Ocean views ... not always great

Carnarvon was a quick stop, restocking and washing completed. It was a little different to be in a town where nothing was open on Sunday apart from Woollies, one pub and the service stations ... and the one pub that was open didn’t have a bottle shop!

From Carnarvon we headed to Gladstone Bay located in Shark Bay, a World Heritage area and spanning about 3 kms of coastline.

Gladstone Jetty

Gladstone Jetty

From the early 1900’s the Gladstone Bay jetty was used to freight wool and sandalwood to southern ports. The wool and sandalwood were brought to the port by teams of camels from stations throughout the Murchison district. A 287-metre stone causeway led from the wool store shed to the 77-metre timber jetty. The remains of the causeway and jetty can still be seen today. As with most of the places where we have stayed along this part of the coast it was extremely windy … as was the next stop in our travels, Denham. 

At Denham we were booked into one of the caravan parks – ocean views … we backed onto a fabulous view of Dirk Hartog Island across from us.  Ocean views may be something that we all love … except when the wind is blowing directly at you at 60kmph nonstop – all day and all night!  Apparently, the build up to the cyclone season is early this year!

The locals tell us that most of the area shuts down from the end of November until March due to the high temperatures (45-47 daily) and the high winds – but at least the flies disappear too!

While in Denham we took the opportunity to go and have a look at Monkey Mia … the famed dolphin feeding complex.  We missed dolphin feeding time so there was not much else to see there!  It is a pretty big complex with a large caravan park, cabins on the beach, eatery and large on stop souvenir shop.

Monkey Mia

On our second day we headed up to Francois Peron National Park which was one out of the bag!

Monkey Mia

Francois Peron was born in France in 1775, in 1801 he was travelling as a naturalist on a voyage led be Thomas Baudin. This voyage was ordered by Napolean Bonaparte and lasted two years with a lot of the time spent exploring Shark Bay area.  The park covers 52,000 hectares with arid shrublands, sandplains and spectacular scenery.

Francois Peron National Park

Francois Peron National Park

The trip to the top of the park is 4WD only, lots of corrugations, sand drifts, dry salt lake beds and massive sections of very deep sand with huge ‘wombat holes’ that have the vehicle porpoising.  You can’t see the massive troughs (even at 30kmph) until you hit the first one then you need to hang on and try to wash off speed while maintaining momentum so that you don’t get stuck … even with our tyre pressures down at 16psi!  Although there was hardly any traffic – there were some vehicles coming the other way heading at us sideways with others forcing you off to the side as they drove down the centre of the road!  The drive was good preparation for our trip to Steep Point and Dirk Hartog Island. Despite the road conditions it was worth the drive, the scenery was incredible.

Francois Peron National Park

After a leisurely pack up we left Denham to go to Steep Point in preparation for our 6.30am Friday barge transfer to Dirk Hartog Island.

Steep Point is the most westerly point on mainland Australia. Our campsite for the night at Shelter Bay felt anything but sheltered, the wind blowing a gale, everything covered in sand!