South West Coast

 We’ve made it a long way since the last update. We've passed Carnarvon, and Shark Bay and even Perth and now we're down at Margaret River. We've done this section of the coast a bit quicker than normal to meet up with family in Perth, but we're in a really top spot now. Since leaving Carnarvon though it has rained so much. I don’t know if we’ve just forgotten what its like or whether it’s an inordinate amount of rain for the west coast, but it hasn’t stopped. I don’t think there was one photo from this last leg with a clear sky in the background.
 Not sure if I can fit everything we’ve done into one blog post, so might split it up while we’re still in civilisation.

 After heading out of Carnarvon we headed up to the blowholes, we were lucky and got a day with a decent swell and got to see some pretty good blowhole action.
 Carnarvon is a bit of a fruit mecca for the north west coast, with a lot of great cheap fruit and veg, so I took advantage of this by trying to shoot a Tangerine out of the biggest blowhole there. It didn't work though.
 The blowholes themselves were really cool, but the campsite there wasn’t too crash hot. Lots of people we've met on the road have told us the blowholes are a great place to stay, so we had high hopes for the camp ground, but when we got there we were severely disappointed. There were caravans everywhere squashed in next to each other, and we had to pay for the privilege of squatting next to some derelict lobster fisherman’s shacks, it was very disappointing.
 We were out of there the next day.
One up side of staying there was we met another coaster driver with two huge dogs who gave us a 20 watt solar panel he wanted to get rid of, which we have now hooked up on the roof, giving us a bit more solar.

 

 The Blowholes

 After the blowholes we headed south at a reasonable pace to a beautiful little spot called Gladstone. This is basically just a pier on the very eastern coast of the shark bay area, it had an old pier they used to use for loading wool onto small boats to get out to the big ships.

 With decent roads though it was made obsolete. It was an alright spot for snorkelling though and I had a crack (and failed) at shooting one of the big Queensland mackerels which would shoot through the pier from time to time. We stayed there a couple of nights, it was deserted because of the short dirt road you had to take to get in there. Just like we like it.

 After Gladstone we toured shark bay, we stayed at Denham a few nights and didn’t bother going to Monkey Mia as it looked like a huge tourist trap. You actually have to pay just for the privilege of entering the town. How crazy is that! Its main attraction is the dolphin feeding anyway, and I’d rather swim with them somewhere than watch tamed ones come in for free fish.

 From Denham we saw all the sights of shark bay, including the shark bay aquarium, which I think was well worth the visit.

 Shark bay was pretty cool, but there is a lot of sand in the bay, and very shallow water, which makes for lousy snorkelling. I did have a crack at swimming out from Denham harbour to an outer pylon at one point, it didn’t get deeper than about 3m the whole way. But, on the swim I counted 16 sea snakes, I’ve never seen so many in one place before. One of them took a bit too much interest in me and followed me for a few minutes which was a bit unnerving, They seem to do that sometimes, but I’ve never let one get close enough to find out what they do when they get to you. I shot a nice tuskfish on the swim too.

Really at Gladstone and Shark Bay I was only interested in seeing a dugong, but after a long time in the water, there were no dice.

 They are apparently pretty shy creatures, and probably wouldn’t have been around the areas I was snorkelling.

 This is a shell stone quarry from the stromatolites in shark bay. The beaches down that side of shark bay are covered in little cockel shells which are native only to the salty shark bay waters. These compact and form some really cool looking sandstone which was quarried in the old days to make some funky looking shell bricks

 Shell Beach Shark Bay

 Feeding sharks at shark bay aquarium. The one in the photo is a sand bar shark, you can tell sand bar sharks pretty easily because they have the huge dorsal fin in the photo

 The Bus at Shark Bay

 The Shark Bay Stromatolites - I've been looking forward to seeing these for quite a while. These bacteria (with others) converted all the CO2 created by volcanic eruptions and the like into the oxygen rich atmosphere we're now breathing. This is before plants evolved. They form the towers by secreting a sticky biofilm which sticks any sand or whatever to it, forming a coral like pinnacle.

