Cactus Garden
Carnarvon is a small town located 904km north of Perth. It is well known as the “salad bowl of WA” because of its many plantations, providing much of the states fruit and vegetables during winter.
There is a 26km “Fruit Loop” drive along South and North River Road which line the banks of the Gascoyne River. You can buy fresh fruit, vegetables, preserves, dried fruit and ice-cream from the roadside honesty stalls and a few on-site shops.
Also located on this strip is a Cactus Garden which is a private hobby garden just off the main road and accessible to anyone via donation. It has a variety of incredible cacti on offer, some up to 5 meters high, an old whale skeleton and a fruit stall. The boys were completely mesmerised by the variety of cacti and the huge orb spiders which had made their homes directly above the garden path.
Fruit Loop Drive
From May to October you can go for a drive around the “Fruit Loop”. Located on the South and North River Roads there’s plenty of roadside honesty stalls to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables from the plantations direct.
There’s also a few shops selling preserves, dried fruit and ice cream. We stopped at Morels and Bumbaks and couldn’t go past the homemade chocolate dipped frozen Mango.
Carnarvon Space & Technology Museum
We all really enjoyed visiting the Space Museum and would highly recommend the stop. It’s an eight minute drive from the centre of Carnarvon turning off the North West Coastal Highway. It gave us a good insight into the role Carnarvon played in both the space program and the communications industry.
The museum is located in the original Space Flight Tracking Building, the largest station outside of the USA. It employed 220 people and was originally built to support NASAs Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programs which were in operation from 1964-1975.
Located next to this building is the Overseas Telecommunications Commissions Casshorn Antenna and Satellite Earth Station which played an important role in television history. This included the first live pictures of the moon walk via satellite from Carnarvon, Western Australia to London in the United Kingdom.
There are many activities on offer for children including a mock rocket that took us all in to space.
Carnarvon Markets
Every Saturday from May to October local food growers have fresh fruit and vegetables available for purchase at the markets in the heart of town.
We’ve always enjoyed taking the boys to our local markets and Carnarvon did not disappoint. We grabbed a coffee, some hot mini pancakes and listened to the local busker. There’s a variety of food and drink options and homemade goodies for sale including jewellery, art, woodwork and bags.
