New Norcia

Tuesday 20^th September

From Jurien Bay the most direct route to Perth follows the coast, but we decided to take a bit of a detour inland to visit the small town of New Norcia.  Geoff and Sheena had told us that the town was a Monastic Community built by Benedictine Monks in 1846, and was well worth a visit.   

From Jurien Bay we headed inland to the Brand Highway, then  headed south for about 20km before heading east again towards the Great Northern Highway which is the main inland route south from Port Hedland, down through Newman and Meekatharra to Perth. 

We drove through some of the most beautiful country side we have seen so far.  Lots of purple and yellow wildflowers, and low rolling hills dotted with trees and more huge paddocks of wheat, lupin, and other grain crops.  There was also a lot of bird life including Black Cockatoos, Corellas, Ibis, and Galahs, as well as the odd Kangaroo or two.

Once we hit the Great Northern Highway we started meeting lots of huge trucks, most of them carrying oversize loads, all heading north towards the mining areas up near Newman. For most of them we just had to slow down and pull well to the left hand side of the road, but the driver of one pilot vehicle waved a big stop sign out of his window, and was flagging us well off the road. 

Luckily there was plenty of room to pull over as when the truck following him came over the hill, it took up the whole road.  Its load was a massive brand new loader, and if you look closely at the photo you can see its wheel hubs overhanging the sides of the trucks trailer.  The truck following was carrying the wheels, and they were a load in themselves.

As we approached New Norcia we suddenly got a glimpse of the huge Monastery through the trees.  It was quite impressive to see this huge building suddenly appearing out of the countryside.  Besides the Monastery there is a Convent, Church, and numerous other associated buildings.  New Norcia is the only Monastic Community in Australia.

We had lunch and then went for a walk around the buildings.  Very impressive, but the whole place was a bit run down and starting to show signs of neglect.  The Benedictine Monks are a sector of the Catholic Church, and the whole town is registered with the National Trust.  

Apparently a few monks still live there and you can stay there if you are looking for a refuge where you can find some peace and quiet.

From New Norcia we continued south towards Perth on the Main South Highway, until we hit the outskirts of Perth, where Nancy took over and guided us to our motor camp at Mundaring in the hills in the eastern suburbs of the City.

The Pinnacles

Saturday 17^th September

Geraldton to Jurien Bay

The road south from Geraldton winds along the coast with great views of several little hidden bays visible from the road.  We got as far as Jurien Bay, and liked the look of the place.  We pulled into the motor camp and found out they had a couple of vacancies so we decided to stay here.  It is only about 20 km down to Cervantes and the Pinnacles, so we’ll stay here for a couple of days and visit the Pinnacles from here.

Jurien Bay is another beautiful little seaside town, very modern and built right along the seashore.  Our motorcamp is right in the middle of town, but also right on the seashore.  After setting up camp we had a walk out on the jetty and then along their foreshore walkway. 

That night the wind got up and about midnight the first dirty squall hit.  The wind kept the caravan rocking all night and about every half hour or so another rainy squall would come bashing through.

Sunday 18^th September

Woke up to absolutely shit weather and realised there was no way we would be getting down to see the Pinnacles today.  Nothing to do but sit it out and try again tomorrow.  We had a bit of a drive round town and then booked in for another night.

Monday 19^th September

The weather improved considerably over night and as the morning moved on it kept improving.  While Christel and Cameron were doing their school work, I was pottering around outside when a guy strolled over and said Gidday.  He then asked if we had been camping at Glenrowan in January.  Glenrowan is in Victoria and was the home town for Ned Kelly, and although I was able to say we had camped there, I couldn’t remember if it was before or after we had been to Tasmania.

The guy said he was sure it was January because he could remember meeting us there.  “You had a young boy with you and we gave him an Aussie hat.” It was then I remembered the guy and another couple they were with. They were members of the Victoria Coromal Caravan Owners Club.  They were lovely and friendly and were able to give us heaps of tips about caravanning, seeing as at that stage we were very new to the game.

