Day 118 Cape Range National Park

Now it is time to explore the Cape Range National Park. On the first day we drove to almost the end of the park, to Yardie Creek. This Creek is the only one with year-around water, which is actually partly fresh water and saltwater. The first part of the walk is the Yardie Creek Nature Walk, a nice stroll along the creek with good views. At the end of this walk you see right next to the walkway some trees with pretty familiar noise: bats

There is a longer, steeper and with scrambling over some rocks up and down along the creek, walk: Yardie Creek Gorge Walk. The walk offers some nice views on the Gorge with the water although it is pretty strenuous to walk. Although there were signs about rock wallabies we did not see a wallaby.

After doing these walks, we discovered a little walkway down to a beach, where somebody had built up Stuart village. It was pretty difficult to persuade Stuart to leave the village, but finally the lookout on some beach time & ice-cream was enough. So we drove to Sandy Beach - a very long beach with only a few people around. The water is turquoise and then dark blue, the sand is white and fine - the perfect spot to relax, have a nap, go for a (short because cold) swim and a beach walk. On the walk along the beach away from the people I saw something dark moving opposite direction of the current: a turtle! Luckily, I had taken my phone with me, so when the head of the turtle turned up, I took a quick photo before the turtle swam back into the open water, probably surprised about seeing a human...

On the way back to Exmouth we drove a little detour up to the Vlamin Head Lighthouse. The lighthouse is not in use any more, but from the hill you have nice views over the national park, beaches and surfers around. There is also an old second world war tower with the original sand bags.

On the way back to Exmouth, we saw the reason for the slow driving signs and warnings about Emus: just next to the street two Emus appeared out of nowhere next to a bush, on which they were feeding - after a while surrounded by some tourists, excited to finally see a real Emus and not only warning signs.