Shelved
We left Karratha in the north west of WA in the late afternoon, heading down to find wild surf out bush. Clouds of red dust billowed behind us all the way down three hours of dirt road, and slowly drifted past us as we pulled up underneath a scraggly old tree by the side of the road. Surrounded by spinifex and red dirt, the wind-bent and stunted old gum was representative of this part of the country: dry as a bone and wind-blown out, perched hard between the Great Sandy Desert and the crystal blue Indian Ocean. Plants struggle for a toehold on life between the encroaching sand of the desert and the salty, life-killing spray of the ocean. There are places, plenty of them, where the sand carpet of the desert stops right at the edge of the dunes leading down to the beach. Sand into more sand, with a side serving of salt. Just the way we like it. In other places the land rises up and towers precipitously above the water far below. We left our car behind in the care of the gnarly ol...