Travelog for: Knopf

This beautiful building is the Arts Centre in Christchurch, my last stop in New Zealand.



ChristChurch Cathedral was one of the buildings damaged in the earthquake on 22. February 2011 and only stabilized but not rebuilt since.


The Re-Store mall, basically little shops in container that took the place of collapsed city center buildings.

That was New Zealand for me. Where to next?

The obligatory money shot:

My last view of the mountains of the South Island on my way to Auckland.

waiting to board the plane to Australia:

Next stop: Western Australia!
Driving north from Perth I came through an area with lots of these grass trees and not much else. Grass treees grow very slowly, only about 2cm a year, which is why bigger ones are really expensive if you want one in your garden. They grow back very well after fires and are important to Aboriginals because the big flowering spike on top produces nectar and can be used to make spears plus the tree produces resin, natural super glue.



Next stop in Nambung National Park: These lime stone formations are called the pinnacles. They might have been created by roots of plants the grew in the dune and left behind fossilized harder areas in the softer groound that eventually eroded, leaving the lime stone pinnacles, but the full theories are very complex and there's more than one possible explanation.


Here you can see the different colors of sand: the white one (due to lime) along the Indian Ocean and the yellow one (due to silica) around the pinnacles:


An Australian Christmastree:

It's not super colorful, but this is one of the pink lakes. The color comes from archaea and algae that live in waters with very high salinity.

This is the view from the z bend into the beautiful gorge.
And there are some tracks left a long time ago by comparably huge anthropods.


I climbed down into gorge:



This is another part of the river gorge.


And some local fauna:

Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve is part of the UNESCO WHS Shark Bay because of the  living stromatolites, structures built by cyanobacteria, some of the oldest forms of life on earth that made other life possible by creating oxygen through photosynthesis.

Shell Beach is also part of Shark Bay and a part of the coast where the water has very high salinity, because of which Fragum erugatum thrives here and its shells have collected along the beach, creating a kind of stone in the parts further from the water.

This is a beach resort on Shark Bay peninsula, famous for the wild dolphins that some close to the beach. Because so many of them died due to tourist intervention, the feeding of them is now strictly controlled by rangers.

The pelican also wanted to be fed fish.

This is a view from the high cliff down onto a sandbank in shark bay from where one can see the big sharks as tiny dark spots. Not a place to go swimming!



Apart from sharks, there are also turtles laying there eggs along beaches at night:

This is an original plant part that naturally looks like a bird. How cool is that?

Another one of the amazing, almost empty Western Australian beaches with great snorkeling along the Ningaloo Reef.

This is a beautiful semiarid area with deep water-filled gorges, some of which can be visited and some of which are too dangerous to visit, e.g. because of asbestos. There are other silicates that are also being mined nearby. From above it'S hard to even see the goges, so one has to be very careful. I'm staying in a permanent camp in the park.

 
This is Oxer Lookout from where one can see Weano, Red, Hancock and Joffre gorges.

One of the huge termite hills that are around everywhere.


What a peaceful view early in the day.
Unfortunately I can't show pictures of the amazing gorges, because getting in and out involved climbing and swimming/wading through streams and pools, so the camera had to stay in camp.

The day ended in a road house on the way further north.

This is a really long beach between Port HEdland and Broome, but one has to be careful while walking barefoot or picking up stranded things beaacause of the poinsonous or venomous animals living in these waters like the poor dead snake.