I think Geoff, the guy I was talking to, was the Vice-President of the club, and his mate Ken, was the President.  It was Geoff and his wife Sheena who had given Cameron the hat, which we still have, and Ken and his wife Beverley had given us a towball lock for our van.  You may remember I mentioned them in the blog at the time.  While we were talking to Geoff and Sheena, Geoff rang Ken back in Melbourne and then put me on the phone.  I said Gidday and that I had something of his that I had to return when we got to Melbourne. Ken cottoned on straight away who he was talking to. 

It is amazing how we keep bumping into different people as we travel around.  Especially those travelling in roughly the same direction as us.  You might not see them for a month or 2 and then run into them again.  But meeting up with Geoff again was really out of the blue.   Aussie might be a big country, but it seems it’s quite a small world we live in.

After Cameron and Christel had finished school for the day, we headed off to the Pinnacles, about 40 km south.  On the way we called in at the small seaside town of Cervantes, before continuing on into the Nambung National Park and the Pinnacles Desert. 

The Pinnacles had been on Christel’s ‘Must Do’ list as we had seen photos of it before we left New Zealand.  We hoped we weren’t going to be disappointed.  On our arrival, the first people we ran into were Geoff and Sheena again.  They were just leaving and were full of praise for what they had just seen.

After driving for miles through nothing but scrub, the first sight of the Pinnacles is breathtaking.  It’s another occasion of words not being able to do it justice, so I’ll leave it up to the photos to tell the story.  Just to give you an idea of how impressed we were, we managed to take 54 photos.

The whole area is very well set up for visitors.   You are free to wander anywhere you want, and you can do a 4½ km drive through the park.  The only stipulation is that you don’t climb on the pinnacles themselves.  So what did we see, tourists of asian heritage standing on top of them having their photo taken.

We spent a good 2½ hours wandering around this rather peculiar landscape.

The Pinnacles are the only place in the world where these formations are found, and scientists are still trying to discover how they are formed and why they are there.

On our way back to Jurien Bay, we drove down a side road to have a look at the beach, and on the way back to the main road came across this fellow crossing the road. 

It is a Shingleback Lizard, and they are quite common around this area.  We stopped the car and caught him just as he was heading into the scrub at the side of the road.

Cameron gets a real kick out of seeing wildlife, and was on a real high after being able to hold the lizard.  It’s really great that he is enjoying nature so much.

Tomorrow we head south again, and all going well should end up in Perth.

Geraldton

Sunday 11^th September

Kalbarri to Geraldton

The 150 odd km drive down the coast from Kalbarri to Geraldton was fairly ordinary.  For once we actually had a few hills and corners to go around.  Very much like driving on a New Zealand road.  We passed Pink Lake which was quite spectacular.  Its colour comes from beta carotene which is a natural chemical which also gives colour to carrots, pumpkins etc.  You need to know this stuff!!!!

We booked in to our motor camp which is about 10km north of Geraldton itself, and after lunch went for a drive around the town and called in at the visitors centre.  We are booked in here for a week as we are expecting mail from Cameron’s Correspondence School, our car Registration Certificates, which are being forwarded from Howard, the guy we bought the car from in Melbourne, (remember the fiasco we had when we tried to register the car, and how Howard came to our rescue?), and we have also got the car booked in for a service with the local Mitsubishi Dealer, for Friday the 16^th September.

Geraldton is a lovely town built along the coast around its port.  It has more than doubled its size over the last 2 years, and as a result a lot of the housing is new.

Monday 11^th September

Geraldton

Had another drive around town and visited a few points of interest including the memorial to HMAS Sydney, an Australian Navy Frigate that was sunk by a German Raider off the coast of Geraldton in 1941 with the loss of all its 645 crew.  The memorial is dome shaped and depicts hundreds of flying seagulls. 

Cameron had worn out his jandals so we had to buy him a new pair.  A fairly simple task.  Walk into the first shop we saw that had jandals and buy a pair.

There are about half a dozen shops in Geraldton that stocked jandals, so we had plenty to choose from.  We worked out we needed size 7.  Every shop we went in to had hundreds of jandals, from size 1 to 6, and hundreds from size 8 to 13.  Size 7.  No way.  Plenty of pink, or nice yellowy ones with lots of pretty flowers on them in size 7, but boys size 7? Forget it.

