Down to Shark Bay

Herald Bight - definitely a favourite

For the last ten days we have been making our way further south.  After leaving Exmouth we dropped back down below the tropic of Capricorn, which was marked with a little sadness.  I’ve noticed a couple of things have changed at these lower latitudes. 

Firstly, it has started to get distinctly cooler in the evenings – it has not been unknown for us to pull out jumpers these last few nights and retire to the tent to escape the chill.  

Secondly, I’m convinced that there is a touch less friendliness along the way now.  A controversial statement I know, but I have noticed that the ‘travellers wave’, that subtle raising of the first few fingers of the right hand from the steering wheel to acknowledge a fellow oncoming traveller, which was ubiquitous across Far North Queensland, The Territory and Northern WA, has decreased markedly as we have moved south.   (This wave, by the way, is not to be confused with the Yorkshire wave of my homeland, which is more of an almost imperceptible lifting of only the right index finger in recognition of a fellow countryside motorist). It’s an interesting point to note that even though the northbound southerners are clearly an unfriendly bunch, I am now so conditioned to wave at every car that comes our way, that each time we get to even a minor town, I feel a bit like Mick ‘Crocodile’  Dundee when he first hits the streets of New York and tries to introduce himself to every pedestrian he passes, with nothing but puzzled and suspicious looks in return.  Anyway, I digress...

Blowholes...

After Cape range we spent a night in Coral Bay, which is a sweet little seaside town, followed by a few nights at a good free camp at Point Quobba.  The weather by this point was getting pretty wild and wooly at times, but that did help to add a bit of gusto to the nearby Blowholes.

We’ve spend the last week or so in and around Shark Bay World Heritage Area. I have to admit to having my doubts before we arrived. The headline act for the area is of course the world famous dolphin feeding experience at Monkey Mia.  Sounds great, but we had heard a few stories of hundreds of people attending each feeding session and of course only very few being picked to actually feed the dolphins.  

The boys feeding 'Puck' the dolphin

However, as it turned out, when we were there, there were probably only thirty or so other onlookers and as luck would have it, the boys were picked to give a dolphin its fishy breakfast.  There is also a coffee shop on site – some development can be a positive thing.  All in all we had a really good morning there. 

We've had worse camps....

Better still, our next stop was a camp further along the peninsula at the (relatively) not as well known François Peron National Park.   This National Park is criss-crossed with 4WD only sand tracks (I like this form of ‘natural selection’:-) ) and after travelling along 50 km’s or so of these tracks we arrived at a perfect white sandy beach called Herald Bight where we pulled up right on the dunes and spent three days in what was probably my favourite camp of the whole trip!  Most of the time we either snorkelled, fished or just relaxed.  We even had company as John, Maggie, Fabien, Milly and Broughton, a family we had befriended along the way, were camped with us for part of the time

Fish...

Between us, we caught so many Garfish that we twice had fresh fish for dinner and on our last day I had to persuade the boys to take a break from pulling them out of the water (I really prefer to catch fish to eat, rather than for ‘sport’ and there are only so many Garfish that we could swallow, not to mention fillet!)  Even Jules got in on the action one afternoon, pulling out another nice little fish.  A truly beautiful spot.

Of course, as previously mentioned; the laws of Ying and Yang dictate that there has to be a balance in life and so, predictably after such a serene few days, we had to have a little drama before we left...

Too busy digging to take photos, so here is a shot of
the boys on a mission

That beautiful soft white sand that we had so enjoyed, obviously did not want us to leave so soon, and once again, the trusty anchor-trailer lived up to its name.  Having hitched up and jumped in the car to depart,  our wheels immediately dug themselves into the deep soft sand and we moved forward not an inch.  It took us a hot and sweaty hour and a half of digging, removing a fair bit of the weight from the car and trailer and using the car mats as traction-aids, before we were able to finally extricate ourselves.  So, several hours after we planned, we arrived back in the pleasant little town of Denham, where we quite rightly treated ourselves to lunch (with dessert!) and lots of cold drinks. 

Of course, getting stuck is all part of the fun of off-road travel, and in truth I’m sure none of us would have minded getting stuck in such a great spot for a little while longer...