Kalbarri - day 2

Sunday 27^th April 2008

We’d arranged to meet Johnny down at the beach so he could take us for a spin in his boat. Only Lisa was there – and that was because she had to be. She apparently had some issues with the level of alcohol in her body and it was affecting how she felt?! Johnny appeared shortly after with a ham salad roll, some chocolate (ostensibly for the girls) and an all important Red Bull.

He took us south past Red Bluff – where Holly coaxed Paul into the water for five minutes – all the way past the cliffs. Paul did some of the steering – I think Johnny wanted some fresh air – and was the one who noticed a pod of dolphins skirting along the cliffs. We hurried over and watched as at least twenty of them surfaced occasionally and carried on nonchalantly down the coast. We all counted this as our best sighting of dolphins ever.

Inevitably, though, the girls could only take so much of looking at cliffs and bobbing up and down on the water so we headed back to port and Johnny headed back to bed.

We ventured off-road in the afternoon with a visit to the gorges of the Murchison River. If all the unsealed roads we come across are as good as that we’ll be laughing, but I suspect it was merely a gentle intro. We first stopped at a lookout that had stunning views and then moved on to the Loop and Nature’s Window. Katie wanted to whinge about the 800m we had to walk down to Nature’s Window and admittedly the flies were BAD but she got into the swing of things after a bit – even trotting after her mountain-goat sister and endeavouring to be the first at the window. That was a bit hair-raising for us as they skipped over loose boulders (there’s that word again!) but it definitely improved the atmosphere.

The Window does have a stunning view and it really is impressive but for me it was slightly spoiled by the rock that had been concreted onto the optimum spot for a photo, and the Japanese tourists taking a million photos of each other in a hundred moody poses. I guess we should be grateful since they did take the photo of the four of us which would otherwise have been impossible.

Holly hadn’t had enough of rock skipping so we did the first part of the Loop walk (the whole thing takes 3-4 hours so we didn’t venture far) and felt like slightly more intrepid tourists. After that Katie literally ran all the way up the steepish, rocky slope to the car-park – so much for not liking walking!

Back in Kalbarri, Johnny had flown back down to Perth so we trotted out with Lisa to Finlay’s BBQ place. The fish was superb – my orange roughy was excellent – and the ambience was very laid-back Aussie style. It was BYO and we even had to take our own glasses, the plates, knives and forks are all plastic, you get damper in a bag and they provide tubs of margarine to slather on. We entered the daily raffle for the Old Bastards’ (members of Finlay’s) charity of choice and when the holder of the first ticket appeared to have left the building it was drawn again. Katie was the winner! She received a bottle of wine, two glasses and two Old Bastards stubby holders presented in a box wrapped with newspaper and she was the happiest girl in the place (unlike her sister who had divvied up the tickets and given herself the ‘wrong’ ones!).

Our second night in the caravan park – it was surprisingly quiet, but I guess a lot of visitors had to retreat home with the end of the holidays. Our adventure has now well and truly started!