Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
By car or bus, the pictured location is circa 45 kilometres south of Adelaide’s CBD.
If you avoid rush hours, a car trip from the heart of Adelaide to Aldinga Beach can take just 45 minutes.
Aldinga Beach is definitely not “just yet more of Adelaide’s dispiriting, seemingly never-ending sprawl”; it has well-protected natural bushland, a large number of resident ‘roos, reefs onto which one can walk, at low tide…and glorious beaches.
Leave a Comment
Anvil Beach sits at the end of the Nullaki Peninsula, just east of where Irwin Inlet (sometimes) meets Southern Ocean.
It is one of the more “choice” of many wild and wonderful beaches on Western Australia’s south coast.
The proverbial crow – flying in from Denmark, not many kilometres distant, to the northwest – could reach Anvil Beach in just a few minutes.
Leave a Comment
Today’s chapter in this series’ “wet sands” section features a fast-scuttling crab, on a northern Namibian beach,
Here, rain hardly ever falls, but fogs often roll in from the cold Atlantic Ocean, and thence into the western section of the Namib Desert.
Q: a terrible place to be shipwrecked?
A: yes…but this shoreline is far from “lifeless”.
The waters that lap it teem with life; human population density is among the lowest on “our” planet, but the local seafood is abundant and excellent.
Leave a Comment
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.
Leave a Comment
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.
Leave a Comment
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.
Leave a CommentA 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.
Leave a Comment
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.
Leave a Comment
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)
Leave a Comment
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.
Leave a Comment
