Perth to Broome - Day 2

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Today was a day packed with several small walks and stops along the way. We are heading to Sharks bay where we'll be spending the night.

The first stop was at the Bigurda trail which is a nice trail along the cost. In this occasion we only stopped to admire the views since we had better walks to do within this day.

The first walk was to what they call Nature's Window which is, as its name indicates, a natural window formed by rocks and erosion.

And this is the famous window

My trademaked jump!  When you pose for tens of pictures it becomes quite tedious so sometimes you have to spike up the posing up. :-)

Right after this trail we went for another walk not far off called the Gorge trail and the z bend. By this time the temperature had risen to 35-40C, it was pretty hot.

Usually in these places they don't mess about with this things and there are always lots of signs to remind you to take sufficient water with you and also to let you know what the first symptoms of dehydration are.

You may thing it's obvious to bring lots of water with you when you are gonna be walking under the scortching sun for a couple of hours...but  that doesn't seem to be the case...a lot of people seem to prefer paying 400 AU$ for the bottle of salty water they attach to your arm when you are unconcious at the hospital after being taken there for suffering a severe case of dehydration...

Luckily, in this case, the trail was shilded from the sun by the gorge we were climbing down to so the heat wasn't too bad.

Walks are the best way to get to talk to people, the bus makes it more difficult so that's how you get to know people, either at dinner or on a walk.

And then we reached the bottom of the gorge

 

That was a nice walk. A pity nobody else wanted to join me to do some abseiling, that would have topped it up. :-)


Then we had a lot more driving in front of us... just to give you an idea of the kind of distances we are doing every day, I would say that as an average we are doing about 700 Km a day, that's a lot of hours on the bus and most of the driving takes place in the outback which means there isn't even a place where to stop, except for some odd looking petrol stations where you normally wouldn't stop to fill up your tank but here you either stop there or you risk doing another 2-3 hundred K until you find another.

This is what I'm talking about. The only petrol station in miles and miles...despite of not having a shop, nor proper toilets or anything like it, it was full, pretty much each car passing by was pulling over.

Believe me when I tell you this picture is quite complimentary of the place. It looks so much better on the photo than in reality.


These stops are quite boring, it's the only time we have to streach our legs and you can't really go anywere so we all end up standing up by the bus for 15-20 minutes, looking for a shade to protect us from the punishing sun, which some times goes well over the 40 Cs

Right before sunset we made it to shell beach. This is an incredible place. It is a beach as it's name would suggest and instead of sun it's got shells, millions of little shells and you walk through them as you would on sand.

Then the water is protected by a reef barrier so it's like a lagoon a very salty pond which only exchanges water with the main sea on a high tide, the rest of the time it's like a proper lake and it's also very shallow so if you want to get water up to your belly, you would have to walk for a couple of Km to get that much water. Also, thanks to the high temperatures and the fact the water remains enclosed pretty much all day, the water temperature is quite warm.

I can tell you, after all those hours on the bus, almost everyone jumped to the oportunity to get a dip in the water. :-)

And a group photo

Apart from enjoying a good swim we also enjoyed some spectacular views from the sunset.

Then it was time to head for our night accomodation. This time we stopped at Denham in Shark Bay.

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