So a simple job of buying a pair of jandals, took about an hour.  We finally found some, 2 pairs in fact, so we bought them both.  One green pair and one blue pair.  Not our choice of colours, but beggars can’t be choosers, and Cameron was happy just to have some jandals, especially as we were threatening to buy some nice pink ones for him.

After our little jandal shopping expedition we bought our groceries, including a roast chicken which we had for dinner overlooking the beach, in our caravan park, and watched the sun set.  Cameron’s idea.

Tuesday 13^th September

Geraldton and Mullewa

We decided to have a bit of a drive in the countryside today, and hopefully see some more wildflowers.  The township of Mullewa had a Wildflowers Walk which was supposed to be well worth visiting, and it is also supposed to be one of the few locations in Australia where you can see the Wreath Flower, which got its’ name from the shape the plant forms.

Mullewa is 100 km inland from Geraldton, in what is known as The Wheat Belt, and on the drive in there, we passed miles of wheat and grain crops.  Huge paddocks of wheat stretching as far as the eye could see.

Quite a few unknown other crops as well, and we met heaps of road trains carting the harvested grain out to the port at Geraldton.  The country side was flat to gently rolling, ideal for growing crops.

Mullewa is probably about the size of Urenui and was once a service centre for the nearby mining industry.  But the mines have long since dried up, and now Mullewa seems to be following suit, trying to survive on the tourists coming to see its wildflowers.  We found the Wildflowers Walk, and for the next hour wandered along a track through the Mulga scrub looking at a few wildflowers. We didn’t see anything we hadn’t seen before, and certainly no wreath flowers.  Quite disappointing really.

We had our lunch in town and then went to have a look at a church we had seen from a lookout.  It was really quite unique.  Built by a priest who was sent to the area by the Catholic Church back in the days of missionaries.  He apparently built the whole thing by himself which is quite an achievement.

We then took a different route back to Geraldton passing through more wheat fields, and at one point we came around a corner and all we could see in front of us was a purple hill.  A whole paddock covered in purple flowers.  We had seen quite a few patches of these same purple flowers, but nothing as big as this.  Quite amazing.  We later learnt it is a weed called Patterson’s Curse, and it is noxious for animals.

Wednesday 12^th September

Today we visited the museum in town, which among other things, had a good display and information about the Batavia, a sailing ship that belonged to the Dutch East India Company that was wrecked off the coast of Geraldton during her maiden voyage in 1629.  Some of the survivors made it on to a nearby island where they soon started squabbling among themselves which eventually lead to several murders and all sorts of other nasty things.

After lunch down by the seashore, we went and had a game of 10 pin bowling.  We then drove for a short distance south along the coast checking out a few of the beaches, before heading inland again and back to Geraldton. Because we have the car booked in for a service on Friday, we are filling in time a bit, but never mind it’s a nice place and Christel and Cameron are getting lots of school work done.

Thursday 13^th September

After school work we spent some time on the beach before going back to town for groceries and another look around town. 

Friday 14^th September

Dropped the car off at the Mitsi Dealers and then spent 3 hours walking around town before picking the car up again and heading back to camp. We have now done just over 18,000 km with the caravan, and 35,000 km so far on our trip.  Just to get it in perspective, that is nearly 22 times the length of New Zealand.   Tomorrow we will head south again along the coast.  We want to check out the Pinnacles, in Nambung National Park, close to Cervantes, so we will probably head for there.

Kalbarri

Thursday 8^th September

Kalbarri

As usual the day started with School Work, and we also made use of the wind and did a load of washing.  Brochures about Kalbarri had shown several scenic lookouts along the coast to the south of town, with names like Natural Bridge, Island Rock, and Shellhouse Grandstand.  We decided to spend the rest of the day checking them out. The furthest out was the Natural Bridge, about 12 km from town, so we decided to start there, and call in at the others on our way back. 

