Heading north to coral country

A traveller, Alke and me at the Pinnacles.
see all photos »

Yesterday I started another Easyriders tour which takes about a week from Perth to Broome.  We started off yesterday by visiting the Pinnacles, interesting and somewhat phallic rock formations in the desert.  Then we hit almost every coastal town as we dropped off and picked up passengers before reaching our final destination for the night of Kalbarri.

This morning we headed out to the nearby gorges and I tried abseiling for the first time.  I'd do it again in a second.  The scary part was going over the first ledge, then it was jump and slide all the way down the 23m cliff.  All amidst some pretty fabulous scenery.

The Pinnacles
see all photos »

We also visited a fantastic grassroots marine park just on the tip of Shark Bay world heritage site, started by a couple local marine biologists.  It's called quite simply "Ocean Park". They catch all their specimens locally and put them in a variety of ecosystem-like tanks, including a big shark tank that actually had a small tiger shark in it!  Hopefully that's the only time I'll see a tiger shark up that close.  I didn't mention before, but great whites are also known to migrate along the southwestern coast of Australia, but attacks are extremely rare.  Needless to say, I was very glad there were no dramas during my dives at Rottnest island just off the coast of Perth.

Taking a leap of faith in the gorges near Kalbarri.
see all photos »

For the scholars amongst you, or those who have read Bill Bryson's book "In a Sunburnt Country", I also saw the famous 350 billion year old stromatolites in Hamelin bay.  These are the oldest living organisms on the earth, a form of cyanobacteria, and their oxygen production paved the way for the evolution for aerobic species like you and me.  How 'bout that.

Saw a beautiful sunset upon arriving in Denham tonight.  I think there will be many more as I travel along this coast of Australia.  Can't wait.

Sunset in Denham.
see all photos »

I'm adding now at a later date some details of the next day, visiting the wild Indian bottlenose dolphin feeding at Monkey Mia.  These dolphins unfortunately became dependent on humans to feed them several decades ago, and would have difficulty surviving now if they did not continue to get some supplements from humans.  However, they strictly control the number of fish each dolphin gets (and the staff know all the dolphins by name!), giving them only 3 feeds per day, with fewer grams of fish each time, encouraging them to retain their skills to fish in the wild.  Although we were not allowed to touch the dolphins, as you can see from the photos, they were just feet away.  After leaving the site, we had a relatively long drive to Coral Bay, the beginning of the Ningaloo reef.