Off to See the Wizard - Denham to Kalbarri

Time to continue heading south.

We saw an emu on the road.  We have seen more over here than anywhere else on our trip.

We pulled over to have some morning tea and there were some more wildflowers.  The further south we go, the more we see.

It came as a bit of a shock as we rounded a corner and saw paddocks of wheat!  This is the first of this sort of crop we have seen since we don’t know when.  Probably, since South Australia.  No photo, but there were also sheep.  We haven’t seen any since New South Wales.

We crossed the Murchison River, which will feature over the next couple of days.

And arrived in Kalbarri, our home for the next three nights.  We had been driving into a headwind for most of the day, so it was good to arrive.

Back in 1997, we rode “Sophia” the Moto Guzzi, towing her little trailer full of camping gear, to Western Australia.  We camped at Geraldton and took a day trip to Kalbarri, so this is as far north as I have previously been.  My memories are of a  really pretty little town, so I was keen to come back and have another look.

After we settled in, we went for a bit of a drive around town.  We started to notice quite a few buildings having work done on them and then more that looked rather damaged.  Then I remembered that a cyclone had crossed the coast here a couple of years ago.  Mr Google helped me out.  It was Cyclone Seroja in April 2021.  This is the same cyclone that damaged the One Mile Jetty at Carnarvon and the boardwalk on the way out to Shark Bay.  At the time 70% of the town’s buildings were damaged and 40% destroyed.  No wonder it is taking so long to get things repaired.  That is a lot of damage.  

We went to a couple of lookouts just south of town.  The wind was pretty strong, so the surf was up.  That’s right, I said “Surf”!!!  We haven’t seen any of that since we left home.  It has all been very calm waters due to the coral reef.  There was surf out on the horizon at Coral Bay, but not at the beach.

It seems to me (but that is just my opinion) that Shark Bay is the delineation of north and south.  The reefs are pretty much gone and the weather is definitely cooling down.  We are also getting those south westerly winds that the area is famous for.  Let’s face it, there’s nothing to slow them down for a very long way across the Indian Ocean.

One of the lookouts has a memorial to the shipwreck “Zuytdorp” in 1712, well before Australia was “discovered” by Captain Cook.  It was a ship from the Dutch East India Company sailing to Batavia (now Indonesia) carrying 200 crew and passengers and rich cargo, including 248,000 silver coins.  It was unknown what had happened to the ship until 1927 when a couple of fellows doing some fencing discovered the wreck.  It is believed there were survivors, as it was close enough to land and there was evidence of a huge fire being lit.  Some coins, and other artefacts, found near water soaks suggest they may have been assisted by the local aborigines, as they would not have survived otherwise.  It will never be known.  The wreck site is a bit north of Kalbarri and has been made a reserve with restricted access.

Closer to town there was a yacht looking out of place.

When Mick spoke to a local, it appears that the yacht, which is steel hulled, was blown ashore only a few days before our arrival.  It must have been that storm that blew through Denham that we experienced.  He was running low on fuel and decided to come in here.  The channel into the river is rather treacherous.  We sat and watched it and there are waves coming from all directions and the channel is very narrow.  It would have been nigh on impossible for a yacht in a wild storm.  They don’t know how they can salvage it from where it is on the rocks.  It may become a permanent fixture.

So that was our day.