The North West Highway to Coral Bay

We leave Perth in our Moulinex Toaster (Britz Camper) looking forward to nights being serenaded by cicadas gazing lazily into the skies as thousands of shooting stars break over our heads as we barby the hind quarters of a mammal or two. You really do leave civilization very quickly and we were on the open road. Other campers showed their respect by a wave of the hand...we were in a huge club of toasters all cooking slices around the rim of Australia. Allegedly because of the season it is the only way to travel as hotels are full and there ain't nowhere else to stay...Hail the camper van nee 'galloping Gourmet' kitchen on wheels...no crustaceans will be safe in our neck of the woods..you will fry!!! Our first stop is Cervantes, crayfish capital of Western Australia (WA). It is now off season and the boats are pulled up onto the shore and the fisherman have all gone off to spend their wads up and down the coast. We check into the Pinnacles Camping Park. Standard issue in WA is a 'very large' 4Wdrive with 'roo-bars' on the front (preferably with a Rams horns mounted atop - a la 'Dukes of Hazard') towing a large camper...the Roo-bars are essential as we nearly took out two Joeys as we foolishly disregarded the advise about driving at dusk, and they are very big! Their carcases lie on the side of the road where other 'duskers' have come to grief. We cook ourselves spaghetti bolognese...when in Rome...and a charming fellow from the next camper along called Andrew drops in with some friendley advice and a bottle of Kinwarra for the Spag. Its delicious and the stars and planets, especially Venus, welcome us to Cervantes. The camper is split into two and one bed is made up of the seats and table, the other is a shelf perched above this table with a foot of room above it. I get the shelf....by dint of fact that i can actually climb up there and by getting into a particular position which would have made Houdini envious...remove my clothes and wriggle into my sleeping bag. If you want to get out in the night..forget it. In the dark you have to balance one foot on the sink and the other on the end of the seat/bed and lower yourself into the abyss...reversing the procedure for re-entry to shelfdom! Its the best nights sleep I've had for a while which must mean I have tendencies to Japanese hotels and karaoke...strange. Fo, being an insomniac is awake through the whole procedure reading 'Billabong Bills 50 easy to cook Emu/roadkill' recipes. We leave teh campsite and drop into the garage/deli/bakery/bait&tackle shop/family advise centre for breakfast. A terribly gay blade cooked us a slap-up and gave us some friendly advise about the best way to approach a pinnacle although i think we are on crossed conjugates at this point and we leave for the 'Pinnacles Desert'...which is full of pinnacles. Extraordinary large natural forms of re-cemented sandstone in a sea of sand dunes. They are dramatic and interesting and we both mount one for the benefits of a saucy photo! We leave knowing we have a long drive ahead to Sharks Bay and Denham...hoping its nothing like the one near Slough. We arrive just before roadkill'o'clock and check into a charming campsite on the bay run by whats left of Stalag 93 from '44. The bay is fabulous and we take an dusk walk along the esplanade into town. We have already enquired with Haupmansturer sheila in the camp shop and she rather charmingly assured us that no boats would take us to Dirk Hartog (DH) Island where Dampier landed in 1699. Strange really, the bay is full of boats and you can see DH island, surely some salty seadog would dump us there before going off to the slaughter that is the fishing charter business that is the mainstay of the fleet. On top of this there must be a hundred boats all parked around town all waiting to join in the fishing-fest nay daily marine slaughter! We talk to the first fishing boat 'Unreal' fish charters...well!!! Heath (not cliffe) agrees to take us and he is the friendliest seadog you could ever meet. Great we are set but not for a few days.
Still Denham has a wealth of things to do and we are going to do them all. First off snorkelling equipment and then to the beach. Snorkel for hours, nothing to see but the water is gorgeous...and what a sunset...this is definately not Slough!
Over the next few days we do the sights! We swim with dolphins at Monkey Mia, they are such perceptive animals and are very tame here, they are fed in the morning but not at any other times as they have a propensity to get lazy - then not go fishing for themselves or teach the little pups how to catch dinner. One pup this year has already died from starvation.
The following day we go to Whalebone and Shell beaches. Both beautiful places in this empty landscape where you are unlucky if you are not the only visitors. There is so much space and so much unspoilt coastline. The coast from Perth to Exmouth is 1800km -ish and then you have another 1000 or so km to Broome with only 6 or 7 small centres of population. Things are changing though and the area is in boomtime with the mines in the north desperate for workers and shortages of people all the way up the coast. Tourism is taking off but the only way to travel is in a camper and it really does feel like a frontier area with most of the roads having only recently been paved but they still flood if the rains come...which, rather surprisingly, they frequently do. This gives the whole area a carpet of light green and small flowers break out over the entire desert..thus the 'Flower State'
We also visit Eagle Bluff which is a meeting place for all kinds of Planktonics. Sharks, dugongs, turtles etc all come into the bay to feed and chat. The whole of Sharks bay is a marine reserve and covers some 24000km2 which is practically all carpeted in sea grass. The depth of the bay is sometimes only 4m and it traps the seawater in pockets. These pockets are distinct areas which have high salt concentrations becoming hypersaline. The species of animals that inhabit these hypersaline areas are thus distinct to these pockets and adapt specifically to the local conditions. Thus you find specialist animals which are found nowhere else on the coast or in the world. New species of animals are constantly being found in Sharks Bay and there is no sign that there is any shortage of new ones, just not enough scientists looking for them.
