Jurien Bay

Jurien Bay is only 250km North of Perth, so is well and truly in holiday and weekend away distance. When we arrived it was still the end of the WA school holidays and the park was heaving with families and kids, 2 days later we were almost the only people here. We had been hoping to have a game or two of golf while we were here, but found that the local course had sand greens. However, John was so desperate to get a club back in his hand he decided to play in the club's Saturday competition anyway, a bit of an experience for someone who has only ever played on grass. Interesting, but probably not to be repeated in the near future!




Just south of Jurien Bay, Nambung National Park is home to The Pinnacles, a collection of weird rock pillars sticking up out of the desert. Elsewhere in the area it is scrub and grassland, including heaps of wildflowers, but just in this one patch it is classic desert country. There was a brand new visitors centre giving both Aboriginal and scientific views of the rocks and native flora and fauna, and very well set up walking and driving trails, winding their way around and through the rock formations.



The whole area around Jurien is classified as a 'bio-diversity hotspot' and there are more species of plants in the area than in a tropical rain forest. Accordingly, there are several national parks set aside to preserve the various ecosystems. One such park is Lesueur NP, where we did an interesting 8km walk to the top of a flat-topped mesa, providing panoramic views across the countryside and down to the sea. We also went to Stockyard Gully Reserve and did a walk through a cave cut by a creek - luckily dry at the moment. The part through the cave was about 250m long, pitch black of course. We only had one torch with us so held hands tightly to make sure neither of us wandered into a wall or hanging stalactite (or got taken by monster bats). Unlike our previous cave walk at Tunnel Creek (see Derby), we were the only ones there, so we weren't helped by other people's torches. It felt a lot longer than 250m before we turned a corner and saw the glow from the other end of the tunnel!



We also had an its-a-small-world experience while in Jurien. As we were driving out of Stockyard Gully, on a VERY rough 4wd track (probably the main reason why not many people visit) we came across a camera bag, just sitting in the middle of the track. It looked like quite an expensive camera, certainly a lot flasher than our little pocket job. There was no name or phone number in the bag, so we handed it in to the police station at the nearest town. The next day we got a phone call from the owner thanking us for handing it in. As John was on the phone Wendy could hear the conversation in stereo - it turned out the people who lost it were in a tent right behind our van! They hadn't even realised the camera was missing - he must have put it on the bumper bar of his car after they had done the walk at the cave and then driven off with it still there. The police had looked at the photos on the camera and recognised one of the people - it turns out the camera owner had visited his brother recently and taken a couple of family snaps, the brother was a policeman and one of the police at the station we handed the camera in to recognised him from a training course they had done together. How lucky was that!



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