We left Cervantes for Lake Indoon, “situated on the Leeman to Eneabba road” and what a disappointment!! It cost $20.00 per night and although it does have toilets and showers, they are not in good repair, the lake was dry, the grounds were just dust and it blew a gale off the lake all afternoon.
To top it off at 06:30 the next morning we had Carnamah shire workers knocking on the door for their money.
Didn’t take any photos and left as soon as possible for Ellendale Pool, just out of a town called Walkaway, north of Dongara.
Talk about
chalk and cheese, what a top spot, with toilets and BBQ’s and a magnificent
pool, this place is very impressive and to top it off the cost is only
$5.00/night. Took lots of photos, blew
up our canoe and rowed around a bit to cool off. The only small negative was that there were a few flies, and
the dust was bad as they were working on the entrance road.
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| Ellendale Pool |
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| Ellendale Pool |
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| Ellendale pool |
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| View from our van |
Left the pool for Dongara “Top Tourist Park” to pick up some mail and supplies. Great Park averaged out at $37.33 as part of it was in the start of the “Easter Season”.
Didn’t do a lot, washed the van, went out to lunch at the Dongara Pub for Barbara’s birthday, took a drive to Geraldton and had some airbags fitted to the rear of the cruiser as it does sag a little as it has very soft springs but I love the comfortable ride! Generally we just relaxed.
5th
April 2012
Left Dongara
and drove a little further north past Geraldton to Northampton and booked in for Easter at
$25.00/night. Park didn’t look like much
and we were kind of cramped in, but very clean amenities, very nice park owners
and a nice quiet spot and we quite enjoyed it.While here we looked at a couple of bush camps for reference;
(a) Coronation beach at $15.00/night,
looked OK – long drops and not much else, but right on the beach.
(b) Oakabella homestead at $16.00/night,
inc power, no water but showers and toilets available, also can tour the
haunted house for $10.00 each if interested.
May do that some time.
(c) There is also a farm stay at the
“Lynton Heritage site” on the way into Port Gregory at $20.00/night, this
looked nice and would be my pick. The
heritage site is interesting and worth a quick look, got to pat a baby calf
while there.
We also
visited Horrocks Beach and had fish and chips, as you do. Huge serve but didn’t
feel great afterwards.
While in
Northampton we walked around and looked at the heritage buildings etc, and did
the Chapman Valley drive, this time of the year it is dry, it would be
spectacular when it was all green, as it was still very enjoyable.
Below is the
Catholic Church and the old Catholic Convent in Northampton which is now a
boarding house. |
| Catholic Church - Northampton |
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| Old Convent - Northampton |
We were in Northampton longer than planned as we had some mail coming that was delayed and it finally arrived on the 18th, so we left the next day for Carnarvon.
19th
April 2012
Arrived in
Carnarvon and booked into the Wintersun Caravan Park which costs $30.00/night
after Top Tourist club discount but because we stayed a week we got the seventh
day free which brought it down to about $27.00/night.
The tourist
brochure for Carnarvon sounded pretty good but in fact there is not a lot to do here.
We did a run out to the “Blowholes” and
onto Quobba station as far as Red Bluff for a BBQ lunch and return, it is a very pretty
coast line. You can camp at Red Bluff
but it is fairly remote and very expensive.
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| Blowhole at Quabba Station |
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| Red Bluff |
We also went for a walk out on the Carnarvon jetty which is 1.6km’s long, drove around the “food trail” as there was supposed to be heaps of fresh fruit and vegies around as according to the tourist brochure, Carnarvon supplies about 70% of Perth’s fruit and veg during winter. Unfortunately the day we tried nothing much was open, very disappointing. Very nice sunset here though!
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| Sunset at Carnarvon |
26th
April 2012
Arrived at
Coral bay and booked into the Bayview Caravan Park at $39.00/night. Nice park near
the beach but water is not suitable for drinking or caravans. It comes from a bore
around 800m deep, very hot and very salty.
There are a few taps scattered around so you can fill up containers with
drinking water but they are the hold down type and the flow is a trickle. We used the water we had in our tanks for the
three days we were there although some people were using the water in their vans for showers.
Had a look
around town, not much to see; it is all about Ningaloo reef, so off we went in
a glass bottom boat for sightseeing and snorkelling. Had a great time, got to swim with millions of
fish, turtles and some reef sharks. They
took us to one spot called the cleaning station where the reef sharks come in and
these small fish clean them, including inside their mouths. Great day!
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| On the glass bottom boat |
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| John with a turtle |
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| Reef Sharks at the cleaning station |
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| View of Coral Bay |
29th April 2012
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| View from the road |
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| Road into Shot Hole gorge |
The day after
that we drove down the other side of the Cape to Yardie Creek. While there we did the walk on the top of the
Yardie creek gorge and then took the DEC run boat trip up the gorge. The bit you can get to is quite small, not much over
1.5 kilometres but very nice. Got to see
lots of black-footed rock wallabies, see photos, amazing bushy tails and they can apparently jump three metres up!
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| Black footed rock Wallaby |
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| Yardie Creek with view of DEC boat |
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| Yardie Creek |
On the way down and back we looked at some of the camp spots and beaches, all very nice and we decided that if we come in here again we will definitely camp in the National Park. None of them have water but at $7.00/head/night still pretty good value and all right on the beach.
The next day
was cleaning and shopping, unfortunately we can’t get away from ALL of the
chores!
We are
heading off now to Karijini National Park, will update the blog again next month.
Keep smiling!!
Keep smiling!!
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