Kalbarri, 27 43 S, 114 10 E
A last walk along the Denham beach collecting some of the many and varied shells, then on our way back down the peninsula we stopped at Eagle Bluff, a cliff overlooking the shallow bay with its shell-sand bottom and vast sea-grass meadows. From our viewpoint we could watch the sting-rays and sharks gliding in among the sea-grass, the sharks coming all the way up to the beach, no doubt smelling for unwary tourists’ toes – an impressive last farewell to this unique area!
On almost 400 km southwards to Kalbarri – via the Billabong Roadhouse (shades of “Waltzing Matilda” – the map telling us that we’re on the edge of civilisation, this is the last outback roadhouse, from now on it will mostly be normal towns with gas stations). We’re now in yet another National Park, this one famous for its Murchison River gorges, it’s rocky coastline and (in spring) its wildflowers – yes we’re so far south now that we’ve really left the tropics and here they have winter and summer, although the very short and mild winters are to be laughed at in our northern European terms. The landscape changed drastically as we drove south, trees getting higher, grass greener and more common until we were passing through rolling wooded grassland – almost like rural England, if you forgot that all the trees and plants are totally foreign to us! Then out on to the flat coastal heathlands around the river gorges – which in spring are ablaze with wildflowers, but we’re too late, although there are still some patches of pink, lilac and yellow here and there.
I’d read in advance that the gorges were cut into the Silurian Tumblagooda Sandstone 430 million years old, so was looking forward to coming “home” to my original research interests, though far removed from the Oslo Region and the Welsh Borderlands. But when we stopped at a lookout over one of the gorges it turned out that the rocks are now thought to be older at 450 to 480 million years, putting them back into the Ordovician. Interesting deltaic and tidal sandstones though, with lots of lovely sedimentary structures!
A cool breeze at sunset,the temperarure dropping to a chilly 19 degrees - we had to dig out warmer clothes to wear, the thought of Oslo in mid-November in 4 days time is quite alarming!
(We've been talking several times about the sheer size of Australia - I just checked on Google Earth and found that my little trip across the north from Cairns to broome, 4456 km, was actually 14 km longer than the distance from New York to Los Angeles, so there......)
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