For the last week, we've been on a small group tour with Aussie Wanderer on Western Australia's Coral Coast. This trip was one of the first things we booked when planning our Big Trip, inspired by Neil Oliver on Coast Australia to travel north from Perth up to Exmouth and back, a distance of over 1,200kms each way (excluding all the side trips). We travelled over 500 miles in one day alone and covered over 2,000 miles in total. We've survived shared bathrooms and travelling with a group, though there were only 6 of us on the tour so that wasn't too bad.
It's been tiring (lots of very early starts and a few late nights too) but worth every moment - we've seen, experienced and learnt about so much more than we'd expected (even if we didn't get to see dugongs and turtles) and laughed a lot too. There hasn't been much time for reading though... I'm slowly working my way through Make My Wish Come True by Fiona Harper on iBooks.
Our driver and guide Ryan shared interesting stories and information along the way, giving us a bit of understanding of the landscape, wildlife, people and history of the Coral Coast, as well as teaching us a few good Aussie expressions along the way! We've eaten well... everywhere we stayed had great outdoor BBQ equipment so burgers, steaks and chops have been on the menu.
Pictures sometimes paint a thousand words and other times fail to do justice to what you've seen and experienced. I've taken hundreds of photos and will enjoy sorting through them all when we get home. But here are just a few to show some of the highlights or even just some quirky things we saw along the way...
After beginning our journey exploring the strange and prehistoric looking Pinnacles in Nambung National Park (lots of sandy coloured rock stocks of varying heights and circumference), one of next stops was at Port Gregory Pink Lake... the pinky colour is actually caused by beta karradine (as found in carrots) and something to do with the salinity of the water... changes in salinity levels have a big impact on wildlife, sea life and plant life up and down the Coral Coast.
We also stopped off on the cliff tops above Kalbarri to check out some of the amazing rock formations with names like Nature's Bridge - the blue sky was pretty much a constant throughout our trip.
The first highlight of day 2 was a visit to Kalbarri National Park, in particular I loved hiking through the Z-bend gorge on the Murchison River... we didn't get to parkrun this week, but hiking here was a pretty good alternative. The views were spectacular and the workout pretty challenging... It was 44C in the shade by lunchtime.
Lots of miles later, including detours to see stromatolites at Hamelin Pool and shells as far as the eye could see on Shell Beach, we reached the brilliantly named Monkey Mia in the Shark Bay World Heritage Area... just in time for a sunset cruise and some dolphin spotting. The view from our room wasn't bad either... this was definitely the best of our accommodation (not least because we had our own bathroom and a TV so Jon could catch up on the cricket).
It's not often you get to start your day with a walk along the beach with dolphins swimming about 10m away but that's how things work at Monkey Mia. The dolphins have been coming to the beach in the early morning for about 50 years. Visitors and locals used to feed them - which obviously stopped the young dolphins from learning how to fend for themselves. That has been controlled now and the site is protected. The most fascinating element of the morning was watching the dolphins outwit the pelicans in the race to a shoal of fish.
Dolphin-spotting is obviously hard work so this was my reward...
From Monkey Mia, we travelled on to Coral Bay, the start of the Ningaloo Reef and another World Heritage area and arrived just in time for a sunset beach run... it was still very hot whilst we ran but the sun sinking down into the Indian Ocean was a very special sight. Monday was Australia Day... lots of people in our hostel were heading down to the beach for the time-honoured Aussie traditions of beach cricket, beer and bbq. We headed out on to the Ningaloo Reef on a glass-bottomed boat. The reef is a fringing reef so very close to the shore. It's home to an amazing array of aquatic life including reef sharks, turtles, manta rays and every colour of fish imaginable... my favourites were the little blue neon fish. The giant clams were fantastic too. Photos definitely don't do justice to what we saw. The variety of shapes, colours and sizes in the coral was staggering...
We then walked around Coral Bay along the rocky coast and through the dunes to a little shallow inlet. It was only about 20 minutes from the Australia Day festivities on the main beach but felt a world away. We had come to see the reef sharks in their nursery... they come into the shallows at high tide in this inlet and we were the only people there to watch them. There were about 30 in total and I think I could have watched them all day (if it wouldn't have resulted in sun stroke). Picture quality is poor but I promise they are reef sharks and they were amazing.
After the excitement of watching the reef sharks, we fortified ourselves with the highly recommended "brecky pies with the lot" from the Coral Resort Bakery... pies are definitely an Aussie tradition and this one was exceptional - a meat pies with added bacon, egg and cheese!
From Coral Bay, it was time to head to the northern limit of our trip in Exmouth. We arrived in time to join the Australia Day celebrations at the nearby Yacht Club. The party was in full swing when we got there and the live music was good fun... a singer from Manchester who'd been in Australia for about ten years, who loved a medley and combined Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up with Waltzing Matilda at one point!
