The old Koonalda Station was so quiet last night, no trucks or other people, just the sound of a few bugs hitting the side of the camper and the dingo’s howled for about 10 minutes just after dark. The wind dropped after one of those ruby red sunsets and did not get up again till the sun came up. While watering the horse after dark I had a bat do a 360 around me and I swivelled my head just at the right moment to have the headlamp right on him about 5cm away from my right shoulder. We were eye to eye briefly, they are ugly things bats. The sunrise time on the clock now is way later than in WA so while we got up at the normal ‘sun time’ we slept in by the ‘clock time’ (if that makes sense).

Trying to fill the truck at old Koonalda Station bowser!

We had breakfast and packed up the camper to the joy of the 250,000,000 flies that swarmed all over us. They know exactly when both your hands are occupied and go up your nose, into your mouth and fight over who is going into your ear. Just down from our campsite about 500M was the old shearing shed and yards. The yards were made from old railway sleepers and bush limbs. The fences around the property were all bush limbs with holes drilled in them and wire threaded through. Most of the wire had failed before the fence posts had.

Old shearing shed and yards

Three stand shearing shed

Some of the old fencing

Old scales. I remember using some very similar ones at a farm dad used to class at.

Down the bumpy road another 7Km we came to the Koonalda Cave a rather impressive hole in the ground that leads off to a cave system on one end. You are not allowed to enter the cave and it has steel gates on it. You would not want to anyway with the amount of fallen rock around the place. You would need abseil gear to get to the base anyway. There was an impressive undercut on one side. Apparently there is a lake in the cave system and they used to pump it out to water the station. On the way out we followed another dingo who could not hear us for the wind.

Koonalda Cave entrance

Can you see Sharon on the ledge? She is at the top of the access route down!

Dingo out the window

Back on the highway after a very slow 20Km drive out on the rough track we headed to the Nullarbor Roadhouse where I was going to take a detour out to the Murrawijinia Caves but in the end we decided to keep going and leave them for next time. Sharon was keen to see the whales at Head of the Bight lookout but when we arrived it was blowing a gale, the flies, wasps and Marchflies were thick, there were no whales and they wanted to slug us $15ea to walk down to the cliff and viewing platform. No thanks this time!

We drove on and stopped for lunch in a roadside stop where we were forced to make and eat lunch in the car due to the flies! We turned off the highway just past Nundroo and headed for Fowlers Bay not hopeful of the conditions there. The wind was not too bad here and we booked into the small caravan park for the night. The sand dunes here are massive and encroaching on the town. They had to demolish some buildings and re-route the main access a few years ago as the sand dunes moved forward. There is a sizable 384M jetty here and Sharon got to the end of a large jetty finally. Not Busselton but it is the best she will get this trip. The guy on the end had just caught a good whiting and some squid.

We climbed the huge sund dune on the edge of town and had a look around on top and through the town. There are many history boards and information displays dotted around town. Sand surfing is available here but it’s a tough gig to walk back up each time to come down again.

Catching up….

Sand dunes on the edge of town from the jetty