In my mind these are really the proof that global warming isn't a conspiracy. If it took these clusters of bacteria 3 million years to change our atmosphere over from an aerobic one, then 9 billion people with however many cars and power plants could probably reverse the process a lot quicker than it took these bacteria...

 Smaller stromatolites - You can see the cart wheel tracks still present in these stromatolites from where wool farmers used to wheel their carts over the stromatolites (which to them just looked like rocks) and onto skiffs to be loaded onto larger ships. This was in the 1900's, which shows just how long it takes for even the little stromatolites to grow back.

After shark bay we headed down to coronation beach (a lovely spot) and through to Geraldton, where we decided to dive the Batavia shipwreck. We got there though and found out that it had been taken by the Perth Shipwreck museum (bastards).

After that we headed to Cliff head (another lovely spot), Coal Seam national park (not really amazing but nice), and down to Perth. Over this period it did not stop raining…

Geraldton Lighthouse

 Greenough historical church - This was a pretty cool historical town which was abandoned but restored by volunteers. You could go into all the buildings and see what life was like for wheat farmers back in the day. (The oldies all loved it, the visitors book was full of comments like 'it's not the same these days'  ...I think they might have forgot about the lack of power, food and medicine back then...)

 Alpacas at Greenough

Rachael and some Coal Seam NP wildflowers

 We stayed at cliff head for a while which is a great free camping spot on the beach and checked out the surrounds.

 There were some beautiful coastal towns around the area. When we inevitably ran out of water we headed over to port Denison and stayed there the night to take advantage of their hot showers and clean water taps. We were getting a bit of cabin fever at this point because of all the rain, and for some reason we headed over to the hardware store and decided it would be a good idea to paint the entire bus’ interior a lime green colour.

 I’m still not sure why we did this. It looks pretty hideous… And it took 2 days to finish…

 A Hive of Bees dangerously close to where we parked...

 We then headed down to Jurien Bay, where we blew another tyre… This was a real blow out. We had noticed a kind of squelching noise coming from the back left tyres for a while when the tyres were cold, but I couldn’t figure out which tyre it was coming from, and couldn’t feel any separation in the tyre.. It was there though, and our outer tyre (thankfully) exploded.

 When I tried to put the spare on we also realised we can’t get the spare out without the tool for lowering it from under the car. (which you can’t buy anywhere apparently)

 So we had to strap it on to the bike and I had to ride to Jurien Bay to get a new one.

 This would have been fine, except for some reason I didn’t wear a jacket, and pretty much after I left for the 130Km return ride it started raining. It was really cold

 It just never stops raining... I miss Darwin.

 Tyre Blowout - It might look all sunny and promising in that photo, but that is a lie...

After getting all that sorted we headed to sandy cape recreation park, which was really nice, except it wouldn’t stop raining…

The bus at the Pinnacles - I've got to say I wasn't that excited about the pinnacles, but it turns out they were pretty impressive, even with all the rain.

After that we headed to a couple of other spots and down to Perth, where we stayed for a couple of days at Fremantle.

 Perth was a pretty nice city, it reminded me a bit of Brisbane, it was surprisingly big. We went to the museums and the cbd and did the usual tourist crap, but for some reason I didn’t take a single photo… Looking back on the photos we’ve taken we’ve been pretty bad with photographing lately..

 Probably the best thing we did in Perth was to go on a tour through a decommissioned submarine. It was huge, and pretty cool how they cramped 80 people into a steel tube.

 We also finally got to see the Batavia shipwreck. This was very cool to see and read about. It sunk off Geraldton before captain Cook came through, apparently it was deliberately steered off course by a shipmate who had it in for the captain. After that the captain took his upper deckhands and officers off the island they were stuck on to find some water.

 After not finding water on the mainland they didn’t even bother going back and headed for Jakarta.. In the meantime the mutineers went crazy and some serious lord of the flies started happening on the Abrolhos Islands, about 250 people were tortured and murdered..

