A second day on the beach of Discovery Bay took us further along the Discovery Bay Costal Park.
Late at night (or rather, very early in the morning), once the moon set, there were no clouds, and the stars (and the Milky Way) shone in their full brilliance. And to top it off, I also saw a meteor.
With a 16 km day today, and low tide around 1:30 pm, we were in no rush at all to leave camp. Carefree and I didn’t even get up until nearly 8 am. When we did, a small mantis that we saw on our tent last night was still there. When we were taking the tent down, it even tried to climb up me as if I were a tree.
Before leaving, we also saw a couple of snails, and two wallabies hopping through.
We left camp shortly before 10 am, at first following a sandy road back towards the beach, and then a sandy trail. We saw two emu — this seemed like prime habitat for them, with roughly meter-tall grass they could easily hide in. Unsurprisingly, they were shy, and ran away quite quickly when they saw us.
We also saw a snake, a large copperhead, we think, sitting on the trail. It was not inclined to move away very quickly, but eventually it did.
Before reaching the beach, we had to head towards, and then over, the dunes. Climbing up to the top of the dunes gave us a good view of the farmland just inland.
It also gave us a bit of a view ahead: still obscured by the haze of the crashing surf.
As the day progressed, though, we could tell we were traveling further along Discovery Bay, and Cape Bridgewater, at the southern end, gradually started to come into focus.
The beach continued much the same as yesterday, though usually with a smaller, more sloping hard area of beach. This made it a little slower to hike, as we were often at an angle, and more often had to maneuver away from the waves. The ocean here was rougher, with easily two- or three-meter high waves out where they first broke, and the waves more frequently ran higher up on the beach than they did yesterday.
There was even less of interest on the beach than yesterday. A washed-up styrofoam block provided habitat for some shellfish. There was the usual assortment of shells on the beach, sea birds, and biting flies that chased us the whole day, but apart from that, the beach just didn’t seem very lively.
I wondered what kind of distance flies traveled in their quest for food each day. The ones that followed us all day (or at least, the ones that survived following us all day — I managed to swat half a dozen of them at our first break) must have flown a good 30 or 40 km — the 17 km we did, plus much bonus distance from them constantly orbiting around us.
There was also no shade whatsoever the whole day; we took our two breaks set back from the ocean in moderately-hard sand, but never really got comfortable.
Our second break was a short distance after we accidentally spooked a seal that was sunning itself on the beach. It waddled into the ocean, swimming back and forth. At first, we thought it was just playing, until we realized it probably wanted to go back to its spot on the beach that we were now standing too close to. We walked a bit away and sat down for lunch. It promptly got back out of the water and resumed sunning itself where it had been before.
While we were on break, we saw another, much larger, seal swim past. After a little while, we wondered if perhaps it was the mother to the (possibly) baby seal we passed, and promptly ended our break and hiked on to give them both (much) more space.
After four hours on the beach, we finally departed, heading inland on a very soft sandy track through the dunes.
This was a slow, arduous slog, and with the ocean breeze blocked by the dunes, it felt like we were hiking in an oven. An area of apparently shifting dunes, trail markers were few and far between, and it was not always clear which way we should go.
At the end of the climb, we got a “reward” of sorts, a view towards lush greenery and farmland.
It only took half an hour to get from the beach to Swan Lake Camp, but it felt like much longer, and we were tired and exhausted once we made it to the welcome shade of the shelter.
At the shelter, we sat down on the benches and entered lazy mode, trying to cool off as much as possible. We didn’t set the tent up until well after 5. CareFree had a cheese and crackers dinner rather than cook in the heat. Learning my lesson from sweating while eating dinner yesterday, I waited until after 6 pm (by which point it had noticeably cooled), slightly undercooked my pasta, and let it sit a few minutes to cool further (and finish cooking on its remaining heat) before digging in.
Later in the evening, we saw two kangaroos hop through the brush onto the path between the car camping area and the hiker camp. They stopped to look at us for a minute, and then bounced off.
The backdrop for the evening was the sound of cows mooing from the nearby farms. It was not exactly the animal chorus I expected from an Australian bush trail.