Tuesday, October 17, 2017

DAY 98 – WILDFLOWERS AND PINNACLES…..



Jurien Bay is an ideal location to stay at to explore both the Lesueur National Park with all their wonderful wildflowers and then a little further south you have the Nambung National Park with the Pinnacles and these were the areas we wanted to explore today.


We all went together in Ian’s car today, firstly setting off around 8am to drive out to the Lesueur National Park to see the wildflowers.  The drive was an easy drive out to Cockershell Gully Road and then we had about 7 kms of dirt road to get to the park entrance.  Once you get to the National Park, you have an 18km loop bitumen road which takes you right through the most scenic wildflower drive.  

It took us approx. 4 hours to drive this 18kms with about a 45 minute stop along the way to do one of the walks to a lookout.  The flowers were amazing.  We have obviously come at the right time of the year to explore this wonderland. 

The photos though really don’t do it justice,  you can not capture the

Fortunately there were areas along the road where you could pull off to check out the wildflowers closer and take photos.  We were constantly pulling off to snap a photo and in the process of photographing one flower would find several other beautiful specimens to photograph.  It was a photographer’s delight.The sights, the smells and the grandeur of a place like this.  It is called a grey nomad’s national park as it is more about the flowers than any geographical feature, although there were a few of them also.  

At one park of the park, the hills were just covered in grass trees, they looked stunning.

It was lunch time by the time we left, so we headed home to the caravan park for a quick bite to eat before heading out again to explore the pinnacles.


It was a quick bite too, as Ian and Kathy just headed up some left overs from dinner the night before, and were ready to take off again about 20 minutes later, we were still finishing off the last of our lunch crackers as we loaded back into the car.  


The drive to the Pinnacles in Nambung National Park was about 35kms away, and from the highway you would have had no idea this Desert Pinnacle Park would have existed, although we did read later that it was first sighted by some of the Dutch Explorers back in the 1600s.

It's a true desert landscape, where the weathered rock spires of the Pinnacles rise out of yellow sand dunes, yet the park sits on the deep blue Indian Ocean. Once here, a scenic walk and drive trail winds past the ancient limestone pillars of the Pinnacles, some several metres tall. They're scattered across the desert in their thousands, creating an eerie, alien-like landscape. Some are as high as three and half metres, and some finish in a jagged point, while others have rounded domes, resembling tombstones.
 Although we did the drive through the Pinnacles, we stopped at several points along the way and got out of the car to explore these limestone pillars and take photos.  It was hard to know what to photograph as there were so many amazing pinnacles of all shapes and sizes.
 
In parts it looked did look like a cemetery as these pinnacles stretched as far as the eye could see.  The yellow sand of the desert also contrasted brilliantly with the white sand of the sand dunes.   In places of the park you could also see the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean.  Quite a special place to visit.  
 We left the Pinnacles around 4pm and decided to explore some of the other attractions in this area including  Hangover Bay which is also part of the Nambung National Park and then head into Cervanties, a small crayfishing town fringed by more clean, calm beaches perfect for swimming and windsurfing to check out this seaside resort. 

From Cervanties we headed to the salty Lake Thetis, one of the few places in the world to shelter marine stromatolites.  We took a walk out to the lake to take a look at these living fossils, which were formed by organisms similar to the earliest forms of life on earth.   They were very different from the stromatolites that we had seen at Hamelin Pool.
Beach at Cervanties
Views from Thirsty Point
 It was getting on to sunset when we got home, in fact the sunset looked quite spectacular tonight with the sunrays coming down through the clouds and we stopped to take a photo of it.  Steve hoped out of the car as we arrived back at the caravan park to grab a couple of photos as the sun went down below the horizon.

 Dinner was going to be late this evening as we had a roast chicken to cook in the weber and we had arrived home late.  It did give us time to get dinner on and showers before it was time to sit down and enjoy a wonderful roast dinner, but it was pretty much eat and then get ready for bed as once again we are on the move first thing in the morning again.

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