Nambung National Park

Nambung National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Nambung is a coastal park on the Indian Ocean about two hundred kilometres north of Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and it contains one of the best-known landscapes in the country, the Pinnacles desert, where thousands of limestone pillars stand in a sea of yellow sand. It is reached in a little over two hours from Perth by the Indian Ocean Drive, a fast coastal road opened in 2010, the entrance lying seventeen kilometres south of the crayfishing town of Cervantes, which has motels, a caravan park and a celebrated lobster restaurant; there is no public transport to the park, and the many day tours from Perth, by coach or four-wheel-drive bus, which last twelve hours, commonly add sandboarding on the dunes at Lancelin, a koala park or a lobster lunch. An entry fee per vehicle is paid at the gate.

A sealed road leads to the Pinnacles desert discovery centre, with an exhibition, shop and toilets, from which there are two ways of seeing the formations. A one-way loop drive of about four kilometres, on firm, stony sand marked out by rocks, suitable for ordinary cars but not for caravans or large coaches, winds among the pillars, with bays in which to stop and wander; and a walking trail of about a kilometre and a half, starting at the centre, leads to a lookout over the whole field and on among the pillars, and is the better way of appreciating them. An hour and a half suffices, but those who stay in Cervantes can return at sunset, at sunrise or under the stars, the park remaining open to vehicles until the evening. Elsewhere in the park, short roads lead to the white beaches of Hangover Bay and Kangaroo Point, for swimming, snorkelling and picnics, and, just outside it, a boardwalk at Lake Thetis passes living stromatolites.

Visiting Nambung National Park: what you will see

A reserve was created here in the 1950s and the national park now covers about 190 square kilometres of coastal dunes, heath and low woodland; the date of 1995 sometimes given refers to a later change. The name comes from an Aboriginal word for the crooked river that loses itself in the sands, and the land is part of the country of the Yued people of the Noongar nation, for whom the pinnacles were a place to be avoided, the fossilised remains, in one account, of young men who strayed where they were forbidden to go. The pinnacles number in the tens of thousands and are scattered over some four square kilometres of bare, mustard-yellow quartz sand: jagged spikes, smooth domes, mushrooms, tombstones and clusters like ruined walls, from a few centimetres to about three and a half metres in height, of grey, cream or rust-coloured limestone. Their raw material is sea shells. In an earlier, wetter age, the wind heaped up along this coast dunes of sand rich in the broken shells of marine creatures; rain, made slightly acid by vegetation, dissolved the lime in the upper layers and redeposited it lower down, cementing the sand there into a soft limestone, capped by a harder crust. How that limestone was then carved into separate pillars is still debated among geologists: on one view, plants rooted in the crust, and their roots, exploiting cracks, channelled the water downwards, dissolving the rock between them and leaving columns;

on another, the pillars are the casts of the trunks and root systems of trees, or of a buried forest, round which the lime concentrated. What is agreed is that the pillars were formed underground and have been exposed by the wind blowing the loose sand away, and that the drifting dunes continually bury some and uncover others, so that the field is never twice the same; stone tools found among them suggest that they were exposed about six thousand years ago, were buried again, and re-emerged only a few centuries ago. They were unknown to the general public until the late 1960s, although Dutch navigators of the seventeenth century, sighting them from the sea, marked them on their charts and took them for the ruins of a city. The surrounding sand plain, monotonous to the eye for much of the year, belongs to the south-west of Australia, one of the richest regions in the world for wild flowers, and from August to October it is transformed by the blossoming of banksias, wattles, grevilleas, kangaroo paws, smokebush, orchids and hundreds of other species, most of them found nowhere else. Western grey kangaroos and emus wander among the pillars in the early morning and evening, and the park has bobtail lizards, carpet pythons, honey possums, galahs and black cockatoos, with sea lions, dolphins and ospreys along the coast. At Lake Thetis, a small saline lake, grow stromatolites, rock-like mounds built layer by layer by communities of microbes, the oldest form of life on earth, of a kind that dominated the planet three billion years ago.

Nambung National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open daily, from early morning until about nine in the evening. Spring, from August to October, is the best season, with the wild flowers in bloom, days of 20 to 25 degrees and, in September and October, humpback whales passing offshore; autumn, from March to May, is also mild and settled. Summer, from December to February, is hot, often above 35 degrees, with a fierce glare off the sand, persistent bush flies and a strong sea breeze in the afternoon, and visits should then be made early or late; winter is cool and showery, with the desert often deserted.

The time of day matters more than the season: at midday the pillars look flat and pale, while in the first and last hour of sunlight they glow orange and cast long shadows across the rippled sand, and on a moonless night the sky is superb. The tour coaches from Perth arrive between about eleven and two. Do not climb on the pinnacles, which are fragile, and carry water, a hat and sunglasses. Allow two hours. Cervantes is fifteen minutes away, Jurien Bay, with its sea lions, forty minutes, and the dunes of Lancelin an hour south.