Kalbarri
Kalbarri is a sleepy but happy little tourist town where Murchison River meets the ocean. There’s beautiful beaches, an impressive gorge with great lookouts and the local volunteers are feeding the pelicans every morning as an entertainment for the kids (and actually adults too). All kids where allowed to throw fish at the pelican, and obviously all of them missed the target and seagulls ended up snatching the fish. It was fun nonetheless.
Shark Bay
Our next stop was Shark Bay, a small peninsula on the Coral Coast. We camped at Big Lagoon and were blown away by the colours! The area consisted of dark red sand, which stretched all the way to the water to meet crystal clear, turquoise waters.
The wildlife was amazing too. We saw Emus, Wallabies, Echidnas, plenty of different lizards and even had a pod of Dolphins travelling past our campsite and playing on the beach.
On a trip to Cape Peron, we saw another dolphin, sharks and a whale, while the kids were playing in bright red sand on top of the cliffs, overlooking the turquoise ocean. The road was really sandy, a lot of people get bogged on this road. Luckily, we made it through without problems.
On top of that, we had beautiful sunsets every day, right from our campsite.
We also spent a few days at Monkey Mia, a nice resort on a beautiful beach where Emus roam the campgrounds and dolphins are hanging around very close to the shore every day.
Carnarvon
Carnarvon was more of a technical stop, as it’s the first place since Perth that has a proper supermarket and a hardware store. We visited the Space Museum, advertised as “#1 tourist attraction in Carnarvon”, which sounds a lot less impressive once you realised it is also the ONLY tourist attraction in Carnarvon. The kids enjoyed it though.
Ningaloo Reef
From Carnarvon, we travelled north to reach the Ningaloo reef. After just 200 km of driving, the water temperature jumped from 20 to 25 degrees, which made swimming a lot more pleasant, especially for the kids. It’s also the last place where one can swim safely before entering croc country.
Our first stop was 14 Mile Beach, a very remote and hard to reach, but very pretty campground, right on the beach! We had fantastic sunsets every night and the kids loved running around the dunes, looking for beetles and lizards. These were some of the most relaxing days we had so far.
A couple of very corrugated tracks took us to Coral Bay, which is a very lively place, packed with tourists. It has a fantastic beach where you can jump in with a snorkel and mask and just 2-3 metres from the shore, there’s heaps of coral gardens inhabited by thousands of colourful fish. Ida went snorkelling in the ocean without help for the first time and did a great job chasing little fish.
We then spent the next weeks camping at various beaches along the Ningaloo coast, all very pretty in their own kind of way. Camping between the dunes, far away from any form of civilisation and the waves roaring all day has become quite addictive for us. The night skies were some of the most impressive we’ve ever experienced. Snorkelling has become Idas new hobby and we went out almost every day, exploring corals and countless types of colourful fish. We saw some stingrays, dolphins, sharks, heaps of turtles and from far even whales and an Orca!
Bogged at Winderabandi Point
Our favourite campsite was Winderabandi Point. We had a beautiful camp site, right on the beach! At high tide the water was 10m from our door. The water was crystal clear and shallow, perfect for swimming. Quite a few people camped here, but our next neighbours were around 50m away, everyone had their personal stretch of beach. This was a real paradise. Not much to do here, other than relaxing. No roads, no mosquitoes, no flies, no mobile phone reception. Swimming at daytime, camp fires at night, amazing night skies, countless shooting stars and watching golden sunsets right from our dinner table every day. A dolphin swam past every morning and we saw a couple of small sharks too.
The trip came with a few complications though. This place is about 2.5 hours from the next town, Exmouth. First, we had to cross the dry bed of Yardie Creek. Then, a fairly rough track, partially sandy, partially muddy and partially rocky, took us almost 1.5 hours for the last 22 km. A very sandy track through the dunes lead to our campsites… where we got bogged in the sand, around 20 metres before the end. So we got the shovel out, dug some sand away, and wedged some recovery tracks under the tyres, which normally helps. However, the caravan holding us back and the sand being extremely soft meant that the tracks would just dive under the wheels and come out behind us. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts, we asked our neighbours for help. Minutes later, 2 blokes with a bigger shovel and more recovery tracks were helping us shovelling sand away and after another 2 more attempts, we eventually got out and reached our campsite. The whole ordeal took 3 hours, and a lot of sweat and sand on our skins. Finally time to relax.
Four days later, on our way out we were a bit nervous, worried about getting stuck again. We walked down the track multiple times, identifying soft patches, drove back and forth with the car. Empty water tanks, empty fridge and pantry, no more firewood and only one person in the car meant our rig was a fair bit lighter. We still struggled a bit, but got out just fine… for now. After the whole rocky, sandy, muddy track back to Yardie Creek, we got bogged again on the very last stretch of the creek crossing, 30 metres before reaching the bitumen again.
Luckily this is a very busy area, with a camp site, a bush walk and a beach to launch boats, which means there were plenty of helpful people around. We only just got the shovel out, when the first person to walk past asked “want me to snatch you out? Just wait a sec, I’ll go and get my car”. Which he did, and we hooked up a rope between us. First attempt failed, as always, and it was clear that we needed more recovery tracks again. A young dad who watched us pointed at another car and said “these guys over there have some”. And before we could even think about this, his kids ran over and asked them if they could borrow their tracks for us. So next attempt of pulling us out worked fine and we successfully reached a car park.
We finally got to fill our tyres again and are now travelling on actual roads for a while. Quite an adventure, but well worth it.
We are now heading inland into the Pilbara, spending some time in the outback.