Saturday 12th May Pinnacles and stromatolites!
In the morning, I saw two birds I had never seen. It was the beginning of a Bird Adventure in Australia, as I was going to see so many new birds every day of this trip!
Here is the first one:
Here is the second one:
The campsite was close to the beach but it wasn’t a really nice beach and there were a lot of seaweeds on it.
Before to go to the Pinnacles, we stopped at the Visitor Centre where we bought a month pass valid to visit all the National Parks of Western Australia. On our way to the Pinnacles, we saw that sign that we had seen briefly the day before and were going to see during all our trip too, and luckily see all of these animals too, kangaroos, emeus and echineas.
The Pinnacles are these limestone pillars rising mysteriously from the dune sands, which creates a really magic landscape.
We could see at some point some white sand dunes behind and also the sea, which made it even more magic.
We started first with the drive around and then also walked around. During the walk, we saw the Sphinx of Australia!
There were some little volcanoes sometimes, created by some sand creature.
If looking from really close, we could see on the sand some tiny little Pinnacles. That’s it, maybe the bigger ones are just these little creation which became bigger, some sand shaped by the wind which accumulated and sticked together after many many years.
We climbed a dune and enjoyed the view over the Pinnacles from the top.
I saw this beautiful little bird there that I never saw again later in the trip.
After seeing the Pinnacles, we went to Lake Thetis, parked the car and had a walk to the lake. Here was the landscape on our right.
Inside Lake Thetis are some stromatolites and thrombolites, apparently the oldest micro-organisms of the world.
Here is a stromatolite.
Here are some thrombolites.
If you don’t know what they are and their scientific importance, these things look really unimportant and useless. Back in the car, we joked a lot about them, and thought we actually should change our pitbull sentence at the back of our wicked camper for some “Long life to the stromatolites!” or “You haven’t seen Australia if you haven’t seen the stromatolite!s” or wait wait, I got one: “Get out of my way, you stupid stromatolite!” Ah ah ah… 🙂
We hit the road again, with the sea on our left.
Here is the map of the bit of road we did, from Cervantes and Nambung National Park to Geraldton and then until Horrocks in the evening.
We saw the first billboard telling us about road trains. Road trains are very long trucks which can have a maximum length of 5 wagons of a total of 52 meters! They are one of the icons of the outback of Western Australia.
Not so long after seeing this billboard, we saw our first road train! Impressive!
We stopped in Geraldton for a quick break. There was a yellow submarine on the parking. It had been invented by a local in 1969 as a prototype that would help fishing the green crayfish, but they discovered some technical defaults and it was never operational finally.
While the guys had some burgers, I went for a stroll on the little beach there.
We stopped to watch the sunset. The sun that day was getting down with a normal pace, not like the first day!
We drove a bit longer, the road was beautiful.
The colours after sunset are also gorgeous in Australia.
We stopped in the middle of nowhere on a small rest area on the road going to Horrocks, cooked there some delicious meal with all we had in our camper, made the bed, and slept there.
Tomorrow, going to Kalbarri National Park, yihaaaa!!!!
Pom explores 