Our last full day at Quinninup didn’t give us much of a chance to explore as it turned out. The “scattered showers” turned into a more or less constant rain, forcing us to once again deploy the fly sheet to keep the main tent dry. Fortunately the pub next to the camp site serves excellent food so having been confined to camp by the rain all day at least we could eat well !
The rain continued this morning as we left, heading further west again, although the rain showers became less frequent and shorter with the occasional breakthrough of some sunshine.
We headed first to Pemberton where we finally got our WA National Park permit for the month. It’ll cover us for most of the parks which would otherwise cost $12 a day. We’ll try and utilise as many of the NP camp sites too as with the permit it’ll only cost us $20 a night at those that charge.
We took a diversion to Augusta, which turned out to be a smaller town than we’d expected. At the end of the peninsula, near the light house, is the old water wheel in the picture. It was used to pump water for the construction of the light house and also for the use of the light house when construction was finished. The water race (still working) is fed from a spring but the water wheel seems to have been petrified by the minerals in it.
From Augusta (via a bakery for a spot of lunch) we headed up the coast into the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park, our camp site for the night being about half way up the park. There are a number of caves along the route but we didn’t fancy heading into the one we stopped at – a “challenging” cave apparently that had a ladder system through tight enclosed spaces.
The camp site is of the usual NP standard, good marked out pitches with long drop toilets.
We’ll continue north tomorrow and see where it takes us, the bad weather is supposed to clear in the next couple of days and hopefully that with our northward progress will see us with a bit more sunshine. Temperatures at the moment aren’t too bad but the wind is cold so out of the wind it’s still T shirt weather but missing the high 20s, low 30s we were expecting.