Carnarvon and quobba

End of Friday June 19. 

We got to Carnarvon yesterday. En route I found that my camera charge port was broken and the battery is fully dead. After hours on the phone trying to negotiate replacement batteries and cradle chargers to be hastily delivered to remote WA, I have given up and bought a cheap pair of binoculars to see me through the rest of the trip. Slight bummer. 

Yesterday: saw more black-cockatoos leaving Geraldton - drove through thick coastal fog at Northampton - stopped at Galena Bridge - stopped for a roadside picnic at Nerren Nerren and regretted the lack of an available bird camera - kept driving through meteor blasted waste-land until finally hitting Carnarvon at about 3pm. We had Japanese last night at a place called Miss Fang, which despite the threatening name was a very sweet outdoor eatery in a carpark, of good quality. 

Carnarvon is weird. It's on the same latitude as Bundaberg QLD, but feels like it's in in a tropical moonscape. It's a space town (there's a NASA base here), an aviation town (Kingsford-Smith landed here), a famous fishing town, a fruit town (one of Australia's two Big Bananas is here), a wool export town, a famous Long Jetty town, a depressing bogan meth-head town, a town with a long and ultimately tragic indigenous history, a heavily under-developed town. and one of the ugliest towns I have ever seen. Only in Carnarvon does the local Op Shop get a harbour view. But nearby, Quobba Blowholes and a nearby natural swimming pool called 'The Aquarium' are astoundingly great, and hopefully the wildlife there is a sign of things to come further north. 

We snorkelled in 'the aquarium' and I won't go on about the fish life, but for me the best bit was swimming over to an offshore island, on which we found one of the country's largest colonies of Australian Fairy Terns, a rare bird neither of us had previously seen. We also saw Little Terns and Lesser Crested Terns. 3 new spots in a row.

A Kiama resident happened to be nearby when we visited the Blowholes and in his view the Quobba Blowholes are than Kiama better by a mile. I have a video which I may upload in the coming days. 

I just cooked LMK 9 large local tiger prawns in garlic and chilli and now she is stealing my wine. Happy wife, good life. 

On a strange side-note: we just met two people from our street in Glenelg who also just happen to be in the Quobba area on a fishing trip. We've known them for years. It was strange to run into them in Carnarvon Mall, out of the blue. 

I posted the blowhole video on my facebook. You can see it here.  

​https://www.facebook.com/reel/1376784351014298