Bob Geldof brought poverty in Africa to the world's attention with Live Aid and the striking images of children standing motionless with flies crawling over their faces. I couldn't understand the reason they didn't move them away, but having experienced flies in Kalbarri National Park I now know why.

The park was the first place we planned to explore during the several days we spent in and around Kalbarri. There was an 8km loop walk that took our fancy. It winds round a gorge passing a lookout called Nature's Window. We'd been warned that there were a lot of flies in the area so dug out two fly nets that the previous owners of our car had left under the seats. They wouldn't win any awards on the cat walk as they make you look ludicrous, but we thought we'd pack them just in case.

Almost as soon as we started the walk flies began buzzing around our heads and walking over our faces, trying to get up our noses and into our mouths and ears. Even with vigorous head movements and constant waving of our arms trying to get the creatures away, we still ended up with more than 20 on us at a time. It was either become exhausted by the futile effort of trying to remove them, adopt the African method and just let them crawl around, or don our fly nets. I'm afraid it had to be the latter.

Nature's Window is a natural hole in the layered sandstone rock perfectly framing the river gorge below. As it's near the beginning of the loop walk most people just go there, have their photo taken at the Kodak picture spot in the window, and drive on. Richard and I however enjoy a good walk so continued along the rocky ridge edge. Just before we climbed down into the gorge there was a warning sign saying that it gets ten degrees hotter down there. It was already 33 degrees and as we got half way down we felt the sudden increase in temperature and started to sweat.

Over the next hour and a half the route took us (and 50 flies stuck to our fly nets) along the sandy river bed, around rocks and back up to Nature's Window. I have to say we were both pretty weary and a little dehydrated by the time we got back to the car but enjoyed the walk - it's one of the most scenic gorges we've seen in Australia.

Best sight of the day, however, was at the entrance to the park when we came across a grey kangaroo. Richard stopped the car and I got out to film it. Just as I zoomed in, a joey poked its head out of its mother's pouch and looked around. I was rather pleased to capture the moment on camera.

Kalbarri sits at the point the Murchison River enters the Indian Ocean which provides a lovely setting for the town. Along the coast there are several beaches and viewing areas.

At Jacques Point we stood on the rocks for a while watching surfers tackle the large waves breaking on the reef.

We went on to see Island Rock which is exactly as its name suggests. We hadn't even reached the vantage point before we saw a couple of Humpback whales just off shore. Their tails kept flipping up out the water as they moved along in a playful manner. We watched them through Richard's binoculars and also spotted a school of about 20 dolphins swimming by.

A couple of kilometres along the coast is another natural wonder labelled Natural Bridge. We drove on there to catch the whales up. From the cliff we saw them tossing their bodies out of the water and we got to see their white underside and huge mouths. It was such a good experience and far better (and cheaper) than the whale watching boat trip we took in Kaikoura, New Zealand.

Katy