142. Day 89 – Driving through beautiful wildflowers to Shark Bay

Wednesday 23 July 2008

Dick’s body clock is still on Sydney time (2 hours ahead) so he gets up at 6am and goes walking while Pip’s body clock is on Perth time and she sleeps another hour or so!

We had camped in a free roadside camping area beside the Galena Bridge which crosses the Murchison River. Dick walked down to an area where about 30 vehicles were parked. These ranged from a second-hand VW Beetle with a couple of hiking tents beside it, to many caravans and a few home built motor homes.  In this field it shows that we are behind the USA.  In an equivalent area over there you would mainly have expensive mobile homes parked.

We left at 8.20 am on a lovely sunny calm day and kept heading north on the North West Coastal Highway.  The wildflowers beside the highway became more colourful as we travelled north –  with bushes of beautiful red grevilleas, masses of yellow flowers and patches of pinks and blues with flowers covering the red earth.  It was very beautiful and we stopped a few times so we could get some close up photos.

Today there were fewer road trains and trucks on this part of the highway.  We continued to have many 4WDs towing caravans pass us as they headed south.  We have seen more caravans in these past two days than we have seen anywhere else on this world trip.  It is a very popular way for Aussies to travel around Australia.

We crossed a grid on the road and noticed that we had driven through the State Barrier Fence, called the vermin fence on our map.  This fence was built to keep the dingoes out of the south.

We were enjoying the smooth straight road when we noticed a man jogging along beside the highway towards us, followed by a sign written kombi van.  We turned around and pulled just in front of him.  It was Vlastik Skvaril supported by his wife Jo from Tasmania, running from Bay to Bay (that is, from Shark Bay to Byron Bay) across Australia raising money for Canteen. We gave him a donation and took photos of each other before we said farewell and turned north again.

We stopped at the Billabong Roadhouse for a cup of coffee – so different from the Russian cafes we have been in.

It still feels such a novelty to be driving our Earthroamer in our own country – it’s fantastic.  We were reminded how wealthy our country is when we passed a council worker emptying the rubbish bins that are placed at all the truck parking areas beside the highway.  The road is a very well maintained bitumen road with very little rubbish to be seen, with great open spaces of hundreds of kilometres between settlements.

We remembered the Russian truck drivers who had stopped to help us when we were in trouble, when we saw an elderly couple trying to change a tyre on their caravan beside the road.  We stopped and Dick was able to help get the tyre onto the axle.

We turned off the highway onto Shark Bay Road and drove out to Hamelin Pool Telegraph Station.

We walked down to the coast of Shark Bay and saw the old quarries where the compressed shells had been cut into building blocks and used to build some of the telegraph station buildings.

We continued to walk along the coast to the protected marine park where the Stromatolites are growing.  We walked out on the specially constructed boardwalk over the earliest forms of life. They start with a single cell which cements particles of sand together then continues to grow horizontally producing oxygen into the atmosphere.  They are very old and extremely rare.

After making ourselves a sandwich for lunch, we left at 1pm and headed back to the highway.  We stopped and walked amongst the yellow and pink flowers, they were so beautiful.

We drove into Carnarvon along the HMAS Sydney II Memorial Avenue where palm trees line each side of the road, with a plaque below each one with the names of the 645 crew members that were lost. 

We noticed that there was very little traffic around.

We drove to the Carnarvon Airport and found the shed that Dick and John Wallington had used in June 1993 to store and prepare the balloon they used to complete the first successful balloon flight across Australia.  We weren’t able to go out to the launch area because of the security fence that has now been erected around the airport.  A reporter from the local newspaper, the Northern Guardian came and interviewed Dick. We made a cup of tea and were finally able to send and receive our emails on Telstra’s broadband.  We had virtually no mobile coverage along the highway today – in Kazakhstan and Russia we had good mobile coverage all the way.

We drove out to the One Mile Jetty near the mouth of the Gascoyne River on the coast at Carnarvon we walked out on the jetty.  It was built in 1897 from jarrah timbers from south west forests to enable the steam ships to transport passengers, livestock, fresh produce and wool from the Gascoyne to Perth. The last tanker discharged its cargo of diesel fuel in 1984. There was no railway or economical roads for transportation. It is now a tourist attraction and popular with fishermen because they can fish in deep water without the use of a boat.

We drove through Carnarvon and stopped just out of town on the north side at a BP Service Station.  We filled up our tanks with 229 litres of diesel for $454.54 AUD.

The owners told us we were welcome to park in their yard overnight, alongside some huge trucks that arrived during the evening.  We were also able to watch the local TV stations on our English television.

Total today 455 kms  33,181 kms since Anchorage, Alaska.

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