Water is scarce up here, so in the morning we got to share our camp site with these pink & grey galahs, who were just after a drink.
The owners of the caravan park are friends of N's - so we went and visited the homestead in the morning for a cup of coffee. We bought the dogs around. They were a bit cautious about how their Boxer, Roxy would react to having two strangers in her yard. I was pretty confident they wouldn't scrap though, as Roxy was the smallest of all three of them - and Bender and Barbie would be out of their territory.
They shut Roxy away in the shed while I bought Bender & Barbie in. Bender and Barbie then just had to deal with the three kids that decended upon them - aged 3 to 7. The youngest kids took a shine to Barbie because she tends to keep all four paws on the ground. She did remarkably well with a four year old boy trotting around after her, his hand resting on her rump.
We let Roxy out of the shed, and they were all fine together. Bender and Roxy had a couple of vocal altercations over a coconut, but apart from that they were all good the whole time.
We were advised that the best local beach for the dogs to go for a run was Janz Beach. After breakfast, we went straight there. There was no-one around, and so we decided Barbie could run muzzle-less.
She seemed to appreciate it. It also made for some better beach photos without the ugly thing on her face!
After their run on the beach, we decided to drive into town and get ourselves breakfast. Exmouth town centre is nowhere near the coast - the coast is mainly taken up by Australian Defence land (it's the Harold E. Holt command centre for deep water subs), and Cape Range National Park. It's a fair drive from where we are staying at Yardie Creek Caravan Park, which is on the coast and just outside of the National Park.
The cafe provided plenty of shade, and the dogs got a lot of attention from friendly locals. It seems that less people up here are scared of them and choose to take a wide berth. The food was pretty good too.
It was still pretty hot - probably about 38 degrees celsius, cooler than the days before we arrived. We decided to go for a drive in the National Park. There is a scenic gorge drive that you can do without going through any checkpoints. We didn't let the dogs out of the car since they aren't allowed in National Parks, but it was too hot for them anyway.
The gorge was very pretty. We saw another few cars up there, but not many. We drove up, took photos, and drove back down again.
After our drive, we went into town and bought salad rolls from the bakery, and headed to the town beach.
You are allowed to drive on this beach, though we chose not to. I kept Barbie on the lead here though, just in case. She didn't seem to mind. She was pretty tired after her run that morning.
After we had hung out on the beach a while, we headed back to the caravan park. We did some washing and hung around the campsite til it was time to go to the homestead for dinner. There was another couple visiting, and the guy was Italian and intent on making pizza. We had authentic italian wood fired pizza for dinner. The dogs were happy just to run around and eat grass.
After dinner we left the dogs at the homestead and went turtle spotting on the beach. We saw a lot of turtles hauling themselves up the beach to lay their eggs, and we even got to see a Green Turtle laying. No photos though because flashing lights can startle them and send them back out into the ocean. I did get a nice picture of a turtle track up the beach the next morning though.
We got back late and everyone had gone to bed - the dogs were all sleeping on the porch but got very excited to see us! We collected Barbie and Bender and we all slept very very well in the tent.
To be continued....
