(For those of you confused by the chronology of our holiday - my apologies - it has taken me a very long time to put these posts up, so we are now long since home from our trip. More up-to-date posts to follow soon, I hope.)
Day 14 Kalbarri: Up early for a canoeing adventure down the
Murchison River. Two other families of four turned up and we were all were
transported by 4WD van along roads that made the previous day’s ride seem
smooth. When we arrived at the launching spot, it turned out that ‘self-guided’
really meant ‘self-guided’ – our van driver saw us off and then drove down
river to cook our breakfast. The canoes were shorter and wider than Canadian
ones, and the paddles were more like kayak paddles than canoe paddles – but we
got used to that pretty quickly and I ended up thinking that kayak paddles are
pretty handy in a canoe because you don’t have to worry about doing the
J-stroke. It was a fairly easy paddle
downstream for the first two legs, to breakfast and then to the swimming hole.
But then the afternoon wind picked up a little early, and we had to work fairly
hard for the final 2 km stretch. Luckily we had stuffed ourselves at breakfast
so had the energy to fight the wind. We were treated to lots of bird life
again, including lots of sea eagles diving for fish and lots of stately
pelicans.
In the afternoon, Chris and the boys went to Jake’s Bay to
look for a good body boarding site, while I wandered around town and checked
out the gift shops and bookstore. The beach they found had good waves but was
too rocky at the shore to feel safe with body boarding, so they found a
different spot that was calm and had a swim/Waboba.
Day 15 Kalbarri: Cliff-top whale watching hike along the
Bigarda trail was the morning’s entertainment. I have to admit, I didn’t really
think we’d be seeing whales, but the woman at the visitor’s centre said she had
seen some a few days ago and if we were lucky... The hike was beautiful, along
cliffs whose base was made of the Tumblagoorda sandstone, underneath about 15
metres of Tamala limestone.
The ocean was turquoise and aqua, dotted with small
whitecaps turning to big foaming froth at the shore. I jokingly offered a big
handful of Doritos to the first person to spot a whale – but sure enough,
Dorito-loving Rio suddenly spotted a humpbacked whale flipping out of the water
in the near distance. The humpbacks are migrating south for summer, passing the
Western Australian coast from May through October. The last ones to come past
are the mums with their babies. They jumped and splashed for quite a while
before continuing on their way down the coast and we on our walk. It was tricky
to watch our footing as well as keeping an eye out on the ocean, but we managed
to spot several more groups of humpbacks by the time we came to the end of our hike.
However, we still hadn’t seen any of the southern right whales which were
supposed to be visible closer to the shore. We watched and waited quite a while
at the final view point, but not until we started walking away did Chris spot a
right whale spouting and swimming at the surface. They are much shyer than the
humpbacks, or at least they are less interested in playing about in plain
sight. It flashed us a bit at the surface and then disappeared again – until we
walked away again, and up it spouted. It did this several more times before we
eventually had seen enough to feel that we’d got our dosage of right whale
viewing.
After lunch we went to the Blue Holes, marked on the tourism
map as a good spot for snorkelling. We warmed up with some beach cricket,
managing to retrieve the ball when it was slogged into the water. However, the
water was blue but not very transparent, and the only fish we saw while
snorkelling were a couple of cute little brown spotted guys and a tiny black
and white striped fish. The ‘holes’ were created by a small reef making some
sheltered pools with much smaller waves. We gave up on the snorkelling and
enjoyed our final relaxing beach time before the drive home tomorrow.
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