy hour at 5.30pm each night, where the campground residents meet up for a drink and a chat. All very civilised! The majority of people there were from the southern part of WA, escaping the winter, spending their full 28 days at Cape Range (the National Parks in WA have a maximum stay per annum in any park of 28 days!) A young German couple were there on trail bikes as well – they'd had them shipped out to Darwin, and were planning a tour of Australia, before driving overland back to Germany – pretty impressive. Especially the girl managing such a huge bike laden with all their worldly possessions!

We spent the week at Cape Range spending some quality time with Priscilla



exploring the beaches


(the ironing board was a make-shift fish cleaning table at Neds!)



snorkelling (seeing lots of fish, sea slugs (yuk!), a small blue spotted stingray and a much larger mantaray – Jen particularly enjoyed Turquoise Bay)

[erherm, snorkelling photos to follow - it takes a week and half to send a film off for developing in Broome!]

waking up to catch the roos on the grassy plains behind us





then chilling in the afternoon and noticing a roo a few metres from Jen



walking into secret gorges



to find the black-footed rock wallaby



watching for dugongs, but instead seeing a shark in our little bay at Neds



and visiting the lighthouse just outside the park, where we watched a pretty impressive display from the passing whales.

All in all, a very pleasant week. We saw turtles popping their heads up for air at our beach at Neds, and the only disappointment was not seeing a dugong when other people said they'd seen them. We've been looking for dugongs the whole trip, Jen's favourite submersible mammal. Until we came to Australia, we'd never even heard of dugongs. They grow up to 3.3 metres long, and weigh up to 250kg, but are extremely shy marine mammals. They're often called sea cows... Anyway, we love them, and were desperate to see one in the wild, but like the yellow-footed rock wallaby, they seem to be avoiding us...

On the Sunday we confirmed to Gwen and Norm, our lovely campground hosts, that we would have to leave the next day for fear we'd otherwise be stuck there for our full 28 days and not know what to do with ourselves at the end of it!

Interlude

As most of you know, we returned home to the UK following some terrible news. On Tuesday 25 May 2010, Jen's dad, Alan Scott Thorpe (The Real Big Al), passed away. Its impossible to explain just how devastating this is for Jen and her family, or how empty it felt to be back in the UK without him there. We're back in Australia now, continuing our trip around the Top End and the East Coast, and will be back in England early in 2011.


RIP Mr T, we miss you every day and will love you forever.
Jen and Claire
x x

Week 16/17, Monday 17 May – Wednesday 26 May 2010

We had a very cold night on Sunday, waking up in the morning to discover our thermometer showing it had been down to 1.4 degrees overnight! We set off up the coast with Linda and Brendan stopping at Jurien Bay before camping at Sandy Cape, in a lovely spot close to beach.

(courtesy of Linda and Brendan Photography Studios)

As we sat relaxing over some lunch, a couple of coach load of backpackers rolled up. We had a minor panic worrying that they may be staying, but they were only there to go sand-surfing before carrying on up the coast. Linda and I (I'm not sure I would have asked on my own!) went to ask the driver if he had any spare boards once he'd sent the backpackers on their way to the dunes. He was a very friendly chap, and happily lent us a couple of slightly damaged boards together with some wax to speed them up! It was a lot of fun, but sand EVERYWHERE afterwards!







We then went in the water for a snorkel, but the visibility was poor so we couldn't see much beyond the seagrass.

On Tuesday Linda and Brendan headed off to do the Stockyard Gully 4wd track, while we raced on to Geraldton, stopping at Green Head, Leeman, Port Denison-Dongara and Greenough on route. We camped at Sunset Beach, and missed an amazing sunset while cooking dinner (deep pinks and purples). We had dinner in the camp kitchen and got chatting to a lovely retired couple who were travelling around Australia on a trike!

On Wednesday we did a food shop in Geraldton, then went up to the HMAS Sydney II Memorial, which pays tribute to 645 crew lost in Shark Bay in 1941 after coming into contact with the German ship Kormoran, which was disguised as a Dutch merchant ship. The silver dome is made up of 645 seagulls, representing the lost sailors.



Then we headed to the WA Museum, only to find it's closed on Wednesdays. So we drove on up to Coronation Beach, only 30kms north of Geraldton, and stopped there the night. It was a nice site, close to the beach, but full of caravans and their accompanying generators, one of which had been carefully stationed next to our site and away from the caravan owner's site to ensure we got the full force of its beautiful song up to 10.30pm. We weren't impressed, having gone to bed about 9pm!

