Sunday, October 3, 2010

Part 4 (Kalbarri National Park)

We got up really early, around 5 AM, on Sunday morning and headed out to Kalbarri National Park. Our destination was the landmark Nature's Window rock formation and the hike, rather blandly named The Loop, which starts from it. Nature's Window is located at the end of 26 km of corrugated dirt road, which wasn't incredibly difficult to navigate in our little car (it was well-maintained, no potholes to speak of, just not paved and basically like driving on a washboard) but pretty time-consuming (it took us more than an hour to go about 16 miles). Once we got there, though, it was definitely worth it.


Nature's Window, which is a rock formation that's had a hole blasted through it by sand and wind, is Kalbarri's picture icon (like Old Faithful for Yellowstone) and it gets pretty crowded with people wanting to take pictures so we were glad we got there early - we were the second car to arrive, and the first ones on the trail. The Loop is only 8 km (5 miles) long, and we all wanted something a bit longer but that was really all that was available. Australia's "National Parks" are more like our state parks (there isn't one national agency that runs them) and most are just set-aside parcels of land without any trails or really development at all.


What we did get, though, was pretty phenomenal. The Loop starts out walking along a ridge atop a river gorge (you can just see Nature's Window off to the left in the picture above). After a mile or so it starts to drop down and goes along the bottom of the gorge (cared by the Murchison River, which ends at Kalbarri town) for most of the rest of the way before looping back to Nature's Window. Although it would have, again, been nice to have something a bit longer, I think we all really enjoyed the hike - apart from the flies, which were worse here than anywhere else we went. Saw some cool birds, a bunch of little skinks, a few kangaroos, and sadly two herds of feral goats.



Although we finished hiking around 1030 and avoided the heat of the day, it took a little more out of us than we realized as we all took a "little ten-minute nap" when we got back to the hostel that turned into a three-hour siesta. After waking up around 2, we had a very enjoyable afternoon reading and swimming at the beach, barbecuing some burgers for dinner, and watching the incredible Kalbarri sunset. The Kalbarri Pub also has a merri-go-round out front, so naturally we had to check that out and spent a happy couple hours there that night.

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