Ancient stromatolites & Beautiful wildflowers 8th September 2007

I have put a photo of the view from our cabin so you can see what a strange caravan park this one is. It is a terraced park and we were at the top terrace with two below us. The ground was covered with little shells and shell pieces. As you can see, our view was pretty good!
Today we left Denham, the windy town, and headed back to the turnoff to join the highway that leads to Perth but we only went as far as Geraldton and tomorrow we will be in the capital. We called in on the way to Hamelin’s Pool where ancient limestone rock built by cyanobacteria (blue-green bacteria) called Stromatolites or living rocks still exist. These can survive in very salty water where many other creatures cannot which is why they are not grazed on by sea snails. Apparently the pool has a restricted tidal flow due to a sandbar at its entrance and it rapidly evaporates and so becomes very concentrated in saline which the stromatolites live in. They resemble rock which is what they become like but some do stay spongy underneath depending on where they live. These have been dated as being about 3,000 years old. They have a walkway to allow visitors to view the stromatolites up close without damaging them.
After this we got back onto the ‘big dipper’ road, which is what I call it because it is so up and down in great big dips that you can see from the distance, and headed off toward Geraldton. We had read in Western Australia’s Wildflower Holiday Guide that at Riverside Sanctuary about 50km north of Northampton we took take a guided wildflower tour on the farm in some of the 10,000 acres of remnant bushland so we went there but after rousing the farmer’s wife who sounded very doubtful then the farmer we were told it is a bad year for wildflowers but not as bad as last year but we could take a look along the Riverside Road on our way out. We did that and were still fairly impressed with the carpets of flowers we could see; white and yellow everlastings and a little pink one as well as some garden variety yellow daisy weeds. As you can see by the photos they make a lovely display considering nobody puts them there, they just crop up wherever the seeds have blown to. There are supposed to be wildflowers to see in Ravensthorpe area also, in fact there are many areas according to this booklet which breaks the wildflower tours into eleven trail zones which are different parts of Western Australia. For example, Perth Trail, Wave Rock Trail, Goldfields Trail etc. We were following guides from the Northern Explorer Trail. It’s a great resource for those who are keen to see wildflowers except sometimes the directions on how to get to a particular place are a little vague. I guess they hope you only use it as a guide of where to go and have better maps to help you also.
We got to Geraldton and found out, after some probing because the caravan park receptionist is not up with the internet services they offer, that they have a wireless service if you go into the games room but you need to buy a pre-paid card to use it. As it turned out, we could have paid online but we got the cards anyway; it was $10 for 100 minutes access and it was quite fast so at least I could get the photos and BLOG posts up very quickly and make the best use of the time available. I even got to catch up with my good friend Maree on MSN! When we get to Perth tomorrow we will call Vodafone and try to get the USB modem up and running again.