Roadtrip to Exmouth: Day 7-9 coming home and Kalbarri

Day 7 was time to vacate Cape Range :( that was without doubt the easiest electricity, running water free 48 hours I've ever had and I will Definitely come back :)

So it was time to begin the 3 day trip home..... but alas! the drama was not over yet!

We had driven about 200+ km south when we get stopped by the police! Turned out that a petrol tanker had crashed about 12 hours earlier and they expected the road to be closed for at least another 5 hours!!!! the problem was, the only detouring road was over 100km back in the other direction!! Soooooo we had to back track and then take the long way round. This ended up being a 300km, 3.5 hour detour through the middle of nowhere!!!!! We were furious that they took so long to put a road closed sign up that would have saved us a few hours of driving before having to backtrack! Grrr... and might I add.... this is the MOST boring part of the drive aswell...

The highlight of that detour was finding not only roadworks but a TRAFFIC LIGHT in the absolute middle of nowhere. You really can't have a day in this country without being affected by road works. This would have been the only traffic light for thousands of kms.....

The other upside is that we got to cross the Tropic of Capricorn about 4 times...

Anyway all this meant is that we wouldn't make Kalbarri that night as planned, but instead we spent the night in one of Carnarvons finest caravan parks... It was actually quite pleasant and we went out for amazing pizza :)

Gotta love Carnarvon....

Day 8 saw us getting to Kalbarri but with weather to shock us back to reality. It was went and windy so many of the gorge roads were blocked. So much for all that sight seeing!.. We only got access to the first viewpoint:

The weather cleared for a few hours, so we took a lovely walk along the river for a couple of hours and lazed under the trees.

Then we went to the ocean to watch the mental waves as the ocean and river meet.

Roadtrip to Exmouth: Day 5-6, Cape range national Park

In order to get a campsite into the national park, you need to queue up first thing in the morning and hope for the best. A huge huge national park (with no power or water supply), and there is only 110 campsites available (with no more than 15 at each location). You can't book these sites, so the rangers find out who is leaving each day and at 8am they allow the same number of new campers in to the park to fill the spots of those who are leaving. This can mean 10 cars lined up and only 2 get in.... or none... you get the point. So to increase our chances, we arrived at about 530am. Yet there were already 2 cars waiting in front of us! We wasted time until sunrise then cooked up a feast on the side of the road waiting for the rangers.

And we were lucky that day... there were 9 cars lined up and the first 7 got entrance. including us! and we were blessed enough to get what i think is one of the best campsites, at the Lakeside camp. only 6 other campers and one of the only locations with shade, a clean drop toilet and only 50 metres from Coral reefs and stunning beach!!!..

This is the beach that we were camped near:

We spent that first day just lazing by the beach and snorkelling. At 5pm everyone at the camp gets their camp chair and a glass of wine to sit around and have a chat. it was nice to meet everyone - even being a good 30 years younger than most!

Day 6: Today we decided to head of and explore the rest of the park, starting with the the Yardie creek and Mandu Mandu gorges.

Yardie Creek (at the most southern point fo the park that is accessible by 2WD (from here though you can go along the beach to eventually reach coral bay.... 100+km away..):

rock wallaby!

Then we did the much more adventurous Mandu Mandu gorge. This was a coupld of hours going from the depths of the stone clad gunny up to the highest rocky peak to find 360 views of the ocean and moutains :)

Oh look theres some more emus! the park was also fulllll of ospreys (inda like sea eagles), mini emu things and about 2 million kangaroos!

More beach visits:

We followed the hikes with some more snorkelling! The snorkelling really was amazing. turles, eels, sting rays, octopuses and evry kind of tropical fish you can imagine