To Hyden and Wave Rock

Today was a lot of road time.  We left Albany this morning about 9:00 AM after a nice breakfast at the Dome.  The Dome is an Australian franchise that serves breakfast and lunch along with espresso coffee.

We drove about 400 kilometers through the Stirling Mountain Range and through ranch and farming areas.  It was a nice drive with stops in a couple of small towns enroute for snacks and lunch.

We passed a dutch windmill at one point.  It was at a ranch and B&B.

The fields had been newly planted with (we believe) wheat.  This is a big wheat area as well as cattle and sheep.

Some of the interesting flora we saw on the way.

These are a type of gum or eucalyptus tree.  What is interesting is all the leaves grow at the ends/tops of the branches.

In Pingrup, there was a city park with lots of flowering plants and bushes.

The flowers on this bush were 1/8 inch. 

There were two types of Banksia

Don’t know what this is, but the flowers are small.

These flowers we very unusual.  The size of a hand.

This is the post office at Pinkrup.  Notice the boxes on the side of the building.

We arrived in Hyden in mid afternoon leaving plenty of time to visit wave rock.  This is a natural rock formation, that was formed through geologic action.

This is the face of an outcropping of rocks in the area.  It was interesting to walk along the face of this “wave” without worrying about getting wet.

In another section of the park is Hippo Yawn.  This was caused by the expansion of natural salts contained in the rock.  It cracked from the inside out, causing this Hippopotamus mouth.

About 20 kilometers from Wave Rock was Mulka’s Cave.  This is a place you can see aboriginal cave paintings.  It was fascinating, although hard to see the paintings because it was fairly dark inside.  There were over 400 inside but we were only able to see a small number of them.

Here are a couple of examples

We ended the day watching the sun set as we drove back to our motel for the night.  This is our first sunset because for most of our trip the skies have been cloudy.

Tomorrow we head back to Perth.