Australia: Warrah Lookout and Pearl Beach

14 October 2012

Sometimes it's nice just to get out of town for a few hours and have a change of scenery. That's exactly what I did this Saturday. My friends Quazi and Grant and I drove up, an hour north of Sydney to the little town of Woy Woy, on the other side of the bay from Killcare and Terrigal, which I visited a few weeks earlier. There isn't much to do there except have a coffee and move on, which is exactly what we did. A little bit to the south, you enter part of the Brisbane Water National Park - which is oddly enough about 700 kilometres from Brisbane. Brisbane Water NP ends where the Hawkesbury River flows into the ocean and there is a great scenic overlook at Warrah Lookout. We had to walk about 200 metres from the car to the overlook through a scabby forest with thin eucalypts and squiggly gums - which are gum trees that beetles have burrowed underneath the bark, forming these squiggly patterns.

The lookout is great! It's about 200 feet up from the water and you can get good vantage points from the fenced-in viewing area as well as non-fenced bedrock platforms. It was a bit of a gray day, and threatening rain the whole time, but you could still see up the Hawkesbury and out to Palm Beach and Barrenjoey Head on the other side of the river.

After the lookout, we drove down into the tiny town of Pearl Beach, which as a geologist, I loved because of all the different street names: Beryl Boulevard, Garnet Road, Onyx Road, Jade Place, Agate Avenue, Coral Crescent, Diamond Road, Emerald Avenue, Amethyst Avenue, Pearl Parade, Opal Court, Tourmaline Avenue, Crystal Avenue, Gem Road, Cornelian Road, and Silex Lane. Now most of these I understood because they are all names of minerals, gems, or rocks. But the last two, Cornelian and Silex, I had to look up. It turns out that cornelian is a reddish mineral in the chalcedony family which is a type of microcrystalline quartz - akin to jasper or flint. And Silex is any type of finely-ground stones with very high (or pure) silica contents. So they, too fit in with the rock/mineral/gem theme Pearl Beach has going on!

At the beach we walked out to the rocky headland of the Paul Landa Reserve and watched the tide come in a bit but then the waves started to crash a little too much, so we decided to head back before we got stranded. The sandstone bedrock out here was pretty cool too because it was chock-full of little weathering pits that created a honeycomb texture in the rocks. And between the rocks, near the water's surface, little rock crabs darted in and out of tiny fissures.

With a little lunch from the Pearl Beach Cafe in our bellies, we headed back to Sydney, refreshed!