Esperance:

Esperance is a lovely town with wide streets, a country town feel and very friendly people. It has a beautiful beach and of course turquoise blue sea and lots of granite rock clings to the shore and forms islands off the shore so it is very pretty. A bike path runs right along the foreshore. Unfortunately it was fairly windy so we didn’t venture out on the bikes.
Our caravan park was quite near the town centre so we went exploring after we had set up our caravan. A beautiful avenue of huge Norfolk pines leads you down to the main street.
The significant port on this bay is a huge facility for the loading and unloading of goods. Sheds, cranes, circular holding tanks for wheat or grain, are visible. This port is used for exporting many different products, wheat, grain, wool, sheep and cattle, canola and products from the gold fields in Kalgoorlie some 400kms north. The train that goes to the port ran right past our caravan often tooting at night.


People can swim beautiful bay if the water is warm enough. It is coming from Antarctica so it’s pretty cold. A long jetty stretches out into the bay 862mtrs and is called the Tanker Jetty because tankers used it in past years to load and unload their goods but now it is very popular for fishing. The sea lions wait around in the shallow water near the fish cleaning table for titbits.

In the morning we drove the 40kms Great Ocean drive around the area stopping at various points as indicated on the map. The Rotary lookout gave us a 360 degree view of the most awesome scenery you could discover anywhere. The islands, the turquoise colour of the water against the dark areas of the rock shelf which runs along the coast of the majority of beaches and inlets make a magnificent scene. Twilight Beach was voted the best beach in Australia in 2006. At Observation Point we had a beautiful view down the
coast and out to sea. Each beach had well maintained timber steps leading down to the sand or up to a lookout. Next point of interest was the Pink Lake although these days it is no longer pink. The algae which causes the lake to turn pink has been removed from the surface and left a blue lake with a large salt content. An excellent drive on a beautiful day.

In the afternoon we went to the museum which is one of the best museums we have seen and it was huge. It even had an old a steam train as well as a railway carriage inside the museum. That reminded me of my boarding school days.
In 1976 the Skylab crashed into earth dropping derbis in a path over this area and there are lots of “bits “of it here in the museum. Apparently people were finding pieces everywhere and it became quite a treasure hunt. A lady in the museum actually witnessed it and she was relating to us the massive noise it made.
We had a very interesting time in Esperance but it was time to move onto Cape Le Grand which is a beautiful national park 50 klms to the east.