Day 7 of the Western Australian adventure: Kalbarri

Today was a rather long and uneventful day of driving with a few stops thrown in just for fun. We woke up in Denham and headed off early to our next stop which we had decided would be Kalbarri as there is a National Park there with some interesting things to see.

On the long drive to Kalbarri we stopped at Shell Beach, which is apparently the only beach in the world made up entirely of a crustacean shells.

Next stop along the way was the stromatolites, which was one of the things Dave had wanted to see. Stromatolites are collections of cyno bacteria - they are the first single-cellular organisms which produced oxygen and eventually gave rise to multi-cellular organisms; so basically, without them we wouldn't be here. Shark Bay is the only place in the world you can see them because they only live in extremely saline water. I could tell you why this is but it's actually not that interesting for a blog post...

What seemed like hours later we eventually arrived in Kalbarri. Once again, the Lonely Planet had been somewhat misleading - there was pretty much nothing to do in the town, despite it having said it was a hub of activity. There were some nice cafes and restaurants about but they were ridiculously expensive - I wouldn't pay that much for food in Sydney, let alone out in the middle of nowhere in Western Australia. So we settled for a night in our little cabin on the camp site with our usual picnic fodder, the essential ciders and a pack of cards for crib...I beat Dave twice...no change there then.