Today, must have been round up the sheep day, as we woke to the sound of the gyro-copter taking off. Later the quad bikes. The busy life of a sheep farmer :)
The initial plan was to go to Carnarvon and spend a night there before heading down to Hamlin Pool. We had seen enough of Carnarvon by early afternoon, so decided to push on further.
As we drove past the river which Carnarvon sits, it was completely empty of water, so we wondered where they got their supply from. The water is under the sand and feeds down to a aquifer which they draw from. We went out to the jetty. All the goods coming in and going out of Carnarvon was by ship and they had a tram line from the town out to the port.
Out at the jetty there is also a lighthouse and we were fortunate to be there when the volunteer was the daughter of one of the lighthouse keepers and grew up in the house there. She had many stories to tell of the times when she lived there. She was a great great grandmother at 70!
Old fire truck at the museum. We actually found out more about the Korean Star, it was a salt freighter and went down in a heavy storm.
There is a beautiful foreshore at the harbour. That has to be the greenest grass ever. Just beautiful and thick and soft. The main part of the town is slowly dying, lots of shops for sale or empty. Internet shopping is a major competitor. Target Country recently closed.
We decided to eat lunch at the foreshore and just after we settled down, we listened to the sound of two council employees with their whipper snippers going full bore. Yes, you have to ask yourself why would they think it appropriate to do that during lunch time when it surely should be a before 10am or after 2pm job. Who needs tourists anyway.
We phoned ahead to Hamlin Pool Caravan Park to check availability and made a booking. At $22 a night it was a good rate. Hamlin Pool was a settlement and has the original telegraph station as a museum along with the shell quarry.
The telegraph station around 1959, but played an important part in the tracking information of the Gemini space program in 1964. The dish at Carnarvon tracked the rocket, but the phone lines went down, however, the telegraph line was still operative and the woman who worked there five years previously relayed the messages via morse code, saving the day.
Pretty scary to see stuff that I have used during my working life in a museum.
In the early 1900’s there were few trees here for timber, so they used the compressed shells, hand cut into blocks for building materials. These shells very tiny and survive in the high salinity of the water. Hamlin Pool is open to the sea but has a natural bar preventing full tidal changes so with evaporation due to the high temperatures has a very high salinity.
Down at the shell quarry, we saw another of the white winged blue wrens, again too quick to get a photo. We also saw another bird a Dusky Gerygone to tick off in our book. We heard the Chiming Wedgebill, so we are keen to see this one and tick it off.
This is one of the early buildings in Denham which is built out of the shell blocks.
I can’t help thinking that these two blokes couldn’t swim, but overloaded the boat to save a trip.
Stromatolites
Bacteria bugs growing in very salty, slimy water. Apparently the mounds of living organisms, are about 3,000 years old and still growing and scientists are very excited about it…….
The white stuff is foam, at first I thought it was salt.
This is the viewing walkway.
This cute baby swallow looked like it had just left the nest and new to the big world was just sitting there, totally unafraid.
The view of Hamlin Pool Caravan Park Museum Complex. It is privately owned and not funded by the government.
We then left for Denham, 100 kms away. We called into Eagle Bluff to the viewing platform over Shark Bay. It was hard to see where the sea ended and the sky started.
Shark at Shark Bay The view from Eagle Bluff
This is Denham. A beautiful foreshore across from the shops. Bottom left is the Discovery Centre which is the tourist information centre. This is a really nice little town, on the western side of Cape Peron.
We really enjoyed Denham too - very pretty and laid back town. We had an emu and chicks walking across the park next to the foreshore!
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