Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
This series is the fruit of our most recent trip to our favourite part of Australia.
The featured image looks east from Wilson Head (which is immediately west/southwest of Denmark’s Ocean Beach and the Wilson Inlet) over to West Cape Howe.
Torbay Head – on the far/hidden, southeast tip of West Cape Howe – is Western Australia’s southernmost point.
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Where else in the world could one be less than 20 kilometres distant from an eminently civilised town of more than 40,000 permanent residents (plus a large number of tourists) , and enjoy the pictured experience?
My beloved and I are not visible in the featured image.
It does, however, show all other humans present at Muttonbird Beach during the late afternoon “golden hour” on 21 March 2021.
To reach this glorious, safe-swimming spot, on a perfect “beach day”, we drove for less than 30 minutes, on good roads…
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Silicon – usually, as quartz crystals – is the primary component of most of the world’s light-coloured ocean beaches.
However, in tropical and subtropical waters where coral reefs thrive, calcium carbonate is more likely to be a so-called “white” sand beach’s “hero” ingredient.
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East Java’s Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park (aka, within Indonesia, as “TNBTS”) contains multiple volcanoes.
Mount Semeru (3,676 metres) is Java’s highest peak, atop which snow sometimes sits, albeit briefly.
However, the park’s “tourist magnet” is a volcano that is much less lofty, but currently much more active
Mount Bromo (2, 329 metres) is surrounded by Indonesia’s only desert-like expanse.
Bromo is one of the four or five “new” volcanoes (visibility was limited when we were there. some sources say “four”, others say “five”) that have arisen from the floor of the huge caldera created by the much older Tengger volcano.
The Tengger Sand Sea’s “sands” are a mix of volcanic ash and sand – the mostly-basaltic “fruit” of Bromo’s eruptions.
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The Taranaki region is named after the volcano that dominates it.
Some people still call it “Mount Egmont”.
One of the world’s most “perfect”/photogenic volcanoes, Taranaki is the primary “author” of the region’s obviously-fertile soils…and of its “black” beaches.
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Some well-meaning 20th/21st century humans have viewed the pictured dunes as an unfortunate byproduct of 19th and/or 20th century overclearing and overgrazing.
In fact, this particular dune field was already part of the local landscape long before Europeans reached any part of Terra Australis.
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Both photos were taken late on a winter’s afternoon, near Margaret River.
Running on sand, through shallow water, is a pleasure enjoyed by many humans, horses and dogs.
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Vive la différence!
Goolwa does not aspire to be “the Saint-Tropez of the Southern Hemisphere”.
No wannabe “Brigitte Bardot” is ever likely to strut, mince or pout her way along this strand.
“Chic” and “Goolwa” are two words I have never seen or heard within the same sentence.
However, I am sure the “relaxed and contented” index is very much higher on its ocean beach than on any “Riviera” strand.
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Hoteliers and tour operators like to describe the pictured beach as “idyllic”.
Ifaty is a village in southwestern Madagascar; fishing is its raison d’être., although tourism has become increasingly significant in recent years.
Its seafront “lagoon” is sheltered by one of the world’s major coral reefs.
On the reef’s far side is the Mozambique Channel, which is 1,700 ks long, 419 ks wide at its narrowest point, and surprisingly deep – up to nearly 3,300 metres, with an average depth of around 2,700 metres.
I took the photo just before midday on 19 May 2018, as the big daily event was unfolding.
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Both photos were taken about twenty minutes after we had flown over the wreck of the Eduard Bohlen.
Less than half an hour later we would be back in Swakopmund, after our late afternoon 600 k flight over the Namib Desert’s “sand sea”.
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