On Tuesday, we went into Cape Range National Park for another chance to explore the Ningaloo Reef. I'm not the best in the water but really wanted to try and see the reef at close quarters... it was time to overcome my fears and go snorkelling. After lots of practice in the shallows of Turquoise Bay, I gradually worked out how to manoevre myself through the water using my flippers, stay afloat with my noodle and breathe through my mask without hyperventilating. Swimming out about 15 metres from the shore, the current brings you slowly back across the reef. Mask under water, I saw the reef and amazing fish life right in front of my eyes. A few times I spluttered and had to come up for air, mostly because what I was seeing was making my squeal with delight and if you squeal under water, it's not great. I was only seeing the very edge of the reef - further out it is is even more dramatic and some of our group spotted a turtle in the shadows - but it was a triumph for me.
Jon took to snorkelling like a (up 'anley) duck to water... despite being worried he wouldn't actually be able to see anything at all, it turned out his range of vision was pretty much perfect for snorkelling on the Ningaloo Reef. He even braved the more rocky conditions of the Oyster Stacks, to witness a fish feeding frenzy. He had a big smile on his face when he got out of the water! There are no pictures but the memories are very vivid.
We saw wedge-tailed Eagles and black-footed wallabies in Yardie Creek before a champagne sunset at the lighthouse, spotting a few kangoroos and emus in the bush along the way.
Wednesday was our day to start heading back South. The road from Exmouth to Coral Bay is surrounded by termite mounds and looks like a scene from a sci-fi movie. There were hundreds if not thousands of them as far as the eye could see... it made me wonder just how many termites were running about under our feet! This was our big driving day - 500+ miles over about 10 hours. Our tour guide Ryan built in lots of stops to keep us all going... posing for photos at the Tropic of Capricorn sign just south of Coral Bay caused great amusement.
We stopped for chocolate coated frozen mangoes and bananas in Carnarvon and to see the Gascoyne River... all dry at the moment but has reached a 7m peak in recent floods. Water is scarce but can often bring devastation when it rains too much all at once. Our journey was mostly on the NW Coastal Highway... a long, straight road with very few turnoffs and hardly any road signs or distance markers. In some ways, the scenery hardly changed over hundreds of miles and in other ways, it looked different every time I looked out of the window... rocky outcrops, a single tree on a hill, evidence of bush fires and immediate re-growth, dry river beds. Further south, there were wheat farms, to the north a few cattle and sheep stations. Around Carnarvon, we saw lots of banana and mango plantations too. Sometimes, there just wasn't much growing at all.
The only real sign of progress are the roadhouses we passed... the outback equivalent of a motorway service station but without the Costa Coffee or M&S Simply Food. The roadhouses can be several hundred kilometres apart and their appearance in the distance was generally received with relief... Mynila (toilet stop), Wooramel, Overlander and Billabong (lunch). When we stopped for lunch on Wednesday, it was 43C in the shade.
Our final destination of day 6 was Kalbarri, where we stayed close to town and were able to fit in another run... this time incorporating a visit to the river estuary, war memorial garden (where Jon found a dedication to a soldier from North Stafforshire), a lookout point and a shipwreck memorial. The rocky cliffs and interesting currents around Kalbarri certainly go some way to explaining the number of wrecks on this coastline in times gone by.
We finished day 6 with a last dinner all together... which included this very special bush trifle for pudding.
One final early start for day 7, with panackes for breakfast at 6.45am and it was the final leg of our journey back to Perth. Lots more driving but with a couple of stops along the way too, keeping ourselves amused for a little while with a variation of twenty questions, trying to guess different people, places, objects or animals we'd seen on our trip. It took a lot of guesses to work out "road train" (maximum length of 36.5metres and pretty tricky to overtake). We encountered our first traffic lights and fast food restaurants in a while as we passed through Geraldton then Jon got up close with another woman (Eve the Stimpsons Python) at Greenough Wildlife Park...
And I got to meet Olaf the baby kangaroo...
We stopped in Port Denison for "super sandwiches" (filling options included tuna, sweetcorn, beetroot, lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, pineapple, cheese and pepperoni) followed by the the thrill of sandboarding on the dunes at Lancelin. I managed three runs down the dunes, without falling off but going quite slowly. Jon enjoyed it too... after a slightly dramatic end to his first run, he was flying down the dunes after that - spot the Stoke shirt in the photo below.
And now it's all done and we're back in Perth for one more weekend. We've been out of our comfort zones and loved it - thanks Aussie Wanderer.
Happy travels
Liz T
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