An early start this morning thanks in no small part to a pair of cockerels that decided 4am was close enough to sunrise as makes no odds ! There were too many flies to hang around so as soon as the coffee was made and safely stored in our insulated mugs we hit the road.
The first part of today’s journey took us through the Kalbarri National park. A diversion off the main road onto around 25k of mixed sealed and unsealed road brought us to a series of lookouts and walks that follow the inland gorges carved by the Murchison river. The gorges have water in them at the moment which, apparently, is the first time for 3 years.
We bottled out of the 7k walk and climb down to the river in the bottom of the gorge as we were plenty hot enough on the rim of the gorge with temperatures in the low 30s.
After a few hours of exploring the gorges we headed back to the road again and followed it to highway 1, the North West Coastal Highway as it’s known at this point. Turning north again the highway is a bit of a drag, similar to the Nullarbor although it does have a few trees. Lots of signs of recent bush fires at the side of the road too. We stopped for fuel at the Billabong Roadhouse and took full advantage of the air conditioned cafe area to have some lunch. Temperatures have certainly started to creep up over the last few days and it’s now very uncomfortable sitting in the car when it’s stationary.
After leaving the main highway to head towards Denham we had a brief stop to look at the stromatolites at Hamlin Pool. Stromatolites are created by primitive Cyanobacteria that bind sediments together, forming rock like structure. Fossilised stromatolites are among the oldest evidence of life on earth and these living versions only exist in 4 places now. They look a bit like large cow pats though… It had to be said.
At some point we crossed the 26th parallel which means we’re now to the north of latitude 26. In simple terms that means that we’re now officially in the north of Australia as latitude 26  runs through the centre and we’re north of it !

Anyway, Denham is a nice spot and gives us a good base to visit Monkey Mia tomorrow. We’ve booked in for two nights so we’ll be able to take our time tomorrow at Monkey Mia and exploring some of the 4×4 tracks in the national park. On Thursday we should then be able to get to Carnarvon and then somewhere near Exmouth on Friday. We’ll try and get signed up for a snorkelling trip at Ningaloo on Saturday.

The camp site at Denham has free WiFi with a decent speed so we finally managed to update the HEMA maps on the iPad so we have the most recent versions. Tomorrow night I might upload some of the pics from the proper camera to the gallery (all the pics on the blog have been taken with our iPhones).