Pinnacles

We had a lot of rain and thunderstorms during the night - the noise actually woke me up a couple of times.

I got up early to fill up the car and thought I could beat the city traffic but even at 6:30AM the streets are very busy and crossing the Great Eastern Hwy was a major task, even without the caravan.

We heard on the news this morning that yesterday people were threatened by a gunman in the suburb of Northbridge and then in the Belmont Forum shopping centre - we visited both of those places yesterday on foot!

By 9am we left the Caravan Park and headed North on the Tonkin Hwy then across to North Perth and finally North on the brand new Indian Ocean Road.

It took some 50km before we got away from the Perth traffic and I was certainly happy to leave the city with all it's city problems behind.

After about 200km along this beautiful beach area we arrived at Cervantes just before lunch. Rain showers were moving through and kept the otherwise beautiful coastline shrouded in rain and cloud.

However, by 2pm the bad weather had mostly cleared and we set off to the famous Pinnacle Desert which is located 14km outside Cervantes. Along the way we stopped to photograph 5 Emu's - 1 Male with 4 chicks. In the Emu world the males look after the chicks.

The Pinnacles are very interesting limestone structures scattered throughout an area covered mainly with yellow coarse sand and not much vegetation. The origin of these structures dates back 500,000 years but they were buried until only 6000 years ago. Limestone was formed when rain water leached calcium out of sea shell based sand and after drying out the calcium binds the grains.

Although these limestone pillars are found all along the West coast, the Pinnacles represent the largst collection. How these pillars were formed is still not proven and scientist have a couple of different theories on what could have caused it.

After a quick browse through the Pinnacle's Discovery Centre we returned back to our caravan just before sunset. Our travel northward shall continue tomorrow.

Here is the link to today's travel map.