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Heading further north, the landscape has become more desolate with only a few roadhouses and stations inbetween. However, the scenery can change suddenly from the desert country to amazing rugged gorges and pristine coastline with white beaches and clear waters. We've seen emus crossing in front of us, turtles and rays swimming below us, big red kangaroos frightening us on our walk and the most annoying bush flies and march flies you've ever seen!!!!
To explore the Shark Bay area, we spent a few days camping right on the beach on Tamala Station, which is on a peninsular named the 'Useless Loop'! Far from being useless, though, we managed to catch fish 2 days in a row for our dinner - nice snapper and flathead, and Alf even caught a 'shovel-nosed' ray!
We used this as a base to drive up to the most western part of the Australian mainland - Steep Point! What a great day! It's a 4wd trip 3 hours one way over sand dunes a bit like the Simpson desert to the point where you can see Dirk Hartog Island, which was discovered 400 years ago! The cliffs along the coast here are also named by the dutch, Zuytdorp Cliffs (after a dutch shipwreck) - very rugged with some amazing blowholes which come out of the rocky surface on top of the cliff. They were actually a bit scary as you could hear the hissing of escaping air and see the water spray coming out of the obvious bigger holes as well as a lot of small holes. I held a stone above a crater about 6cm diameter and the first stone was sucked straight down, but the second one flew high up into the air -made me jump!
From there, we rejoined the bitumen again to see the 'touristy' sights which Shark Bay is renowned for: the Hamelin Pool stromatolites (unusual rock formations in high salinity water), Shell Beach (tiny shells compacted to form the beach and have been cut out to use as 'bricks' for buildings), Eagle Bluff (overlooking the clear waters to see sharks & rays below - also dugongs in season) and on to Denham, where we have spent the night.
Facing west every day, we have been blessed with the most amazing sunsets as well as some beautiful sunrises - God's beauty to greet us every morning and bless us every evening!
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