8GreatEscapes - 1. Escape to Ningaloo - Pe...

Day 4 Kalbarri

On The Road With Chris Day 4 DriveWA Ep. 4

The alarm went at 0630 again this morning and we were "up and at 'em" for breakfast in Marks magnificent one bedroom apartment which has a full kitchen - the Kalbarri Edge Resort rooms are truly excellent - we were still using the stocks we purchased at the Deli in Midland on Day 1 - the fridge in the WA Pass Nissan is an excellent investment which has paid for itself a thousand times over. We had toast, butter and apricot jam and avocado depending on your preference with Taryn eating the left over salad from the previous night and picking out the spring onion etc

The team went fishing whilst I did admin work for the show - Steve rang me from the boat to tell me they had nearly finished and that he and Taryn had caught two really nice Taylor each while Mark had caught nothing despite his keenness and his obvious passion for fishing. Steve had already rung Marks mate Andrew the owner of ORE to tell him the news so Mark is expecting a rude reception from his mates when he arrives home about being outfished by a girl who was basically very very inexperienced. Great for the DriveWA show though!

So we took off to the Rainbow Jungle where the owner Kevin Kelly showed us round – I was amazed how big the attraction was and was astounded by the enormous array of different multicoloured parrots and other birds from all around the world. One does not always expect displays of that quality with such a variety in regional WA. And from there we went just around the corner to the Seahorse Sanctuary where the owners Mike and Wendy made us very welcome. This small regional business sells horses (seahorses) to places all around the world and they are beautiful. I purchased a lovely book for my elder daughter to use as a teaching aide for her kiddies - she teaches Y2 at a Perth Primary School.

We purchased a pack lunch in town and took the two 4WDs off to play - we set off for Lucky Bay with Steve very confident that he could find his way there. It is not easy and when we turned off we were without our trusty Oziexplorer moving map software because Marks computer was playing up - ever since we loaded the spooky Oakabella photo onto it - so if you have looked at it watch out.

Then followed about 40mins worth of quite stressful 4wd through some rediculously narrow vehicle tracls - which I would not normally worry about with the WA Pass Nissan as I am not that careful about how it looks but we had one of John Hughes cars so we needed to be careful with it.

We finally found our way up to the dunes after Mark had done a piece to camera about my valve deflaters which Mark loves - and then we were in those spectacular sand dunes - they are absolutely spectacular and Taryn had her first 4WD experience and loved every second of it.

Watch the DriveWA webisode off this day below

source: LocoTV

We struggled a bit to find our way out but suddenly on our UHF radio we had help from a gentleman – he was a machinery driver who was overlooking the flat land we were on from a hill he was working on opposite and he could see where we were going wrong and of course they all use UHFs for work and probably we were on his working channel or he was on scan.

So we drove home along the beach to the tin sheds from where there was a reasonably well marked track to the main road.

We went to Finlays for dinner (5.30pm to 8.30pm) and we had a great time - the meals only cost about $20/head for the main and the food was excellent.

They had a trivia quiz going which I managed to get the right answer to a couple of times and won a couple of minties - oh the excitement - but it was great fun and later on Steve and I got the accoustic guitars out of the WA Pass Nissan again and had a hoot around their small campfire with about 20 people singing along - some in tune some out - but that didn't matter. It was just great good clean Aussie fun in the outback - well almost the outback!

>> Go to Day 5: Kalbarri to Monkey Mia