Originally we were intending to camp in Francois Peron
National Park for a couple of nights but had been told that roads/tracks were way to rough and sandy
to tow a van into so, against my better judgement I believed them! After school
we said good by to Monkey Mia and headed back to the entrance to Peron with a
hitchhiker on hand. He was waiting at the front of the resort and to my suprise
and great delight Steven, our new best friend was from Holland. Coincidence
that the English cricket team had been humiliated by Holland during the night
in the T20 WC...I think not! It wasn’t far to the park where we dropped him
off but we had a great time laughing at our English ‘friends’.
We left Gator behind and headed along the 4WD track. I was
expecting it to be pretty rough and ready, with some having said they
weren’t sure how their brand new Prado made it through...Hmm no offence but I
am not sure it was the vehicle...as evidenced later on!
Our first stop was ‘Cattle Well’. Well I’ll be stuffed if I
know how they raise anything on land like this let-alone cattle. This must be
some of the harshest country we have seen, some of it making the Nullarbor look
like a lush golf course! However the beaches are incredible.
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| Cattle Well |
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| South Gregories |
The reds of the
oxide soils found in the Pilbra up against the whites of the sand dunes
contrasting with the clear blues of the ocean are amazing. Bottle Bay and Cape
Peron were awesome as both had red soil cliffs leaning over the sandy beaches.
A photographers paradise!
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| Cape Peron |
Around the corner from Cape Peron is Skipjack Point so I was
at it again with my ‘very humorous’ photography!
The two photos are supposed to go together but my computer is playing up...
so you will have to use your imagination!
For those who are not familiar with driving a 4WD they,
meaning ones that are designed to go off road, are much heavier in the steering
when they are in 4WD than in 2WD. So after 22kms of the 51km return journey I
switched Izzy into 2WD just to see if my assumption that this was my no means a
4WD track were true......yep no problem. It seems that there are many different
levels of hard!
After alighting from the park with Gator reconnected we
headed into Denham to restock as tomorrow we are going to Steep Point and there
are NO services there. On the way south we pulled into Shelly Beach which is covered in gazillions of the smallest Pipi shells you have even seem. They mine them a little further on with them going over 10m deep!
With some apprehension we decided to camp under the
radio tower again (as its free) and hope that the flies wouldn’t be nearly as bad. Luckily
they were Ok and we spent the afternoon preparing for the trip. As there is no
way we could get Gator in we had to get all the camping gear, food, cooking
stuff, etc etc out of the van and find a place for it in Izzy. It was a tight
fit but we managed to squeeze it in.
I had read an article about 5 or 6 years ago about fishing
at Steep Point, when the idea of doing this trip was just in its infancy and I
was excited about it then...so as you can imagine....I was reaaallly excited
about it now!
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