 The last piece of the Batavia ship. This is only a tiny part of the back lower section, there was another level on top of this, the actual ship must have been huge. The arch in the back was found all around the wreck, apparently they must have been using it and some bricks as ballast. No wonder it sunk...

 After meeting up with my Brother and Mother in Perth we all headed down south. From Perth we stopped a few places until hitting the Margaret River region. This has been a fantastic spot to visit. It’s full of sleepy coastal towns, great surf, superb spearfishing. There’s also great food inland, we’ve visited wineries, cheeseries, fudgeries, choclataries, nougateries and breweries around this area. There is so much good food and wine it’s hard not to blow our budget staying in a place like this…

 In order to help conserve finances we’ve stayed away from too many temptations in the Lleuwin Naturaliste national park. This has been a beautiful spot to stay, close to a great surf beach and some great deep dropoffs next to the shore (getting down to about 15m in some spots) which are good to go spearfishing at. I don’t really want to leave.

 Most of our days we’ve been taking the bike in to the surrounding towns to check out the area, then surfing or spearfishing in the arvo. The ride out of the national park is fantastic, it is a tight winding road through Karri tree forest. These are some of the tallest trees in the world. They grow to around 80m tall, whilst the tallest (the American Redwood) grows to about 90m. They are actually the tallest hardwoods in the world, and are very impressive to ride through. After riding through the dense forest depending where we are heading it usually opens out into rolling grape fields or ocean views. The scenery everywhere is fantastic. Sometimes we just ride around for the hell of it. It’s a really excellent place, after this trip I think we will be getting a few flights over when we can, it’s just too good.

 I’ll let the photos do the talking though, because this has been a long post...

 Busselton Pier - Meant to be a scuba dive site, but in only 8m of water its much better for snorkelling.

Crested Morwong Busselton Pier

 Blowfish Busselton Pier

 Another Blowfish Busselton Pier

 Kingfish Chasing some yellowtails around the pier

Samsonfish looking for something to eat

 No idea what this fish is, they are all over the west coast and they get really big, might be a sergeant baker of the western variety maybe?

Some spotted cod - Busselton Pier

 Margaret River smoked cheddar has been my favourite cheese long before going to Margaret River, It was so good at the cheesery. No idea who that is in the door...

 65 Metre Karri Tree. - This one has Rio stuck in it so you can climb to the top. It doesn't look that high up, but it was a pretty long climb. Rachael refused to go up.

 My Brother Michael and I at the top of the tree, it was a great view, and very cool when it swayed around in a strong breeze

Bobtailed skink - These lizards are everywhere, on the roads, in the bushes, I even found one in the beach toilets. They think they are all that too, I didn't think there were any lizards with more attitude than a blue tongue

 Heading out spearfishing on one of the few days the surf was not massive.

 Samsonfish - I was pretty excited when I caught this thinking it was a nice tasting kingfish, after putting it in a curry though it was definitely not a kingfish...

 I was lucky to get this fish right in the head, otherwise it might have taken my little cressi 75 speargun. So far all the big fish I've caught have been with that little cheap speargun, it just goes to show that something being more expensive doesn't prove its any better

Heading surfing at conto beach on one of the calmer days

 As far as Lemon news is concerned, we’ve had the tyre blowout, and also the gas needed a tune up badly. We were at the point where the engine was bogging out at anything faster than 60Kph. I had a crack at emergency tuning it again with the help of google, and managed to find one site which can get you out of trouble. There is almost no information on the net on tuning lpg converters yourself (because most people don’t have to) but this site was very useful http://www.fordmods.com/post597545.html

 Using this we could travel on gas at 80Kph again, but we eventually caved and got a mechanic (god forbid) to do it properly with a gas meter. It’s going great now though. We also decided to change the front right tyre. It was looking pretty cactus, with flat spots on it after the right wheel was locking up way back up at Kununurra, and whilst one of the rear tyres going is fine, if we lost one of the front two I’m pretty sure we’d just flip over.