Bottoms up!
Pelican Yoga wishes you all a happy and honeyed 2025.
Leave a CommentMonth: December 2024
After taking in the panoramic view across Thistle Cove – as featured in this series’ previous chapter – we walked down to the beach.
This post’s photos offer a closer view of the “stained” water and sand that were visible in the bottom right side of #16’s photo.
You are looking at a freshwater spring’s waters flowing onto the beach at Thistle Cove.
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By the shortest, sensible road route, Esperance is a whisker under 700 kilometres southeast of Perth, and just under 400 ks south of Kalgoorlie.
A further, easy 50 kilometres drive, east of Esperance, will take you to “the best beach in the world”, according a 2023 list of “The World’s 50 Best Beaches”.
You are not looking at it!
This post’s photo shows the very next beach, westward; my beloved and I are not alone in liking it rather more than we do the adjacent, “best” one.
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One of life’s great pleasures: to stand in sunshine, watching a storm form on the far side of a bay or lake.
It often includes a superb, entirely natural “light show”.
It is especially splendid when one is standing on the sands of Little Beach, looking across Two Peoples Bay, to Mt Manypeaks.
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A few of my favourite things…
Unusually white sand that squeaks when bare feet walk across it.
Unpolluted, refreshing cool, brilliantly blue water.
Magnificent vistas in which other humans and built structures are nowhere in sight, or just a small presence in an otherwise natural environment.
Anyone who loves the above – especially when they all co-exist in a place that is not hard to reach – will surely love the south coast of Western Australia.
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This and the next several chapters in this series all feature wet sand.
Today’s post also has oystercatchers, in “reflective” mode.
Both of the relevant strands are on the northern edge of the Southern Ocean, according to most Australians.
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This post’s heroes are fine festive season role models: relaxed, well-fed…and not too house-proud.
And, unlike reindeer, Pelecanus conspicillatus – the Australian Pelican – has never been co-opted by Coca-Cola!
Pelican Yoga sends best wishes to you all.
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By their very nature, sandy soils are “poor” – low in nutrients and unable to retain much moisture.
Yet in some places where rain often falls and the sun often shines – including some of Amazonia and parts of the world’s largest sand island – rainforest flourishes.
That island is Australian. (Queensland’s Fraser Island/K’gari)
So too is this post’s sandy, “desert” location, which is circa 900 kilometres distant from any ocean’s shore.
Even an ignoramus would never mistake the Simpson Desert for rainforest, but s/he would almost certainly be hugely surprised to discover just how beautifully vegetated is so much of it. (as are a great many other sandy, “arid” Australian places)
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As in #10 in this series, you are looking at a photo which illustrates the power of the Shyok River.
By road, we were now 35 minutes further upstream, closer to Khaplu.
At 4.49 pm on 15 May 2024, the fast-flowing, largely glacier-fed river’s flow was relatively low.
The Shyok’s width, depth and flow-rate are hugely variable; the river transported and deposited all of the photograph’s silt, sand, gravel and rocks.
My telephoto lens zoomed in on just a very small portion of what my naked eyes could see in a single glance, with head still.
One translation of the Shyok’s name: river of death.
Its floods have killed many people, drowned trees and crops too, and destroyed/removed many formerly-arable fields, even some of the houses that had been built above and behind the fields, on what used to be “safe” ground.
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“Rippled sand + moving water + rock” is one of my favourite natural “recipes”, especially when other humans and human-made structures are not part of the “mix”… or are only a tiny, discreet element.
“Remote” ocean beaches are not the only places that offer such delight.
The pictured location is much more than 1,000 kilometres straight-line-distant from any ocean shore – and there is absolutely no “straight line” (let alone “same-day”) transport route to one.
By definition, when a river flows through a valley that bears its name, that river’s bed is the lowest ground within the local landscape.
The pictured low spot – just a little upstream of where this river flows into one of the world’s most significant rivers – is more than 2,700 metres above sea level.
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