Wednesday 4th February 2015 – Thomas River – Cape Arid NP- fine warm/hot sunny

Another beautiful day, we certainly have been lucky with this camp site.  We headed off after breakfast for a short walk near the information centre.

We are in a die back zone, so you have these little boot scrubbers to use before and after you walk to prevent spreading the spore that causes die back in the plants.

 

Relics – you hear the rangers speak of relics which are things that have been in the location since the year dot, and have continued to thrive through climate change.  I think these are macrozamia’s and these grew in much wetter climates.  The plants here are extremely old and if not hundreds then thousands of years old.  This type of plant was around when the dinosaurs were wandering around here.

The walk was through a couple of groves and then basically around, along and over the boulder mountain.

 

These ants have been here a very long time.  They have created a track to a huge ant nest.  I wonder how many ants walking back and forth daily and how many years to create a track this deep.  It made us wonder how long that particular nest had been in use.

 

There is always something in flower here.  

This afternoon we drove around to Dolphin Cove and Tagon Beach and Headland.

The headlands all look the same – it’s hard to tell one from the other.  They all have some vegetation on top and rock shorelines.

We walked from  Little Tagon Beach to Dolphin Cove,

Really ! no surprises there.  We drove as far as we could to Tagon Beach – again powder sand between sand dunes, so we walked the last bit to the beach.

 

There was plenty of colour in the sand dune plants.  The wind had collected all of the seeds together in any indentation there was in the sand.  That sure made it easy for the ants to collect.  The wind blows the ants all over the place and they really struggle to walk anywhere.

Our time in WA is almost to an end.  We crossed into WA on the 14th August 2014 and give or take a few days, when we cross into SA – we will have spent 6 months in WA.  We have covered most places we wanted to go in that time –  some we haven’t bothered with because of the huge distance to just get to one particular spot (like Kalgoorlie) or (Mt Augustus)  Just too far out of our way.  It’s a huge state and you could spend a life time, trying to see it all. Everywhere is different, we loved the Kimberley – it was just the best – and all of the little heritage towns, we visited like Toodyay and Collie, Pinjarra, Walkaway– they were great too.  Loved Cape Leeuwin Light House, that was special.

We have had to change our plans :(   speaking with the ranger, it is not advisable to travel through the park tracks in the next couple of days.  We have had a couple of hot days (not that we really noticed) and there is now high fire danger, until there is either rain or a cool change comes through.  If a wild fire starts while we are on the track then we are in serious trouble.  We accept that they are giving good advice, .  We have finished doing what we wanted to do in the park and it doesn’t make sense to sit around for a couple of days and hope for a cool change or worst still a bush fire starts up and having wasted two days, we still can’t travel the track. 

Posting this blog from Cocklebiddy on the Eyre Highway, just taking a quick break.  We left Cape Arid this morning and used another track to Balladonia rather than drive right around.   Will write up our trek tonight at our rest stop.