After a midday flight from Brisbane, we arrived in the Perth afternoon (being disoriented by gaining an extra 2 hours because timey whimey wibbly wobbly). Picking up our hire car (hereafter known as “Beige Fury”, a lovely new Mazda 3), we did some simple provisioning then headed to our overnight stay near the airport. After making a simple dinner meal, we re-organised our bags (from Tetris fit everything in mode to life on the road mode). A good night sleep and we were ready to head north early on our way to Cervantes.
We stopped along the way for lunch at The Lobster Shack, a lush half lobster, chips and salad each. The taste was really good, but if we are honest, the lobster was a little overcooked.
On the way to our accommodation we diverted to Lake Thetis to check in on some of humanity’s most distant relatives – a large collection of Stromatolites living in the shallows of the lake. These massive colonies of bacteria are relatives of prehistoric earth life that was some of the first to emerge from the primordial soup. Sad to see so many of these amazing layered dome colonies damaged by people stepping on them.
We checked in to our accommodation, disgorged the car contents, did some preliminary dinner prep and then headed off to see The Pinnacles, an astonishing area in Nambung National Park.
The Pinnacles are a forest of limestone monoliths that emerge from the yellow desert sand in most mysterious ways. Some tiny (barely up to our knees), others towering overhead, it was truly an alien landscape. I love that there is no single accepted theory as to how they were formed.
We drove the discovery circuit, stopping and walking among the monoliths when something took our fancy – such variety in shape, colouration, placement and size. They were doubly striking in the afternoon light, long shadows and high contrast directional light made them just so interesting.
We left as the sun went down and the insects came out in swarms, and headed to Thirsty Point Lookout to witness our first sunset over the Indian Ocean. As a Queenslander, we have only ever seen SunRISE over the water, with sunset in the west over land. Western Australia, being in the west gets the converse. Beautiful weather that day, clear skies, clean sunset colours.
Dinner, another reorganisation of bags and it was bedtime, with a very cold night. Morning luke-warm showers caused by a malfunctioning hot water system were a bit of a challenge. We have experienced such extremes of temperature so far in WA. When the sun goes down at this time of year it gets profoundly cold really quickly. Mornings are almost painfully crisp, but the days have been lovely, allowing us to jettison coats and jumpers.
After packing the car, we were back on the road, we headed to Lester National Park, opting for the 2.5km Gairdner Trail Walk, known for it’s abundance and variety of species and microclimates.
We rambled along a rough path, absolutely brimming with hundreds of different types of wild native flowering plants. We must have been going slow (there was so much to see) as we were passed by lots of faster walkers. It was just fascinating- every colour you can imagine, many plants we recognised, way more that we had never seen before.
One of my missions is to find some of the many native orchids, and we managed to find a couple, including my fav so far – a Black Orchid. I had to leave the path a bit to track down an open flowered example, most were still in bud.
Such wonderful variety in flower form, growth habit and scale – from huge to minute blooms, petals and bracts, scales and stamens, just fantastic.
After a full morning of floral exploration we pointed Beige Fury towards Kalbarri and we were on the move again.