2015/10 Australia trip - Yalgorup |
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We continued on south looking for our next campsite at Yalgorup national park, not far away, but hard for us to find. As we’ve found in Canada, GPS directions to parks are 
always suspect, sometimes taking us to the centre of the park or its nearest corner, rarely to a park road or the campground. This time we were at a corner, where we met this peacock, an Indian immigrant.
Finding the track to the Martin’s Tank campground took a while and even then we got stuck behind a car. I thought they were lined up to get into the campground, whereas they’d actually decided that the track was too rough for their car and wanted to back out. They were probably right; the track got worse. We met the campground hosts and handed over $26 for two nights’ camping. This was the first campsite we’d had to pay for on the trip; in return we got trails and a pit toilet and this large kangaroo as a neighbour.
Yalgorup seemed to be mainly forest surrounding a dozen or more lakes, most of them long and narrow. We’d explore in the morning. For now it was time to begin cooking 
and warm up the camper on a very cool evening.
Friday October 16th
It was a cool and sunny morning, good for walking. We set off early to see what the park had.
We began with the nearby Pollard Lake trail which took us through woodland to the bird hide on the lake. We assume that the lake is a busy spot during the 
migration seasons but on this morning it had precisely one distant duck in residence. However, along the way we’d seen plenty of flowers and birds, including this wattle bird and an inquisitive kookaburra.
Signs suggested that there was more to see further along the trail, so we plodded up and down hills of limestone rubble and climbed over fallen trees until it dawned on us that perhaps the trees had been dragged there to stop us.
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Yalgorup (1.33) |
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We hadn’t seen many new flowers but there were these few oddities: a grass tree forest, a grass tree stump, a plant infested with snails, and a monarch butterfly. We had no idea there were monarchs in Australia, but apparently their 
caterpillars arrived when somebody brought in milkweed. Both weed and monarch were happy to become Australians. We also found this pair of blue 
tongues – you don’t often see a pair.
This was a bit far for my back and I limped slowly back while Sandie hustled back to make lunch. We checked the trail lengths in the trail description, and realized we’d misunderstood. To my mind a 5K loop trail is the same length as a 5K return (out and back) trail and a 5K one way trail (if you don’t come back). However Australian parks sometimes quote “5K return” when they mean “5K one way”, a problem if you run out of water or daylight!
Back at the camper we met a young German guy on his first ever camping trip in Australia. He’d been working near Perth and wanted to see some wilderness before driving on to his next job in South Australia. I think he was on a similar deal to Sophie’s WWOOFing. We told him how to get himself a campsite and warned him to make sure he always carried plenty of water.
I needed some recovery time so we drove to Lake Clifton and took the short trail to the lake shore. It’s a freshwater lake but apparently it has a spring which delivers calcium salts. This enables the growth of thrombolites and the associated froth.
Thrombolites are “living rocks” formed in the lake by cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), the descendants of the bacteria responsible for generating the oxygen that allowed 
more complex life forms to develop.
Today there are only a few places in the word where they continue to live. They are similar to the stromatolites we saw in 2006 at Hamelin Pool a few hundred miles up the coast. The stromatolites grow in layers and the thrombolites in segments like a brain, but they both look like rounded rocks. It’s odd that the only easily visible specimens in the world are both in Western Australia.
This was interesting stuff but watching rocks grow is not too exciting and we returned to the campground’s area. We took a quick look at the beach: ocean to the west, endless sand 
to the north and south, not too exciting either except to the bucket and spade gang, so we moved on again to the Heathlands trail.
This loop trail began as an old road, easy walking amongst yet more types of flower. It was supposed to take us to a lake shore, but we were running out of daylight, so we skipped that bit. This was just as well as the return part of the loop was a zigzag through dense shrubbery with lots of rocks, slow going.
We were dodging kangaroos in the gloom on our drive back to the campground. It was busy with humans as well on a Friday night, noisy too but no one stayed up late.
Saturday October 17th
On our way out we checked out the day use area on Lake Hayward. It’s a salt lake, surrounded by salty sand, and a few shrubs. It’s not safe to swim in so we were not sure what day visitors would actually do there.