CARNARVON and SHARK BAY / DENHAM

The trip from Giralia to Carnarvon was uneventful, but there were quite a few stops along the way to have a look at the increasing numbers of wildflowers along the roadsides. All the WA locals we speak to tell us that this should be a really good year for wildflowers right across the state because of recent rains, so we have that to look forward to.

One jarring note occurred when we re-crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, this time heading south.  We were not all that happy about the prospect of heading towards the cooler weather, but the time has come to head towards Perth. Carnarvon was the first stop.

The Carnarvon area produces a fairly large percentage of WA’s veggies and large farms dot the landscape close to town. The supermarkets have a lot of fresh local stuff including local bananas. I can’t understand why local bananas from just up the street still cost over $13 a kilo, a price similar to that charged for Qld bananas after the floods etc., sounds like a rip off to me and it’s hardly surprising that no-one seems to be buying them!

Carnarvon is a major centre for the fishing industry and it was nice to have a couple of nice seafood lunches, makes a change from focaccias and ham, cheese and tomato sandwiches.

There’s a few things to see near Carnarvon. Naturally there’s a Saturday market albeit a little small, but a market nonetheless. A drive out to the blowholes is a must even though they’re about 60Km out of town. The blowholes are, as expected, naturally formed passages in the rocks where the action of the waves forces spouts of water to shoot up into the air…. fascinating.

As the sign at the blowholes says “King Waves Kill and it’s easy to see how rock fishermen could easily be dislodged by large waves. There were a couple of large waves while I was looking around the area and I did manage to get a couple of pics of the splash behind the Patrol… impressive.

Just along from The Blowholes is a local memorial to HMAS Sydney, lost with all hands on 19^th November 1941 near there.

On that day HMAS Sydney, a light cruiser had a fatal engagement with a German raider, the auxiliary cruiser HSK Kormoran. There are various theories as to why the captain of the Sydney allowed his ship to come so close before properly identifying the Kormoran as a warship rather than a merchantman, it was to be a fatal mistake (if that’s what happened).

In any event, the Sydney was lost with all 645 crew perishing. Some German survivors were picked up at Red Bluff, not far from the site of the memorial. Some debris from the Sydney also washed ashore in this vicinity, but the location of the ship itself was not discovered until very recently.

We spent a little more time than planned in Carnarvon waiting for some mail to arrive, but once we received that it was off to Denham for a couple of days of beach time.

 

Denham was again fairly busy and we had to spend a couple of nights in an overflow area without power or water before we could move into the caravan park itself. We really have no problems doing that, we carry plenty of water, enough for a few short showers if staying in the bush and the battery power is sufficient to run all of our lighting and our inverter takes care of the TV / video player. During the day our solar panels also allow use of a fan powered via the inverter if the weather gets a bit hot and, of course we still have the generator to fall back on if we need the aircon Iit’s a tough life!!

The Denham / Shark Bay council has done very well with general signage and with the little things that tourists like. Unfortunately you can’t legislate for good or even adequate coffee and the general standard of coffee here was quite poor – more like hot weak coffee flavoured milk L. Once again I rued the day that I decided to leave my treasured  De Longhi coffee machine at home.

The foreshore areas are nicely grassed with plenty of seating and playgrounds for the kids and lots of picnic areas and places to just sit and admire the view. For fishermen (or fishers if you want to be politically correct) there is a state of the art fish cleaning table in stainless steel with positions for about eight people, running water and bins very near at hand. As a consequence, the table is always clean and tidy for the next person.

We were at a bay nearby to Denhan and I think we discovered why it is called Shark Bay, have a look at the picture!!

About 20 Km out of town is Eagle Bluff, a large, well constructed, elevated walkway allowing viewing of some of the nearby seagrass meadows and patrolling sharks. The area is also the home of quite a few dugong. The walkway provides a view of the bay and in the far distance, a mountain of salt at the Dampier salt facility as well as the promontory leading to Steep Point, the westernmost point in Australia.

Many beaches on Shark Bay are of shells instead of sand. There are uncountable billions of small white shells. At the aptly named Shell Bay nearby the shells have been naturally compressed and are able to be cut into blocks. In the past, buildings have been made from such blocks, including one of the local churches.

Little Lagoon, a 4wd friendly picnic spot not far north of Denham is another place where the beaches are of billions of shells rather than of sand. This area is a haven for sea birds

Monkey Mia is about 25 Km north of Denham, famous for its visiting dolphins. We had been there once before and were very underwhelmed by the experience. I believe that the whole dolphin thing is very over managed by National Parks or CALM or whoever the authority is. We didn’t go there this time.

Denham on Shark Bay is a very pleasant and relaxing part of the world even though it’s about 130 Km in from the main highway and, of course, the same distance back to the highway.

Next stop, down across the 28^th parallel to wildflower country.