Week 18-19, Tuesday 13 July – Sunday 25 July 2010

So, we're back in the land of thongs and roos, and surprise surprise, already playing catch up on the blog. So one blog for two weeks, here goes...

We landed back in Perth on Tuesday 13th and Coralie and Andrew kindly collected us at the airport. We collected Priscilla from Padbury (after home made chicken soup from Coralie, yum!) then spent a couple of days at a motel in North Beach cleaning, re-packing and re-stocking. The fun part of all this was discovering the mice in the garage who had made our portable bbq their home, bedding down in the (now shredded) toilet tissue that we'd left in the bbq as a rattle insulator! Mouse poo and wee everywhere, little blighters! Very amusing to see them poking their noses out of the bbq though!

We set off back up the coast on Thursday. I'd had a crazy idea that we might get to Carnarvon in a day (about 900kms), which I'd scaled down to Geraldton (about 400kms). Leaving Perth in our typically organised fashion at about 2pm after re-stocking, this plan was scaled back again to a stop at Gingin, a mere 80kms out of Perth. Hohum! We stayed in a basic, but clean roadhouse caravan park, and woke up to the sounds of kookaburras laughing and a flock of galahs in the trees above our heads in the tent the next morning. We took this to be Australia saying, “Welcome Back”.

On Friday we stopped on our way through Geraldton for more supplies, and camped the night at Galena Bridge just outside Kalbarri, where we'd stopped on our way up North before. The next day we made it to Carnarvon, and finally some warmer, if very windy, weather. We stopped two nights at a caravan park there, getting used to being back in the tent again, and taking a little trip out to see the blowholes at Quobba, which were pretty impressive (as much for the noise they made as for seeing them).





We pushed on up to Coral Bay on Monday, which was a lovely spot. We took a stroll down the beach, thought about snorkelling (the reef is accessible just off the beach), but decided to leave it until the next day. We had an expensive and frustrating night at a campground in Coral Bay – young Aussie backpackers set up their party just behind our tent (Sean, your friends are right, the story about half price waffles on a Thursday really isn't very funny), and the next morning the wind was howling again, and snorkelling no longer looked very attractive. So we upped sticks again, had a little tour around to the boat harbour, and set off up a dirt track towards Yardie Creek at the southern end of the Cape Range National Park. We made it as far as a campground at Point Cloates before deciding to cut back to the tarmac to make sure we got to Exmouth in time to camp and make the early start for Cape Range the next day. Not before seeing some rather large termite homes though.



We re-stocked in Exmouth, then headed out to Yardie Homestead at the northern end of the park – the closest camping spot to the entrance, where I read up on Cape Range and Jennie did her research.



Cape Range National Park gets so busy that you need to queue up in the morning at the ranger station and wait for people to come out to get a camp spot! We'd heard we needed to get there about 8am, but the lady at Yardie Station put the frighteners on me, and we wound up setting off at 5.30am to sit and wait in a queue for 2.5 hours! Jennie had made a flask of coffee though and we ate a tin of fruit in syrup for breakfast.



Typically, it wasn't so busy that day, and we'd have easily got in if we'd been there for 8am, but being there so early did mean we got our pick of the campgrounds, so we got to stay at Neds Camp, which I'd read was good. And it was. We turned up and paid for one night, and wound up staying for 5! It was really lovely. Very windy still, which is a bit tricky in the rooftop tent, but beautiful. The campground hosts also hold a happy hour at 5.30pm each night, where the campground residents meet up for a drink and a chat. All very civilised! The majority of people there were from the southern part of WA, escaping the winter, spending their full 28 days at Cape Range (the National Parks in WA have a maximum stay per annum in any park of 28 days!) A young German couple were there on trail bikes as well – they'd had them shipped out to Darwin, and were planning a tour of Australia, before driving overland back to Germany – pretty impressive. Especially the girl managing such a huge bike laden with all their worldly possessions!

We spent the week at Cape Range spending some quality time with Priscilla



exploring the beaches


(the ironing board was a make-shift fish cleaning table at Neds!)



snorkelling (seeing lots of fish, sea slugs (yuk!), a small blue spotted stingray and a much larger mantaray – Jen particularly enjoyed Turquoise Bay)

[erherm, snorkelling photos to follow - it takes a week and half to send a film off for developing in Broome!]

waking up to catch the roos on the grassy plains behind us





then chilling in the afternoon and noticing a roo a few metres from Jen



walking into secret gorges



to find the black-footed rock wallaby



watching for dugongs, but instead seeing a shark in our little bay at Neds



and visiting the lighthouse just outside the park, where we watched a pretty impressive display from the passing whales.

All in all, a very pleasant week. We saw turtles popping their heads up for air at our beach at Neds, and the only disappointment was not seeing a dugong when other people said they'd seen them. We've been looking for dugongs the whole trip, Jen's favourite submersible mammal. Until we came to Australia, we'd never even heard of dugongs. They grow up to 3.3 metres long, and weigh up to 250kg, but are extremely shy marine mammals. They're often called sea cows... Anyway, we love them, and were desperate to see one in the wild, but like the yellow-footed rock wallaby, they seem to be avoiding us...

On the Sunday we confirmed to Gwen and Norm, our lovely campground hosts, that we would have to leave the next day for fear we'd otherwise be stuck there for our full 28 days and not know what to do with ourselves at the end of it!