Friday 9 October 2020

Wildflower Trip – Part 5

If you watched the video in the last blog post you might have noticed I attempted to get very artistic (for me) by inverting the camera.  I was holding the camera vertically on the gimbal and then had this marvellous idea that I could invert the camera and gimbal which would bring the camera to ground level.  Of course that meant the video images were upside down but I was able to rectify that with the software,

Back to the trip.  We headed west to Horrocks a small town on the coast approximately 500km north of Perth and is at the southern end of the Coral Coast.  This is mostly a holiday town with fishing a surfing being the main activities.

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From Horrocks we headed north hugging the coast.  The next town is Gregory famous for the “Pink Lake”.  

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We arrived at the wrong time of the day to see the full effect but you can still see it’s pink.  The colour is caused by the extreme salinity of the water which creates two types of algae which are reddish-orange in appearance containing beta-carotene.  On the eastern shore there is a beta-carotene extraction plant.  The resulting product is used as a colouring pigment in food and medicines.

The next stop was Kalbarri, a major tourist destination.  Western Australia has closed it’s borders to the world (something about a pandemic) which means residents can’t leave and have been “forced” to holiday at home.  The town has four caravan parks and they were all rammed full.  Fortunately Ken was able to sweet talk one of the ladies in Reception into giving us their emergency site for the night.

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I’m not a fan of caravan parks.  Why would you leave your block of lands and brick walls to live next door to a stranger with only the thickness of two sheets of canvas between you?  I’d much rather be on my own.  However it’s obvious the children love the freedom.

Deep in contemplation, my thoughts were broken by Ken who said “Look at the interesting colours and shapes on that tree!” 

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Something else I hadn’t noticed!  Dinner was a defrosted pasta and mince stew followed by ice cream. 

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