Giralia Station then on to Carnarvon

I suppose I should apologise for general slackness in not putting out a blog for two weeks…………….I thought about it………….no….!     :-D

We like Giralia Station. It’s certainly not flash, but it’s always interesting. This time it was a little more crowded with the addition of a number of road workers occupying the donga type accommodation, but they were an interesting, hard-working mob of blokes who started early and finished late and worked three weeks at a time.

Giralia used to be a huge sheep station but the lease has run out or has been revoked and it is now owned by Conservation & Land Management or Dept Environment & Conservation or one of that lot, although the previous owners still operate the homestead area and surrounding buildings as a station stay. There is a track that runs 30 Km or so to end at a couple of bays that are at the bottom of the Exmouth Gulf. The scenery is interesting and the fishing and crabbing seem good – our neighbours this trip caught quite a few large mud crabs in the week we spent there.

During one drive to the bay I had an interesting encounter with an Australian Bustard, a large bird that stands more than 100 Cm high. I spotted one in the scrub near the dirt track we were on and followed it on foot for some distance. The bustard often looks like E.T. in the bush!

 Bustards are not as common as they once were due to the predations of foxes and feral cats. They were often shot for food because of their size (another of their common names is plains turkey). I have previously found that the bustard can be fairly inquisitive and if you follow them slowly in a non-threatening manner and talk softly to them or just cluck or whistle they will just keep walking and watching. If you speed up, so will they and if they perceive you as a threat they will just take off. They have a wing span of about two metres and it takes a bit of a run up and a bit of effort to take off. On this occasion, after allowing me to follow for 50 or 60 metres this one took off and flew to join another three in the general area. I shot a couple of reasonable pics. The pic of the full view of the bustard was taken at Giralia on our last trip in 2008.

 The bays on the bottom of Giralia Station in the Exmouth Gulf are fairly remote at about 30 Km from the station and the only visitors are generally guests at the station who don’t mind a bit of dirt track and a bit of dust on their 4wds. The creek at the end of one bay is a good boat launching site as well as a favourite site for turtle watching, with quite a few medium to large turtles to be seen. The beaches are good for shells as well as being excellent for a wander. I would think that the likelihood of their being sharks in the general area is fairly high.

My neighbours came across a turtle on its back in the mangroves. It looked to be done for, but a dousing with water seemed to revive it so they righted it and carried it to the waters edge and it eventually swam slowly away.

Giralia was a week of doing not very much and we had a very relaxing and pleasant time. Like I said previously, it’s not flash and there’s power only for about three hours in the morning and about four or more hours in the evening but it is very peaceful.

Our next stop was to have been Exmouth, but those Exmouth parks willing to take dogs were either booked out or had been the subject of some very bad reviews on some of the websites I read.  Yardie Creek out of Exmouth had some appalling reviews based on travellers’ recent experiences with the staff so we decided to give Exmouth a miss completely.

We considered a week at Coral Bay, just down the road, but like Exmouth it was booked out. The Bayview caravan park at Coral Bay is happy to take dog owners’ money, but we found in our last visit that it treats dog owners  like second class citizens, putting them all together at the back of the park.  They eventually rang me back offering only two nights in two week’s time, but in a new low for caravan parks, wanted to charge $2 per night for the dog, so we elected to give Coral Bay a miss as well, deciding to spend a couple of days at Carnarvon and then put in some beach time at Denham / Shark Bay.

Next stop, Carnarvon then Denham / Shark Bay.