At Kalbarri, 550km north of Perth we were greeted by a plague of flies brought out of the bush by easterly winds. From the cliff-tops we enjoyed majestic sea-views through fine-mesh head-nets. Thankfully the flies were not biters, but they swarm incessantly (and maddeningly) around one's head. Without the head-nets the blighters would seriously drive you insane in a matter of minutes!
Each morning in Kalbarri, local woman Joyce has made a sport of feeding the huge pelicans that live on the beach, attracting a crowd of tourist onlookers into the bargain. We went along expecting the usual fairly mundane animal-feeding attraction, but what we actually got was half-an-hour of priceless entertainment! It immediately became apparent that Joyce is the kind of fearless, no-nonsense battle-axe that is manufactured only in Australia. Joyce had started off by explaining the finer points of the pelican life-style to the small assembled crowd, when Uncle Percy, the biggest and greediest of the pelicans, decided he couldn't wait for her to finish and swooped in to trough from the bucket of fish in her hand. There followed a titanic battle between woman and beast – evidently seasoned foes – in which the latter most certainly came off worse.
After a quick demo, Joyce asked for volunteers to feed the pelicans (Andy was one of the “lucky” ones picked to shove a slimy fish into a sharp, snapping beak). Hilariously, during the whole thing, Joyce testily fired insults at audience members, generally for their ineptness or squeamishness at feeding the birds. After asking one child his name, Joyce glowered at his mother and decried “why do people give kids such ridiculous names?” - it was pure gold!
In Kalbarri National Park, we visited impressive gorges and this wind-carved natural window above the Murchison River.
Further north, at the base of the Peron Peninsula, we came upon the stromatolites of Hamelin Pool. Biologists among you may recall these beasties from lectures on the origins of life on Earth. The stacks you see in the shallow hypersaline waters of Hamelin Pool are actually colonies of cyanobacteria, which are thought to be similar to some of Earth's earliest life. Life on Earth began around 3.7 billion years ago; incredibly some of these stromatolites have been dated to 3.2 billion years of age.
Although it was fiendishly hot at Hamelin, we found some respite from the heat and flies further up the peninsula, camping on the beach at Denham.
After a day relaxing in Denham, we drove 25km to oddly named Monkey Mia.
In the waters of Shark Bay, off Monkey Mia live several hundred dolphins. Of these, a handful have become friendly with the resort owners, coming close enough to shore to be entertaining for tourists, in return for a daily feeding of fish.
Each morning, the tourists line up along the beach, in a procedure very similar to that described in the last blog for the dolphins at Bunbury. The dolphins come to shore, and the officials (all volunteers for the government's Department of Environment and Conservation, DEC) pick out people from the crowd to wade into the water and hold a fish out for the dolphin to take. As we were there in the quiet season, the crowd was small, so Andy and I each had the honour of feeding a dolphin.
Watching the animals interact with each other and the officials was utterly fascinating, and it was clear that, at least while there was food to be had, the dolphins were curious about us too. They swam in the shallows on their sides so that one eye was out of the water and thus able to ogle the reciprocally ogling humans.
Sunset was very welcome on that stretch of coast, not just for it its aesthetic magnificence – this was the magical time when the goddam flies disappeared!!
While in Monkey Mia, we took a boat-trip out in Shark Bay aboard the Shotover, a former ocean-going racing catamaran.
On the water we spotted dugongs, loggerhead turtles, dolphins, tiger-sharks, sea-snakes, and this massive manta-ray – around 3 metres in width. Back on the beach, we snorkelled with sea-turtles (green turtles, I think).
Six hundred kilometres north, at Coral Bay and Cape Range National Park, we spent several mercifully fly-free days snorkelling Ningaloo coral reef. Garish fish from the size of a thumnail to that of a car-tyre abounded on the equally varied coral. Andy even saw a metre-long reef-shark. Of course, we lack an underwater camera, so we'll have to remember those adventures the old-fashioned way!
From the Cape Range we have hot-footed north (“hot” being the operative word – it's a couple of weeks since there was a day that didn't top 35 celsius!). We are currently at Karratha, the principal town of the Pilbara, a vast red cauldron of metals and minerals that have made Western Australia wealthy. Broome is our next stop, and the point at which we begin to head east across the “top end”.
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