Cape Arid National Park
We left Lucky Bay for another "Insta-famous" beach, Wharton, where we stopped for lunch and a spot of surfing. In reality, all of these beaches, bays and coves are amazing. I think their ranking on any "great, greater, greatest" scale is largely weather and circumstance dependent. For us, Wharton was one of the winners.
We also pulled into Duke of New Orleans beach and walked out to Table Island which is accessible at low tide.
By the time we reached Alexander Bay, having earlier deemed Membinup Beach camp unsuitable, it was late in the day and the wind had really come up. Overcast, cold and windy characterised our 2 nights at "A Bay" and made activities with the kids challenging. Arguably we could have entertained ourselves on some of the crazy dune and rock ledge 4WD tracks but we haven’t got that brave yet. Instead we dragged the kids up the sandblasted beach feigning great adventure. Redeeming features of Alexander Bay were the sheltered campsites tucked into banksia woodland which attracted a lively flock of glossy black cockatoos one morning; and the resident frog in one of the loos.
Our next stop, Yokinup Mia Mia, currently sits at the top of my fav campsites. Again, not because it had the most superb beach necessarily but for a combination of factors that aligned well. We spent 3 nights, perched on a hillside above the Thomas River and overlooking the glorious Yokinup Bay. The kids and Matthias spotted 4 emus (Dad with kids) casually strolling along the beach while I tried to find Telstra network to fit in a spot of work.
Matthias got a surf in while the kids and I explored the rock pools. Hugh’s novelty fishing rod provided a good 2 days of tangled entertainment before irreparable damage deemed it too big an injury hazard and landed it in the bin.
The weather was relatively kind allowing us to explore Dolphin Cove that afternoon for more rock hopping.
We walked the 3km Len Otte inland walk, Hugh not wanting a bar of it. Claire got attacked by meat ants which we’d been forewarned of but not taken seriously. But on the plus side, they hurried Hugh along. The walk itself was not worth the trouble, particularly as all the wildlife excitement happened when we turned back into our campground. We spotted a great carpet python lazily making its way off the road and a big monitor lizard just outside our camp. He was much more focused on his lunch than on us so we got a great biology lesson watching him forage and snap up grasshoppers.
That same evening at Little Tagon Beach we found ourselves on emu highway, and watched a number of emus saunter along the sand as we played in the waves.
