Day 8 - Wed 27th May

Unfortunately our time in Shark Bay came to an end… so I was determined to enjoy every last moment… First up, watching the sunrise from our campsite:

On the station property there is a lake with a local bird population.  Once the sun was up we headed there for some bird watching.  My favourite sounding bird so far is the Chiming Wedgebill.  Yep, sounds like a chime ;)  My least favourite would be the Bush Curlew.  I am sure they call it a Curlew because when you hear one it curls your toes… Well, we had a local male who made his racket all night trying to impress the girly Curlew who had just come back to town…

The lake was an absolute oasis…

Looking over the lake back to the station: 

After breakfast we hit the road for Carnarvon.  A few weeks back Geraldine posted a picture from the top of the White Bluff lookout so our curiosity had been tweaked… White Bluff is one of those hills we have driven past a million times and pondered what was up there… now we know… gnomes!

Today’s highlight came from a completely unexpected detour.  I had spotted the Gladstone Ruins and Gladstone camp in the map book and so we decided to head down the 7km track to check it out… and were blown away.  Apparently Gladstone used to be a port for moving wool between the north west and Perth.  There is a decrepit jetty still standing at the site.   It looks like a great spot to camp with the sites scattered all along the beach.  The camp host told us that morning there had been a dugong in the shallows stealing fish out of someone’s net.  We trekked along the groyne out to the jetty with our eyes peeled for a ‘black lump’ in the water, the tell tale sign of a dugong.  Unfortunately, no dugong sighting for us, however, we had two dolphins chasing fish along the jetty just up from where we were standing.  It pretty much made up for our lack of dolphin interaction yesterday at Monkey Mia ;) 

Looking back at the camp: