More Ningaloo

Mandu Mandu gorge

view of the car and trailer

ningaloo

 

francois peron NP

Point Quobba near carnarvon

dolphin at cape peron

us from behind

warroora station

Cape Range NP Mesa beach

27th june.
Sorry some of these photos are out of sync, just stuck them in anyway.
We set a trip record this morning in that we drove out of the campsite at 8.10am – and that was even with having to take down the annex. It meant that even though we had a few things to do in Exmouth ($200 in food later!), we still got away at a reasonable time. We’ve covered a good distance because of this, and have ended up only 100k away from Tom Price at a roadside stop – first time we’ve been allowed a fire in a while, which is a nice change. The drive was through lots of red dirt – I guess we’re in the Pilbara now – and it’s changing from coastal heath to big scrub plains dotted with smallish hills jutting up every once in a while, to now bigger mountains which are just beautiful in the evening and in the morning sun. The sun is shining down, and when I commented to the guy at Nanutarra Roadhouse that it was a pretty hot one, he just laughed at me and said he thinks it’s a beautiful day, and it gets to 48 degrees in summer (I forget it’s winter here sometimes). You wonder who on earth would live and work out here where there’s literally nothing for miles, but I think it’s considered seasonal work, so people do it for a couple of months, there’s nothing to spend their money on so they save up for a bit before travelling.

There has been lots of traffic up until we turned off towards Tom Price, lots of road trains and loads of wedge tailed eagles hovering near the road. I don’t think it’s necessarily the roadkill since there actually isn’t that much of it (or maybe they’ve already eaten it). There was quite a lot up around Exmouth, and we had to drive slowly in the national park most of the time because there were constantly kangaroos and emus jumping out on the road in front of us, or looking like they were about to. We also keep driving through floodplains today so I can imagine in the wet season a lot of it is under water. Funnily enough all but one of the rivers or creeks we’ve driven over have been completely dry though. There hasn’t been reception of course for most of the drive, which is why I’ve uploaded so many days’ worth of blog in one go. We bought 3kg of frozen prawns in Exmouth which were very cheap, and had them for dinner which was great, although we had completely numb fingers after peeling them frozen before cooking – we had grand ideas for 3 different types of prawns, but it meant that by the time it came to eating them I couldn’t face peeling another one so only had the two dishes that were pre-peeled, not the plain boiled ones (how’s that for spoilt).