We got to the Natural Bridge car park and parked the car. When we hopped out of the car to walk down to the cliff top lookout, we were nearly blown over by the wind, but that was the least of our worries.

Outback Australia is well known for its flies, and at some time or other, we have all seen photographs of outback people with their faces covered in them.  We had been lucky, and although we had occasionally run across them in our travels, they had never been a bother.  Every sports shop we had been in, and a lot of the visitor’s centres up through the outback, had fly nets for sale, but so far, cross fingers, we had no need of them.  All that was about to change...

Today we were going to experience them for the first time.  The minute we stepped out of the car they invaded.  Thousands of the little bastards.  They are about half the size of our field flies, but unlike them, they don’t fly away when you brush them off.  They just fly around your hand and land again.  Talk about annoying. 

The worst thing for me was that they would land in behind my glasses and crawl into my eyes.  Waving my hand in front of my glasses had no effect.  I had to take my glasses off, brush the flies out of my eyes, and put my glasses back on.  Within 30 seconds they were back.  Within a very short time we were all very expert at the ‘Aussie Wave’, and all getting very annoyed with the persistent little buggers.

From the look out at the top of the cliff we could see up and down the coastline for miles.  Just below us was the Natural Bridge formed when the sea had eroded the cliffs forming a bridge in the cliff face.  Nothing overly spectacular but the cliffs themselves were quite impressive.

Out to sea we could see whales spouting everywhere, and right under the cliffs a pod of dolphins played in the beautifully clear water. Unfortunately the flies made it too unpleasant to linger and enjoy the views.

From the Natural Bridge we visited Island Rock, then Shellhouse Grandstand, Eagle Gorge and Red Bluff.  All very similar with great views of the cliffs and coastline, and all with millions of flies.

As soon as we got back into town we bought three fly nets to wear over our hats.  We looked even more like dorks than usual, but the relief they bring from the flies means we don’t give a shit how we look.  In the next few days we would receive many comments along the lines of “Gee I wish we had one of those fly nets”, and, “How much do you want for your fly net, these flies are driving us crazy.”

Friday 9^th September

Kalbarri

After School Work we paid a visit to Rainbow Jungle which was listed as Australia’s most beautiful parrot habitat.  We could well believe it. 

Dozens of different kinds of beautifully coloured parrots, some of them flying around our heads as we walked through their huge free flight area.  The centre successfully breeds some of Australia’s rarest parrots, in lovely natural settings.  A great experience for all of us.  Cameron took all the photos of the birds with his camera.

We then had a round of Mini Golf before trying our hand at fishing again.  This time we joined about a dozen other fishermen near the river mouth, fishing from the beach.  After a couple of hours and no fish we gave up again.  At least we weren’t the only ones not catching anything.  Cameron rode his bike from our camp right through town and down to the river mouth where we were fishing, and then back again.

Saturday 10^th September

Kalbarri National Park

This morning we headed out to visit Nature’s Window and the Z-Bend on the Murchison River in Kalbarri National Park. 

Nature’s Window is a hole in the rocks formed by wind erosion, high on a narrow ridge where the Murchison River formed a huge horse shoe bend as it carved its way through the rocks of Kalbarri National Park on its way to the sea. 

 

It features on just about every brochure there is about Kalbarri, so it was a must see. 

To get to it we had to drive about 30km along a dusty sandy road through the park, but the views when we got there were worth it.

From there we drove another 12 km to Z-Bend, where the Murchison River followed an old geographic fault line forming an impressive gorge.  Again fantastic views and well worth the effort of bumping for over 30 km of corrugated roads to get there. 

An interesting sign on the walk down to the lookout informed us of some fossilised tracks in the rocks by the walk.

They had been made by a prehistoric scorpion about 400 million years ago as it walked across the then soft wet sandy mud. The mud dried and the tracks remained and eventually became fossilised. The scorpion grew to about 2 feet in length.  You wouldn’t want to wake up to find that little fella in your bed.

Back at camp we tried our hand at fishing again near the river mouth, but again no luck. Can’t wait to get back to New Zealand where they actually have fish in the sea.