Day 126 Francois Peron National Park

Leaving Carnarvon for our next stop along the west coast: Denham. On the way south is a turn-off to Gladstone Beach. Information provided in different sources stated, that there will be dugongs visible near the beach eating their favourite food sea grass. Well, we arrived at the beach and enjoyed the views on the beach, but there were no dugongs visible. The jetty is broken, so one could not walk further out to look out for dugongs. On our way back, a woman coming here since years and her auntie said, they have not seen any dugongs here in the last 45 years, so they are very surprised about us coming here to see dugongs... Well, Gladstone Beach is a remote spot with a nice beach (and basic campground) if you want to get away from everything, but no spot to see dugongs.

On the way south we stopped on the Gladstone Lookout for some great views over the landscape. While we had some breakfast with a view, Stuart enjoyed reading all the memorials to Gladstone Beach from friends and family about people who have passed away but loved the area.

Onwards to Denham, Stuart discovered the Shark Bay World Heritage Sign and was afraid to go there because of all the sharks. We were able to persuade him, that we won´t be swimming with sharks but rather look for dugongs.

For the first day, we decided to drive up all the way to the Cape Peron in the Francois Peron National Park. At the Peron Homestead there is luckily a tyre pressure station, because in sections it is driving through sand, so it is required to reduce your tyre pressure to 20, which is approximately half of the normal tyre pressure on a 4x4.  The drive up is not so nice, but as soon as you reach Cape Peron, you know it was worth the hassle. It is a beautiful part of the coast, red cliffs, white beach, turquoise and dark blue water and some lovely wildflowers which we haven´t seen anywhere before. From the cliffs we were spotting some movement in the water, but in such a distance, we were not able to tell whether it were dugongs (the zoom-in on the laptop showed us, yes, they were dugongs) or turtles or dolphins.

Next to Cape Peron is the Skipjack Point Lookout. We can highly recommend going there and spending most of your day: the lookout is high above light blue water, where you can see to the bottom. So it is easy to spot rays, turtles, dolphins, sharks and also dugongs - all mostly in a distance, but a dugong mum with her calf swam close to one lookout point, where the calf played mostly and mum was eating, so plenty of time to take lots of videos (cannot upload here, unfortunately) and photos.

To finish off this great day, we drove to Little Lagoon just outside of Denham for the sunset. On the way there we stopped to watch the emu eating dinner - in the dark after sunset at the same spot were about ten emus running into the bush. So warning signs about emus have - this time - a good reason to be there.