Denham

We travel with a 2-berth van but an early morning inspection proved that it can easily accommodate 200 bush flies on top of that. Most of them were still a bit sleepy when we found them on the side of the van, seemingly disappointed they hadn't been able to find a way in during the night to suck on our skin. We were terrorized during breakfast to the extent that we decided to brush our teeth while driving and make a quick stop further up the road to finish up.

Today we were going to the beach town of Denham in the Shark Bay area. It was around 300km driving from our free campsite. The area is probably mainly known because of the 'wild' dolphins at Monkey Mia which are being fed every morning. We thought that didn't sound too wildlife friendly and since we had already seen wild dolphins in natural setting in New Zealand, we decided to skip this. Nonetheless we felt it could be worth the detour to see Shell Beach, Hamelin Pool and some nice coast line.

The driving here is by the way quite different to anything we have experienced so far. Roads are straight as far as you can see, always surrounded by red sand and bushland that never seems to end. Once in awhile there is a goat, emu, kangoroo or bird showing its face or lying dead on or besides the street. And every 100km or so there is a roadhouse coming up, often with petrol station. While that's of course commonly known about Australia, it is still a different thing to experience yourself. For now we still very much enjoy it.

The first stop was Hamelin Pool, which is a Marine Nature Reserve where stromalites can be seen. These are rock-looking bacteria and the earliest signs of life on earth, as far as billions of years ago. It was cool to walk around there and learn a bit about them. Most were in calm, undeep water when we got there, and we could see some fish "floating in the air" swimming around the stromalites. We had another stop at a viewpoint over the sea, where it was interesting to see Australian red outback sand mixing with white beach sand.

We arrived early at out campsite in Denham, which was needed as it was also washing day. After a late lunch we originally wanted to check out the local beach for swimming as it was warm weather and a coastal town but we both didn't feel too well and decided to take it easy. Instead we baked some improvised spinach-tomato-paprika-feta dough pieces and had a healthy tasty dinner.Read more