In the campsite there is a wealth of people and some fantastic characters and similar to the animals around here I imagine they are not found anywhere else in the world (except Earls Court obviously). They are colourful in their character, in their speech and stories and they are incredibly friendly, open, hospitable people who seem to enjoy every day for the 'hell of it'! I really like them. We have met Des and Annette, both psychologists (worrying) and they are great fun and a mine of information. They have the most gorgeous Labradoodle called Lizzie who is complete character and we want to steal her away and take her north. This is not practical.
Dirk Hartog Island is tomorrow and the anticiaption is killing Fo...more spaghetti then to quell this over excitement........
....as a descendant of William Dampier I am honoured to write this piece of the blog -our trip to Dirk Hartog Island where Will landed in 1699 on his commissioned 'voyage to New Holland'. He had thoughfully written the coordinates down in his navigators log and so we landed at exactly the same spot of the island - now known as Dampier's Landing. Luckily for us we had a travelling companion and explorer Leon Deschamps, local Denham lad and acute Dampier nut - there is nothing he doesn't know about Dampier, Dirk Hartog, turtles and aboriginal pursuits to name but a few subjects.
We were all fascinated - including Heath and Byron our friendly seadog brothers.
We swam ashore to behold the low dunes just as Dampier had descibed them and a paradisical beach skirted with beautiful aquamarine shallows. Dampier collected and recorded 24 species of flora from the west coast of Oz, many from this exact point and his specimens still exist today in the herbarium at Oxford University. So I set about emulating my life-long hero and attempted to identify and collect the same species Dampier had 300 years ago. It was not difficult - my first step onto shore and I could see cuttle fish 'shell's' all across the tide line stretching away to the east. Dampier is attributed with the discovery and naming of the cuttle fish in the annals of natural history as well as the avacado, an archipelago, Sharks Bay itself and the word 'barbeque' to name but a few. He was quite a bashful fellow and didn't feel the need to name his discoveries after himself - sometimes losing the kudos of discovery thereafter.
We trod carefully through the bush and came upon the commemorative plaque installed at the site where he was expected to have collected his samples on August 17th 1999 exactly 300 years after he first set foot. Sadly we were reminded of 21st century man here where a plastic clad windswept barbeque (would you believe) blew in shredded tatters across our horizon. Leon was positively embarrassed.
We made our own discovery while on the beach - a magnificent armpour-plated crab with golden hairy legs and claws - hopefully a new sub-species (also a Dampier word)to be attributed to a Dampier in 2007!
We sadly had to leave Dampiers Landing if we were to sail round to Turtle Bay another haunt of Wills, and poor Leon and Byron had the unenviable job of hauling aboard this super slim torso. Talking of humpbacked whales, one very courteously breached before us as we rounded Cape Inscription - this was turning into the BEST day. The steep red cliffs of Turtle Bay loomed in front of us and again a beautiful beach with an array of shells and plants , and a sad little loggerhead turtle cemetry half way up the cliff - their husks baked in the sun. Leon speculated they had been taken by seabirds for a turtle meat lunch - but I wondered if they weren't washed up there during a storm as there were so many in one place.
This was another magical backdrop of family (and world) history with still a few more in Western Oz to go - sayonara Sharks Bay - we will return.....
It is sad to leave Denham, the campsite full of 'Go West' characters but Coral Bay calls and we have to go via Carnarvon...Wales?? On the way to Wales we stop off at Hamelin Pool, an old Telegraph Station, famous in itself as a telegraph station but an older more important living thing lurks here (and not the knotty old relic who sold me a cornetto. Here, in ancient reefs off the beach, are to be found stromatolites, the first living things to inhabit our planet 3.5 billion years ago and they are still slowly going about their business now. Single celled animals which grow only 1cm a year in a, leaving their skeleton behind in the form of prehistoric and pre 'National Desigh Awards' totally random lumps which to the untrained eye may be an insignificant blob. Not so these animals give off small amounts of oxygen which then accumulated over 2 billion years to give us our primeval oxygen rich atmosphere...so in effect the 'big daddy' of us all! Magnificent.
We stay the night in Carnarvon and they arrange a firework display for us, the charm offensive goes on. Its a day of revelling and boozing and they have indulged. There are merry folk everywhere and lots of people swigging out of highly suspicious bottles of coke.
We set off north again after a coffee and egg and bacon not...McMuffin from a charming Coffee shop in Carnarvon. We set off sated for the Blow Holes just up the coast.
Its a great drive, the recent rain has bought all the flowers out in the desert and we skirt the McCleod Lake to Quobba, blow hole capital!! Another breathtaking piece of coastline with the most incredible jets of water shooting up to 50-100 feet in the air as a front drop to a coastal swell of titanic proportions crashing onto the coastline and breaking on the reefs which fringe the coast. We stop for a little
snorkel in the bay. The water is not so clear due to the swell I imagine but it is a great little bay full of conflicting currents from the inlets and surprisingly good life on the reef. A stop for a Blowhole experience with photos...next stop Coral Bay.