Up before the sun, we were packed up, hitched on and outside the recommended garage by 8 am. Alas the proprietor was evidently still abed.
We checked out other garages but their schedules
were all full and they couldn’t help us until Wednesday at least. We returned
to the first and found them now open and attending to others who had fronted up
as we now did. We name dropped; Fred from the camp had said they could help us.
It worked and we were requested to unhitch the caravan and leave it with them
to check later in the morning.
After having the small gas bottle refilled, we drove
up to the town centre, called into the Information Centre and swapped travel
tips with other tourists, then set out to explore the shops, such as they are.
Chris’s phone rang; the garage with news that they had checked the wheels and
there was nothing untoward to concern us. With great relief we returned to the
garage, hitched up and headed out of town. It was barely 10 am and we were on
the road again.
The road south of Carnarvon, the Brand Highway, is
as desolate as that immediately to the north. This should be no
surprise to anyone, least of all ourselves, because it is here at Carnarvon that
the central desert reaches out to the sea.
The road kill was more numerous than the road to the
north despite the fact we saw few road trains. There were instead hundreds and
hundreds of caravan and camper trailer rigs heading north and many fuel tankers
hauling fuel for those same nomads to proceed further.
A dead emu or two, several rather ancient cattle
remains, a variety of euro and kangaroo carcasses; these were the road kill we
noted today. Occasionally a sign warning of “Flooding” stretched the
imagination too far. And yet, despite this arid land, we learned that Gascoigne
Junction, a country settlement 164 kilometres east of Carnarvon, is still
rebuilding after the devastation floods of 2010. Throughout our travels over
the past two and a quarter years, we have seen floods and fires, but here there
has been drought, although not to the extremes that Australia can know.
As well as being featureless, this highway is of far
poorer quality than the rest of the Western Australia roads we have travelled.
We seemed to wallow along the road, as if in a tub through a sloppy sea. Chris
reckoned it was the tyres, these fancy new Coopers we have on the rear of the
cruiser. He is not happy with these expensive new acquisitions. I suggested
that we have a chat with a Cooper dealer in Geraldton when we get there. Perhaps
“wallowing” and the sensation of softness in the rear is normal for these fancy
tyres? At lunchtime he released some of the pressure on the level rides, and
there was a tiny improvement. But the road was still uneven.
Speaking of disgruntled husbands, mine is still not
happy with the haircut I gave him two weeks ago, even though the bristle has
grown long enough to sit flatter on his head. He told my mother on Skype that I
had “scalped” him; words of a distressed victim. But really it can’t be that
bad because he suggested I use a longer blade next time. Perhaps I will be able
to redeem myself after all and retain my hairdresser status.
About fifteen kilometres past the Wooramel Roadhouse,
we found the Gladstone Lookout, a barren elevated ridge from where we could
look toward Shark Bay. Clay pans and salt pans lay below us; almost a
moonscape, but a pleasant change from the otherwise unrelenting low scrub desert
lands. The only facilities at this rest stop are rubbish bins which had been
used, unlike those along the road side to the north; litter strewn everywhere.
We could have decided to stay on for the afternoon and the night but decided to
keep with plan A, to travel on through to Denham.
Back on the road, after about another fifty
kilometres, we turned west and through the rather grand entry to the Shark Bay
World Heritage area, one of only one hundred and forty four places in the world
awarded that status, an expanse that
stretches from Carnarvon in the north and takes in all the sea around Bernier and
Dore Islands, the Peron Peninsula, the Hamelin Pool, the Henri Freycinet
Estuary, Dirk Hartog Island and all the ragged and jagged coast about these strangely
named places. We will become better acquainted with all of this in the next
couple of days but for now, we checked out the features easily accessible from
the road north to Denham.
We passed the road into the Stromotolite wonders of the
Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, deliberately leaving this for our return
journey, and Useless Loop Road which is the access to a place of the same name
and to Steep Point, the most western point on the Australian mainland, to which
we have decided not to travel. Almost one hundred and fifty kilometres there and back on a 4 WD
track, much on soft sand, sounds like tempting disaster. Instead we have
settled for Denham which is the most western town in Australia, the softer
option.
We pulled into the Shell Beach Conservation Park,
some forty five kilometres south of Denham. Here we found great expanses of
small white Coquina shells, estimated to be ten metres deep in places. The
beach stretches for over 120 kilometres around L’Haridon Bight, the clear very
saline water so very inviting. I told Chris I wanted to swim here on the way
back down but then remembered that this whole area is part of “Shark Bay”. Is
this a good idea or not? No shark cages here! I will ask at the Information Centre
tomorrow morning.
 |
| Tourists posing on the shell banks |
It should be noted here in the context of all these
French sounding names, that the first white explorers were more exotic than our
solid James Cook. Given that this famous Yorkshire man is most lauded and
remembered as the white Great Discoverer of our Australasian homelands, it is
easy to forget that the first recorded white man to arrive on Australian soil
was actually the Dutch trading ship Captain Dirk Hartog in October 1616, a
whole hundred and fifty two years before Cook. He landed on an island at Cape Inscription which
is now his namesake. Eighty one years later his country man and contemporary,
William de Vlamingh, visited the site and replaced the original plaque with
another, returning that original to Holland where it now sits in a museum.
That second plaque was found by members of Nicholas
Baudin’s French expedition in 1801, that which coincided with Matthew Flinders’s
trip. I referred to these mariners when we ourselves were exploring the southern
shores of this continent. Hamelin and de Freycinet were members of Baudin’s
party and both left their names here in Shark Bay; it was this 1801 expedition
that contributed to so much of the naming of this coast’s geological features.
On we came and reached Denham having travelled
almost one hundred and thirty kilometres from the turn off at Overlander, the
afternoon closing in. We came straight to this caravan park having emailed
three in the area and discovered this was the cheapest. It is also less
patronised by caravanners and more popular with backpackers; I hope we will not
regret our decision. I suspect it is the oldest camp in the area, but old can
still be good. There is no grass, just hard white space, perhaps covered in
crushed coquina shells?
No comments:
Post a Comment