From Cape Leveque we drove to 80 Mile Beach
with a stop back in Broome to exchange a faulty snorkel and buy some beer (we
are going to try our first home made damper).
Now this place is well and truly on the top
shelf. We are greeted with more wind and
a massive campground that had over 200 sites in it, but yet didn’t feel packed
despite being majority full. But the
magic lay just over the sand dunes…a beach as it turned out over our couple fo
days there would recede over a kilometer at low tide, from just off the base of
the dunes out across an incredibly flat stretch of sand which was home to the
most amazing array of shells I have ever seen.
We spent a day driving up the beach in
search of shells and boy did we find some.
There were big ones, little ones, spirals, snails, cones, (not sure of
the technical names) but every sort you could imagine in a range of
colours. After a few hours in the
afternoon we returned with a big blue tub full of big ones, a big container of
medium ones and two full smaller containers of smaller ones…with every shell
having a WOW factor. Needless to say
Bron and the boys…or maybe Grandma Barb will have lots of craft ahead of them. And for me, I now have the joy of packing
them and unpacking them everywhere we go. For the next couple of months.
Each tide deposits more and more shells on
the beach and so even with so many people collecting there are still heaps. One lady at the campground who was there for
4 months escaping the cold down south had made little animals, wind chimes and
mobiles out of the shells…all very cool.
But the funniest part of the experience was driving back along the
beautiful beach as the sun set when Bronnie started squirming with one of the
shells crawling across her foot. It
turned out that one of the shells she picked up was in fact home to a hermit
crab which was now crawling around the car trying to find its way out!
Leaving 80 mile (and Hamburger Wednesday)
behind we headed towards Karratha to see the Staircase to the Moon. Only problem is WA has gone on school
holidays and we cant get accommodation….why do kids and tourists need to get in
our way. So we head to a beach camp, run
by the council and set up for 3 nights at Cleaverville Beach, tucked in behind
the sand dunes with only our portaloo (not the collapsible varety) and our
solar shower to provide any level of amenity.
Turned out to be a great few days.
The kids ran up and down the sad dune a thousand times, we had a good
look around Dampier and the Red Dog statue, a quick squiz at Karratha (not much
here) and a little ghost town called Cossack.
Best of all though, we saw the
staircase. This was very cool. As the moon rises over a low tide it reflects
off the mudflats producing a set of lines that look like stairs all the way to
the moon. It is apparently only visible
for 3 nights a month in a handful of spots between Broome and Karratha.
And so onwards we went, heading for another
beach camp the other side of Karratha when we decided to just keep driving so
we might get closer to Coral Bay (another place where we had no accomomodation
booked). Somewhere after dark we pulled
up stumps in the middle of nowhere at some side of the road rest area, set up
in the dark and listened to the sound of road trains passing on the road
outside through the night, one of which decided it was a good game to blow his
horn and wake everyone up.
Tomorrow we head to Coral Bay or Exmouth in
the hope we can snare one of the 6 sites that don’t get pre booked.
Oh and if you are wondering, the first
effort at beer damper was pretty good, even if we did burn the bottom black!
No comments:
Post a Comment