Perth to Broome - Day 1

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This is the longest tour we are going to do in Australia, 10 days!! as we've learnt from previous experiences, the people in the tour is what makes it good or bad and 10 days is not like 3 where if you don't like the people you can just keep to yourself for 3 days and move on...

Luckily for us, it was a great group of people. :-)

Let me introduce you to the team:

My apologies if some names are incorrectly spelled.

Front row, right to left
Daniela (Switzerland), Team Austria (Manuela and Irene), Silvano (Italy)
Second row, right to left
Snjezana (Croacia), Hitome(Japan), Alan (England), Simon (Germany), Rob (England), Ludmila (Russia), John (England)
Third row, right to left
Aída, myself, Wendy (England), Sharon (Ireland), Scot (Australia)

They picked us up in the morning at the Billabong and after sorting out all the people in the right buses we headed for Broome.

Our first stop of the day were the Pinnacles! Some of you may have heard about this place, in esence these are the remains of a forest after some of the trees petrified and the sand and soil trapped inside of the trunks got compacted with the pass of time. Today you can see hundreds of pinnacles point out in the middle of the sand.

The white you can see on the background is not snow, it seems the pinnacles have been covered by sand for many many years, the whiter the sand is the longer it's been exposed to the bleaching effect of the sun. Hence, the yellow sand it's been on the surface for less time than the white sand that you can see on the background.

If you like geology you should come to Australia, do the 3 month tour to Australia and you can almost graduate from any university!! you can't imagine how much geology you get to learn by just touring around Australia. :-)

In this picture you can appreciate the shape of the tree trunks

A relly impressive place.

Right after that it was action time! so we headed for some dunes and went to do some sandboarding!

The dune we were going to use for sandboarding looked pretty steep...and it was

Some people started sandboarding in the normal way, with your bum stuck to the board...

And in one of those attempts, Rob ended up in the bush... we could all see him heading for it..the only tree in 100 Km...and he just ended with his head in it! :-)

Luckly he manage to get out of it without a scratch.
I had tried sandboarding before so this time I wanted to try the real thing, standing up and when I stood on the board and looked down I had the sinking feeling I would end up the day in a hospital bed but there  wasn't backing out now...

You'll all be glad to know I managed to surf my way down several times with no harm done to my humble persona. :-) I thought some more people would also try to go standing up after seeing I survived the experience...but just going down with your bum stuck on the board was brave enough believe me...it was pretty steep although you cannot appreciate that from the photos...

My camera survived the sandy experience which was a good thing too. :-)

After that, we stopped at a place where there was a leaning tree

At first we couldn't understand why we stopped in the middle of nowhere to see a leaning tree...until we turned around...

and discovered that all trees were the same...you can tell where the wind blows from in this region. ;-)

Then it was sunset time, dinner and a good sleep in preparation for an other long day on the road tomorrow

Our accomodation today was in Horrocks beach. We had a house to ourselves although in reality was a backpackers accomodation and it just happened we were the only ones in it. :-)

Not bad for a first day. :-)
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