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The day after the night before. A little hungover - as expected but I managed to get up early to the glorious sight of pure blue sky. A welcome sight after the previous few days of waking up to cold, wind & rain. I decided to head for the beach to chill out before lunch. Being a quiet place, Kalbarri beach is only frequented with a few souls and is an ideal place to relax and try and get a tan. In the afternoon I joined Sabrina & Anna-Marie for a walk down to the Seahorse Sanctuary and the Parrot & Bird habitat at Rainbow Jungle, which incidentally is also where the outdoor cinema is located.
The Seahorse sanctuary was supposed to be a 20 minute walk according the lady who ran the backpackers but in reality it was more of a 20 minute bike ride. Not that we were complaining. Well, not much anyway! It was actually a really nice walk along the coastline and a chance to take some spectacular pictures of Kalbarri before reaching the sanctuary. The Seahorse Sanctuary is apparently the only one of it's kind in the world. It is a self funded breeding centre and breeds many species of Seahorses, with more and more being bred. If the question ever comes up in a pub quiz about the impregnation process of the seahorse I will know that it is the male seahorse that gets impregnated, not the female. Apparently the pregnancy only last about 14 days and after the male releases the babies from his pouch it is 'job done' and up the the female to look after the babies from there on. I don't think house husbands have made it to the Seahorse world yet. Agter seeing the Seahorse breeding centre we took a short walk to Rainbow jungle to see the Parrot & Bird habitat. This is also a breeding centre as well as a zoo and contains many parrots, both rare and not so rare. Some have to be kept in captivity as they destroy the Australian environment. There were two parrots in particular that we saw that had been bought with the specific purpose of breeding. On the sign it stated that the centre had paid a lot of money for them but unfortunately in the two years they had had them they had no luck breeding at all. They had all but given up on them. However the sign next to them it revealed that after about 2 years a miracle had happened and they had finally 'got together'. I guess persistence finally paid off for the owners of the breeding centre and possibly for one of the parrots as well!
For our evening entertainment the girls decided to go back to Rainbow Jungle to the open air cinema to watch 'Mamma Mia'. To be honest I was a bit reluctant at first. You see - Musicals are not really my thing.But I do like a bit of Abba and a bit of cheese so decided to tag along. And I was pleasantly surprised. It was actually really good and funny. Total cheese, but I had a great time. Australia, I was told, would be a life changing experience. However I wasn't told that it would be a life-style changing experience.....
An early night after the cinema was required and I felt refreshed enough to tackle the cycle tour of the gorges and coastline with Mamma Mia, Dancing Queen and SOS still running around in my head and allegedly being hummed by myself. We had decided not to tackle the full 55 km cycle, instead we jumped in the van for an extra five dollars and were taken to the furthest gorge lookout and we would cycle back the rest of the 25kms. A 'Tour de Kalbarri' was probably going to be too much for a now unfit backpacker. We were dropped off in Kalbarri National Park, where I experienced my first encounter with the flies. And believe me, it is bad. Especially in the National parks. The fly spray didn't seem to do what it said on the tin either so it was a case of having to co-exist with them on my face, everywhere! We slowly cycled back towards the town, stopping off at many of the lookout points and walking down to one of the gorges for lunch. The scenery was stunning, as can be seen in some of my photos. Rugged bushland mixed with a beautful coastline and idyllic gorges. This is why I came travelling - to see things like this!
After the 25 km cycle back to town and a relaxing afternoon on the beach another early night was in order for the following mornings sandboarding experience. I have never been sandboarding before so I had no idea what to expect, apart from the obvious. Our sandboarding guide took us out to a spot around 30 minutes outside of Kalbarri, through a couple of fields and to the sanddunes. There was quite a big group, split into two cars. On arrival at the sand dunes the two guides lowered the tyre pressure on the cars, presumably this makes a big difference when driving on the sand. After driving through the sand dunes we arrived at a really steep drop, which obviously the car was not going to go down. Now, the picture of this drop does not do it justice by any stretch of the imagination but trust me - it was steep! One of the guys sitting behind me commented that there would be no way we would be sandboarding down that hill as it was so steep. Well, he was right. We didn't. But what no-one was expecting was what was about to happen. The driver hovered the car over the drop for a couple of seconds and then drove down it. We were told to bring a couple of bottles of water, a towel, sunbathers, suncream but a spare pair of underpants were definitely not on the list. I think my heart skipped a beat as the car negotiated the 50m almost vertical drop down the hill affectionately know as 'Suicide Hill'. With barely time to get our heart rates back to some sort of normality we were told to get out of the car and climb back up the hill ourselves. " You have to be joking" I thought. But he wasn't and there we all were crawling up this massive drop. Most of us were struggling. I suppose the message the guide was trying to get across was that there would be a lot of this today as there were no chairlifts or cable cars to get us back up the dunes once we had boarded down them. This sandboarding seemed like a lot of effort!
So after dicing with death on Suicide Hill and getting a workout tougher than Mr Motivator we were taken to out first spot for our first sandboarding experience. A small hill to ease us in gently. We were provided with our sandboards and instructed that there were three different ways to get down the dune - lying on your front, sitting on the board or lying on your front going down backwards. After a few goes we moved on to bigger hills including an 80m hill. Going down was fun - walking back up was not! Then- before lunch the sandboarding experience was cranked up a notch - standing on the board. Apparently this is where the most injuries are caused with people tumbling off the board. But back to that a little later......
So we started off nice and easy on a small, gentle slope. I fell off a couple of times but I was going so slowly that it was never going to injure me. After a few runs I started getting quite good so I decided to tackle the bigger dune. Fisrt time - perfect. I gracefully boarded down the dune effortlessly. Confidence was high - so I had another go. Not so good this time - I fell off and bruised myself in the process. What do you do when you fall off, I thought? Get back up there and have another go! So I did. And this was when my sandboarding adventure came to an adrupt end and perhaps the point at which I choose to retire from the sport. This time I lost control of the sandboard and for a split second I thought "oh s***, what do I do now?" and before I could work out what I needed to do I was collapsed in a heap on the dune with a badly twisted knee. I was able to hobble up the slope but thought better of trying any more boarding. And lucky I did! It was a really fun day but a shame it ended in injury. As I was to discover the knee swelled up so much I couldn't walk the next day and a visit to Kalbarri medical centre was required to get a doctors opinion and a pair of crutches! My plan to leave the next day on the Easyrider bus was not going to happen so it became clear that I was to spend a few more days in Kalbarri while my knee (hopefully) got better!
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