2006/08 Australia trip - Nambung |
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Up on the head at the river’s mouth we could look down on the orderly waves coming in and crashing on the 
sand bar and the rocks, clearly a wonderful surfing spot. We went for a short visit to the parrot place, the Rainbow Jungle, and ended up spending four hours there! It’s really a great place to visit if you like birds and especially colourful birds, as you can see in the composite picture below. Most of them are Australian, some of them in their own cages and some in a free flight aviary. The aviary was fascinating, with most of the parrots hiding in the shrubbery, and the lorikeets and parakeets zooming around like little bomber planes. It was a good idea to wears a hat in the aviary!
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Rainbow Jungle (13.11) |
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After we limped out of the Jungle with sore feet we thought we’d better put on some miles to the south, so we blasted past all the enticing trails leading down to the beaches in the coastal section of Kalbarri national park. We stopped to make tea at the ruins of the Lynton Hiring Station, built to recruit convicts to work in the Geraldton lead mines. I guess it wasn’t a success as it closed soon after it was built.
We continued on to Northampton and rejoined the North West Highway. We weren’t going to get as far that day as we’d hoped, and we compromised on Coronation Beach, a well hidden campground nestled at the bottom of a cliff. It is run by the Shire and has a couple of dozen sites at $5 a night. The surf was noisy but using all its energy on a distant sand bar. The beach was peaceful with little diagonal waves and the occasional arrowhead of water when the two diagonals arrived together.
The hosts said that whole campground had been under water two days previously, deep enough to swamp some cars. Our site was now high and dry but the campground road was still half under water.
Friday August 4th
We had a nice sunrise, and then showers rolled in off the ocean. We drove to nearby Geraldton, our biggest city in a long time, for some food shopping. We joined the Brand Highway and then drove along the coastal road towards Jurien Bay. We couldn’t see the ocean from the road. We seemed to be driving between sand dunes, old ones covered in greenery and new ones with just a thin layer of plants.
This area is called the Batavia Coast, named after the Dutch ship that was wrecked near there back in the 1600s. The 
shipwreck led to mutiny and many murders, and now is recorded in many books and even an opera.
We checked into the campground in Jurien Bay and promptly set off further south to Nambung park. Nambung boasts white, yellow, and red deserts. The yellow desert is famous for its Pinnacles, large limestone pillars, previously hidden under the yellow sand dunes, and now protruding from 
the sand. There are thousands of these, some of them smooth and sharp, others heavily eroded into giant decaying molars, a dentist’s nightmare and a really weird landscape. The light was beautiful in late afternoon, and we stayed to watch the sun set over the rocks, but the sunset fizzled out. We drove back to the campground in Jurien in the dark, dodging roos and rabbits.