Cahnaaahhvin is basically a plantation & fishing town. Main street is lined with palm trees and is three blocks long. Don't eat the Chinese buffet at the Gateway Motel, and be sure to avoid the infamous Tropicana Hotel unless you're in the mood for fightin' with any salt miners who aren't hanging around my bus. The hardware store has 3 pieces of wood and a packet of nails; if you need anything fancier you have to drive 350 km to Geraldton, where they have civilisation. Weirdly, there are 3 veterinarians. Dentists, optometrists etc visit once or twice a week so you have to book way ahead; most people just go without teeth as previously noted in earlier blogs.
On either side of the main street are a few tiny "suburbs", including a fancy new marina mansion development where the town's 5 rich people frown at their heavily mortgaged boats. The Gascoyne River runs along the north side of town, surrounded by wonderful bushland, river pools and beaches (don't go swimming, it's boiling with tiger sharks). The town is surrounded by plantations of banana, mango and other luscious fruit, as well as herbs, vegies and farm produce; most plantations have a little shop or shed near the road where you can buy fantastic food; a lot of it is organically farmed.
The boat harbour sells fresh seafood (as in, literally straight off the boats), so if you haven't caught a mudcrab or a snapper you can get a sackful of tiger prawns, oysters, emperor and other delicacies, dirt cheap. All your eggs, jams, mango ice cream etc are local - yum!
South of town are Bush Bay and New Beach, where lots of people camp & live permanently for free; I haven't been there yet. It's a day's drive to Exmouth, or you can go to the amazing coastline of Quobba and Gnaraloo Stations where there are whales & dugongs to see. Forty km from town, inland, is Rocky Pool, a permanent pool within the Gascoyne River, which is a sandy camping area surrounded by red rocks and stunning gum trees and a great place to swim. The turnoff for Gascoyne Junction (the town that was completely swept away in last year's flood) is a red dirt track leading in a terrifying straight line towards what looks like endless desert and featuring large signs advising you of the many ways you could die out there in your caravan.
It's about 6 km into town from my caravan park, and there's a steady stream of us traveller types on our folding bikes going to and from the supermarket; there's a phenomenal number of caravan parks here with lots of grey nomads staying for weeks and months on end. There are quite a few people like me who are just travelling around permanently, having a good time & not missing having a mortgage. If they could get rid of the gigantic freaky grasshoppers and that huge ugly thing with a thousand legs in the toilet block it would be perfect.
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