Tag Archives: Northampton

The weather is much cooler with intermittent sunshine.  Winter seems to be arriving early this year.  Northampton is a charming National Trust-classified town established in 1848 which is about as old at it gets in this part of the world.  There is some splendid architecture here – grand stone buildings with wide verandas and olde worlde stores with corrugated tin awnings seem incongruous in this country of  the prefab.  The Old Convent, now a provider of budget accommodation and the pretty ‘gothic’ style Catholic St Mary’s Church next door are wonderful examples of the 20^th century designs of Monsignor Hawes, a English-born Catholic priest who spent 27 years of his life in Australia and left his mark in several towns around the mid-west.  The interior of the church is more like a chapel but for the images of Christ on the cross and St John holding the baby Jesus, which dominate its small interior.  But it is a bank holiday and only the visitors centre – housed in the old Police Station – and a couple of petrol stations are open, so we decide to come back tomorrow for a more thorough look around.

On to Horrocks, a little, slightly untidy, seaside village with a smelly, seaweed-strewn beach and a reef just offshore.  It’s rather overcast as we take a short stroll along the beach.  On the way back to the car park we discover a covered picnic area with sink, tables and – unbelievably – two working electric sockets.  It seems rude to pass up this golden opportunity to charge up the laptops and camera and brew up in the meantime. 

We return to last night’s camp ground collecting some firewood along the way.

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We are down by the beach by 8.45 am for the pelican feeding which takes place daily on the Kalbarri foreshore.  A small crowd has gathered but there is no sign of either the volunteer with the  bucket of fish or, indeed, the wild pelicans.  Twenty minutes later we are about to return toe van when the lady with the fish appears, but the pelicans seem to be otherwise engaged – apparently it is mating season and the waters of a nearby lake are full and food is plentiful.  We hang on for another 15 minutes or so as the lady with the fish bravely tries to make up for the absence of the star attraction with some general information about pelicans (did you know for instance, that a pelican’s bill can hold 12 litres of water?).  All the while she is tossing fish towards the beach to be greedily snatched up by a large flock of seagulls who presumably can’t believe their good fortune.  We are just about to leave, when our patience is rewarded.  The first pelican descends from the sky, shortly followed by three others.  With a three metre wingspan and huge bill they are a remarkable sight in flight.  Gradually they make their way up the beach coming right into the semi-circle created by the crowd, where with an expert eye, they catch the fish in their bills.

Today is the Canoe and Crayfish Festival in Kalbarri.   A few craft stalls, a couple of bouncy castles and the crayfish stall form the backdrop for this event, the highlight of which is a number of kayak races in the bay and a tug-of-war.  The former proves to have limited appeal, to us at least, as only the start and finish take place within viewing distance whilst the rest of the race goes on somewhere further up river.  We spend a while browsing the stalls and inspecting the winners of the sandcastle competition before deciding to say our goodbyes to Kalbarri and continue our exploration of the coast. 

Our first stop is at Jake’s Point, a popular surfing beach with huge curling breaks of the sort you usually only get to see on television.  There are some seriously skilful surfers out today and we stand on the rocks watching their displays.  But more attention-grabbing are a pod of about half-a-dozen dolphins who are also here to frolic in the waves and surf the rollers.  Just like the surfers they wait in the swell for just the right wave and when it comes they swim inside it until the surf breaks.  As it carries them forward they fly out of the front of the surf in a perfect arc.  Then just as their performance seems to be over, the hole pod leaps, perfectly sychronised, through the back of the dying wave and swims out to sea to start the whole process over again. The simple things in life are definitely the sweetest!

Eventually, we tear ourselves away;  the dolphins have tired of their recreation and we hungry.for lunch.  In the afternoon we visit several coastal viewing points that fall within Kalbarri National Park – Eagle Gorge, Island Rock, and Natural Bridge-  before heading on the Port Gregory to see the Pink Lake.  There is little to detain us a Port Gregory which is a small fishing village-cum-holiday retreat and we make our way to a camp ground just south of Northampton collecting wood on the way for an evening round a camp fire.

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