Day 48: 20231110 Friday November 10, 2023- Geraldton, Western Australia
Having breakfast delivered to the room on shore excursion days can save a bit of trouble getting breakfast if you have an early excursion. This worked out for us today. The ship pulled into Geraldton around 6am. We had breakfast delivered at 7am, and our excursion met in the departure lounge at 8am. The weather in Geraldton is much more to our liking. It was 69˚F with 70% humidity- comfortable enough to have breakfast on the balcony while watching the crew tie up the ship, and trucks loaded with iron ore transferring their loads to storage bins on at the port.
Our excursion took us 90 minutes north of Geraldton to the Kalbarri National Park. As we drove through Geraldton, it looked a lot like the suburbs of Sydney, but as we headed out of town it was apparent that this part of Western Australia is a lot more ranch land with large tracts of pasture and recently mowed fields. They grow a lot of canola in addition to other grains.
We passed stretches of bush, characterized by scrubby plants and rocky ground. Among the most noticeable unusual plants is something the locals used to call “Black Boys with Spears”, but now is less offensively called the grass tree. The scientific name is Xanthorrhoea australis, and to us, they looked like relatives of the Joshua Trees in the Mojave desert, but when they flower, they send a spike up to 6’ long covered with flowers that from a distance does look like a spear.
These trees have a thick cork-like bark that is fire resistant. Bush fires leave these trunks blackened in color, and the fires trigger flowering. The other most noticeable is a fairly rare tree with bright orange flowers that are visible from a long ways away. The locals call these Western Australian Christmas Trees because when they flower, Christmas is near.
They are almost as remarkable as the Jacarandas around Sydney. Its scientific name is Nuytsia Floribunda and interestingly enough, it is a hemiparasite that taps into the roots of surrounding plants including grasses and shrubs. It is the largest parasitic plant in the world and related to mistletoe. Its parasitic root structures can extend 150m from the tree. The image is courtesy of Curtin University because we were driving so fast through the countryside that by the time I spotted the next WA Christmas Tree, it was too late to snap a photo.
The bus made a comfort stop in a small town Northampton with a public park in the middle of town. The trees in the park were filled with Pink and Grey Cockatoos called Galahs by the locals. These are quite social birds, and an unusual sight for us, although the locals say they can be a bit of a pest to seed growers. Since canola is an important crop, perhaps this is why the locals aren’t as excited about seeing them as us tourists are. The playground had some imaginative features.
There is a lot of beautiful countryside along the coast where the fields slope down toward the bluffs with the indigo blue waters of the Indian Ocean highlighted with bright white caps in the distance. The coastline is largely sandstone cliffs, but the hillsides have a lot of mesas and even some isolated pointed hills that look suspiciously like cinder cones.
Our main destination was a series of canyon overlooks called the Kalbarri Skywalk. There are two cantilevered steel structures that extend as much as 150m over the canyon edge.
The Murchison river has carved this canyon out of sandstone, and it is like a little Grand Canyon. The sandstones are said to contain fossilized tracks of many ancient arthropods. Reproductions were scattered around the viewing areas and the displays were very well done.
There were bronze statues of various wildlife, although some had been stolen recently, and probably sold as scrap to support someone’s drug habit.
It was very windy so you really had to hold on to your hat or leave it in the bus. Fortunately, the temperature was in the mid 70’s˚F so it was quite comfortable in shirt sleeves. The Skywalk platforms were open grates like you would find in many marinas so you could look straight down hundreds of feet. They were also very beefy structures so there was absolutely no shaking, bouncing or swaying. There are many hiking tracks in the area which lead to caves where aboriginals had lived, and undoubtedly to the many sites where the arthropod track fossils could be seen, but we didn’t have time on our brief tour stop, and they would have been like the tracks in the Blue Mountains, with lots of elevation and stairs. The tour operator did serve some fruit juice and delicious home made carrot cake.
The next stop was in the actual town of Kalbarri, which is at the mouth of the Murchison river. It was a small fishing village, but now largely subsists on the tourist trade. There is a marina in town, but the bar at the mouth of the river where it drains into the Indian Ocean looks extremely treacherous. The guides did say that rescues are not an uncommon thing.
There is a rescue station right at the mouth of the river where the park where we had lunch was. The tour company set up lunch on a lawn overlooking the mouth of the Murchison river with tables and folding chairs. They had a buffet with several kinds of salads and small hand sized pies containing salmon/feta, Bacon/Onion, and Vegetarian options. The food was tasty, but the wind was just as strong as it was at the Skywalk, so chairs, plates, food and hats were flying all over the place.
To make matters even more confusing, a large flock of silver gulls was hanging around and they would swoop in whenever a plate got flipped in the wind spilling food on the grass. It took just seconds for the gulls to gobble up anything on the ground and they made quite the racket. It would not have been a good experience for anyone afraid of birds.
We headed a little further up the coast to two coastal view points where we could look out at the eroding sandstone cliffs where they met the Indian Ocean. It looked a lot like the Great Ocean Road scenery in Victoria, but without the flies.
There is an unusual salt water lake along the coast where an algae called Dunaliella salina causes the water to be Barbie pink in color. BASF owns the lakes and salt beds and harvests the algae for many uses including cosmetics, supplements and also harvests brine shrimp for aquarists.
While these lakes are something else to see, off shore on Middle Island is Lake Hillier, which is quite famous for its bubble gum pink round lake on a small green island in the middle of the blue Indian Ocean. But you can really only see that from a plane or helicopter.
On our return to Geraldton, we did a drive by of the HMAS Sydney Memorial overlooking the Geraldton Harbor. The HMAS Sydney was sunk in 1941 by the German cruiser Kormoran disguised as a merchant ship with false Dutch flags. The Germans dropped camouflage and opened fire when they couldn’t reveal the secret callsign that had been agreed upon by Dutch authorities. The HMAS Sydney was severely damaged and ultimately sank, but not before doing enough damage to the German ship to assure its sinking as well. 318 Germans were rescued by a British merchant ship but there were no survivors of the Sydney. It remains the single most deadly engagement in Australian naval history. The centerpiece of the memorial is an unusual dome made up of 645 birds symbolizing the souls lost when the HMAS Sydney was sunk by a German cruiser off the coast of Geraldton.
A stele representing the prow of the ship and a bronze statue of a woman looking out to sea, and a granite wall with the names of the lost make up the rest of the memorial.
We were the last tour group to return to the ship, which was in the process of removing other gangways. We had dinner in the main dining room when we heard an announcement from the Captain that winds outside the harbor were over 50kts and that it was impossible for the ship to leave the harbor safely. Winds were predicted to drop below 40kts by 5am so the ship will remain docked in Geraldton until 5am tomorrow. Since there are a couple hundred passenger scheduled to disembark in Perth/Freemantle tomorrow, this will severely impact them. Our room steward was also scheduled to disembark tomorrow as it is the last day of his contract. He is very much looking forward to going home to the Philippines, and we gave him going away presents as he turned our room down for the night. Guess he’ll have to make our bed one more time.
