25 October 2009
We are spending a few days in the Kalbarri National Park as there is so much to see. These national parks are big, this one covering 400 square miles so just going for a day out you can easily drive 100 miles or more.
Kalbarri itself is a picturesque place and this is where we are based. This is where the Murchison River meets the sea so you get a stunning coastline and wonderful river gorges in one place.
We started our first outing by driving about 60km to the Hawk’s Head and Ross Graham lookouts. These have great views of the gorge and there is also a walk down to the river at the bottom which we did. It was very hot down there so the walk back up was quite hard.
We then headed off to a place called The Loop. The road down to this is unsealed and corrugated. It’s like driving over a 30km stretch of corrugated tin. Initially we went slowly but our little campervan was being shaken to pieces. On speeding up to around 45mph things were better but at speed we didn’t see some of the bigger corrugations and we flew in the air coming down with a crash. We now know why the campervan rental companies forbid you from going on unsealed roads.
The journey was well worth it if only for the wild flowers. Apparently there are 800 species of wild flower throughout the park (40 or so are so rare they have yet to be named and classified).
At the gorge we did a second longer walk and by the time we were finished, what with the heat and the steep climb we’d had enough. To be honest we haven’t seen much wildlife so far apart from kangaroos, emus and galahs (grey and pink parrots) in the suburbs of Perth but today on our way back we came across something large in the road ahead. As we got closer it turned out to be a large reptile (large being about 4 – 5 feet). We got right up to it but by the time we got the camera out it was scuttling off into the undergrowth and we weren’t going to chase after it.
On our second day in the park we decided to do the coast. This started with a circular walk just outside Kilbarri. It was classified as a ‘grade 4’, 6 being the hardest but to be honest we found it to be not too challenging. After this we found a nice remote beach to have lunch and spent the afternoon relaxing and walking on the beach.
