Kalbarri National Park and Wildflowers

Kalbarri is another one of those places I have wanted to visit since doing research before we left home. The National Park photos I had seen always looked so interesting. What we hadn't planned on was getting there while the wildflowers were in bloom and oh my! They are beyond beautiful and so hard to comprehend. In the National Park, and on the roadside, everywhere you look there is an abundance of blooms in white, red, cream, pink, yellow and orange.

We stayed at Murchison House Station, a working station that has been in operation since the mid 1800s. I'm not sure if they run cattle or sheep, as we saw signs of neither, but it was a nice place to stay and a welcome change from caravan parks. For $27.50/night we had a lovely riverside campsite with a nice view and access to fairly old and run down, but clean, showers and toilets. It wasn't luxury by any means, but it was lovely to be away from people and not staring at other caravans, and the showers were hot! They had alpacas and goats in pens near where we camped and the kids loved them, especially the goats. Rory now wants a baby goat that says "maaaa maaaaa" to him, as there was a baby goat that would call out to us when we went near the yard. At first he was scared of them all but he soon overcame his fear, even of the ones that got out of the yard. He would walk up to them and pat them happily after the first day.

There aren't a lot of walks to do in the Kalbarri NP. There are a couple that are 500m - 1.2km and then there are a couple of longer walks and a 2.4km gorge walk to the Murchison River. Everyone but me is over gorges; Tilda even going so far as to saying she never wants to see another gorge again. Rory would have done the gorge walk with me because it involved climbing down ladders, but I'd have never got him back up again without carrying him. So we stuck to the top, shorter walks. The flies were horrendous and walking was almost hazardous with so many trying to get up your nose or in your mouth or ears. Quite a few people were sensibly wearing fly nets and the rest of us just suffered.

The wildflowers were spectacular! None of the walks took you through wildflowers really; the best ones were along the roadside on the way in. We stopped frequently to take photos because it is so foreign to us to see so many wildflowers blooming together like that.

There were just fields of and fields like this

These amazing flowers were white or purple, or in this case half and half, all on the same plant

This pretty plant is called Stinky Socks... for good reason! At night the smell it puts out is disgusting. We had to shut all the windows and vents to keep the stench out of the van

A close up of Stinky Socks

The walks were to lookouts over various parts of the Murchison River, WAs 2nd largest river. It was a bit of a surprise to see water in it after seeing nothing but dry rivers for the past month or two, apart from the Ord River.

West Bend Lookout  

Z Bend Lookout

Z Bend Lookout

Z Bend Lookout

One of the key photo opportunities at Kalbarri is Nature's Window, a rock formation that perfectly frames the river. This was by far the most popular, and populous, walk of all. It is an interesting phenomenon but not especially beautiful. I think, if the wildflowers weren't blooming, it would have been an OK experience, but not a fantastic one.