The first leg of our journey was to follow the coast south to Port Gregory and then turn inland to Northampton before rejoining the Brand Highway and heading for Geraldton. The road was quite pretty initially, but we ended up in miles of scrubland as we headed south. By around 0930 we were arriving in Geraldton 160km into our journey.
We had a brief refuelling stop at there and were pleased to find that prices are lower back in semi-civilisation! From Geraldton, it was about another 130km south to a turn-off to join the Indian Ocean Drive. We'd avoided this road on the way north as we thought it would be a slow road. Wrong! We stopped at the first place of any size, Leeman. When I say size, I mean there was a fuel station, a shop, a cafe and a caravan park! We stopped at the cafe for a drink and the loo, but found the owner to be fairly unwelcoming. When she brought my coffee, we asked if we could use the loos, she said no, the public ones are on the foreshore! Lynn went to investigate and found they were out of order! It's the first time since we've been here that we have experienced unhelpful and unfriendly people.
Back on the road, we continued to hurtle south down the coast through Jurien Bay and on to Cervantes, a town that uses Don Quixote as its emblem. We thought we'd have a cafe lunch here, but no such luck. The IGA mini supermarket sold us a couple of cheese and bacon rolls instead!
A few kilometres south of Cervantes is the entrance to Pinnacles NP. We both wanted to see this weird desert landscape. After paying our A$12 entry fee, we took a 4km long sandy loop road through part of the desert. Those looking at my FB page will see the strange rocks standing upright in the desert, there are tens of thousands of them. No-one is entirely sure how the feature formed, there are several competing scientific theories behind it. I just wandered around some of the stones considering the strange, and sometimes inexplicable, planet we inhabit.
The visitors centre reminded us that our entrance ticket was valid at Yanchep NP, 150km south, too. Back in the car, we continued south through Lancelin to Yanchep. This park is only 59km north of Perth and is home to lots of native Australian animals.
Once parked up, we found that we were in a grove of Eucalyptus trees that had several Koalas feeding on the leaves. It's difficult to avoid taking lots of pictures of them as they are rather cute! We also saw a few birds before turning our attention to the front lawn of the Tudor-styled, Yanchep Hotel. Grazing the wide expanse of green were about 30 Kangaroos. They don't seem to bothered by humans and we stood and watched them for a while. Some of the 'Joeys' stay and use their Mums pouch when they are way too big, leaving legs and tails hanging out! One family group I watched, had a Male a Female and a fairly small Joey. This Joey was quite keen on feed from his Mum still but she wasn't so keen as she had another Joey in her pouch! We also photographed a very large spider in the middle of its web.
From Yanchep is was about 70km into northern Freemantle and then over the river into Freemantle itself. We are staying for three nights at the Gallery Hotel near Bibra Lake in the suburbs of the city.
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