On Thursday we drove up to Kalbarri, stopping at the fishing village of Horrocks, before heading onto a dirt track for an 80km detour to the Hutt River Province, which was utterly bizarre! HRH Prince Leonard served notice of secession on the Western Australian Premier in 1970, following a dramatic reduction in the wheat quotas allocated to the Hutt River farm. HRH Prince Leonard did his international law homework and appears to have successfully seceded from the Commonwealth of Australia, and also claims to have established the Hutt River Province as a sovereign state (having declared war on Australia 1997, and emerged victorious a few days later declaring a ceasefire while those that do in Canberra watched on in bafflement).

Back on the road to Kalbarri, we stopped at the lookouts for Natural Bridge and Shellhouse Grandstand, before heading into Kalbarri itself. We watched dolphins in the bay for a while, before finding a camp ground in the middle of the town. Having set up camp, we watched the sunset on beach opposite before having dinner and heading to bed.



On Friday we went back down the coastal stretch to see Eagle Gorge, Red Bluff and Jake's Point (a famous surf beach, not that there was any surf when we were there).

Red Bluff


On the way back into town for provisions, we stopped to see the hundreds of galahs gathered on a bare patch of land between new houses. A little bit of me running around and Jen shooting (only with the camera!) we had some nice action shots.



Then we drove out to the main part of the Kalbarri National Park, doing some short walks to see the key sights at Natures Window and the Z Bend Lookout.





Then we headed back out and camped night at Galena Bridge – a very odd rest stop (a car park full of grey nomads and caravans)! We met up with Linda and Brendan here so we could head north to “World Heritage” listed Shark Bay together the next day. Shark Bay was given World Heritage status in 1991 and is famed for its unique ecological system, with the stomatolites, sea grasses and marine life. The biggest tourist draw is the wild dolphins who visit Monkey Mia resort daily to be fed by the rangers.

On Saturday we made the 300km drive up to Monkey Mia. On route, Linda booked us into a camp site at Steep Point, most westerly point in Australia, the following week. Stopped on route to see Jen's favourite rocks, the stomatolites, at Hamelin Pool. The wind was up, so the normally calm seas were a bit rough. We stopped again at Shell Beach (a beach made of shells)...





Then we pushed on to Denham to call home. We decided to spend the night at the Monkey Mia Resort to see the dolphin feeding the next morning. On Sunday we awoke early for the predictably touristy dolphin visits at Monkey Mia. Despite the crowd on the foreshore, it's still lovely to see the dolphins come in so close.






After a morning of dolphin watching we headed up to the Francois Peron National Park on the peninsula north of Denham and Monkey Mia. The park is largely accessible only by 4wd, and Priscilla was happy to be having a bit more play time in the red sand.



We stopped at the Peron Homestead where you can bathe in a hot tub filled with hot artesian waters, before heading north on the 4wd track to Big Lagoon. Then we headed north to Skipjack Point and Cape Peron, stopping to check out the campgrounds at Gregories and Bottle Bay (where we made a little detour along the beach to see these magnificent red cliffs) on the way.



The view at Skipjack Point was stunning, and we saw a dolphin chasing a large school of fish, a couple of turtles and a small ray (we think it was an Eagle Ray).



We also managed to get a mobile signal at Skipjack Point to call home before camping the night at Bottle Bay.

On Monday we packed up early to drive back up to Skipjack Point to call home again. We walked from Skipjack Point across the dunes to Cape Peron and back, before heading out of the park again, visiting Herald Bight on the way. We stayed the night at Denham and went out for fish and chip dinner!

On Tuesday we set off with Linda and Brendan again to Steep Point. Tarmac for 80kms south of Denham, then 100kms on dirt road, the last 20kms of which held the worst corrugations we've encountered. We detoured out on the sand to False Entrance, where we stopped at a lovely surf beach for lunch.





Then we visited the blow holes and had to restrain ourselves from driving Priscilla off the Thelma & Louise style cliffs we found there.



While letting the tyres down to 20psi (under threat of a fine if we didn't!)



Jen discovered a screw had welded itself deep into the rubber of the rear left tyre. We decided to deal with the issue when we reached the camp ground, and pushed on over the sandy track (a great relief after the corrugations) to the camp site we'd reserved, which was idyllic. Our site was the last along a stretch of beach camp-sites, right next to the calm waters of the bay. We decided to drive out to see the most Westerly Point of Australia that afternoon before setting up camp, which was lovely.





We managed to get a signal from the top of a sand dune on the way back, and called home to receive the terrible news about Jen's dad. Being so far off-road, with the sun dropping, we had no choice but to camp the night and set off in the morning for Perth. It also became clear the rear tyre was suffering from a slow puncture, so (with critical assistance from Brendan) we removed and fixed the tyre, putting the spare on overnight so we could sleep in the tent,and re-fitting the old one in the morning when we were sure the temporary fix had worked.

And this is where the trip ended, at least for a short while.

Love to all,
Claire, of Jen and Claire fame