We awoke to the scurrying of dog-claws on the wood upstairs, but these were really quickly replaced with the nice sounds of flocks of birds outside. We jumped out of bed and made a lovely home-cooked breakfast while discussing our plans.
Cape Hillsborough is famous for kangaroos on its beaches, so dusk was definitely a time to go to the beach. Well, dawn as well, but that didn’t agree with our holiday spirit 😉
We spotted our morning wake-up committee on the roof, grabbed a drink and headed off.
Today we decided to hike through the national park and along the beaches. On our drive there, we arrived at a fork in the road. One was a “Sandy Path”, “Better” for four-wheel-drives. Given that it was just “better” I thought I would give it a go.
200m later, I turned around and parked at the main carpark. It’s a nice day for walking anyway!
Before we headed off, we saw these useful signs about the local wildlife.
About 20 minutes later we hit the top of the lookout. It really did have a fantastic view!
On the way down we got some more opportunities to do photo-shooting with the amazingly coloured wildlife.
If it weren’t for the legs this spider would look like a teddy bear, right?
When we got back to the base of the trail, we arrived at a really interesting beach. Not only was the scenery really pretty, but the waves had some sort of reflective sand in them causing it to look like gold was washing up on the beach. We tried our best to get a photo, but it was almost impossible to capture! The whole beach was also decorated by sand-crabs building their holes and flicking round balls of sand out of them.
Serious bird is serious
We also walked across to wedge island. We hadn’t really planned this, but the tides played along fantastically – we could walk along the beach for 10 minutes and across the causeway, rather than taking the 2.5 hour inland path 😀
After a short walk around the island (it is small) we headed on back for lunch. Manja had found the Old station tea house in some brochures. Its basically an old train station from a long abandoned railway, which now houses a cafe and function center. It was super quirky, and we both loved it. It also had some great old fashioned advice for Gentlemen and Ladies from a 1950’s reader digest:
We decided on having some lunch before having a walk around.
One of the cool little things in the gardens was this little old car!
After strolling around we spontaneously decided to stick around for some scones and tea.
Oh, and this little guy joined us for tea!
We headed back to our Airbnb and decided to cool off in the pool and whirlpool. The weather really was perfect for it. Find the photo-bomber in the last photo before watching the video 😉
Once we had cooled off, we considered having an early evening, but then decided on a walk along the beach promenade instead. It was mostly rocky (hence the pool) but we saw these incredible mangrove trees which seem to grow in salt water. Nature is pretty amazing! We also found a treasure-trove of shells, which we carefully curated and selected a few special ones to take along. We also found some odd looking rocks, which we later researched. Turns out they are “Sand Dollars”.
Continuing our war against plastic, we carried a bag load of rubbish from the area as well, and (hopefully) rescued some coral stuck in what remained of the lip around a plastic bucket.
When we got back it was already getting toward dusk. You could tell because there was little kangaroos all over the road. So we wandered down to the kangaroo beach. Unfortunately some idiot was there with his dog and family. There’s only about 100 signs telling people that dogs are not permitted on the beach. Regardless, unfortunately for us it meant that there wasn’t a single Roo to be found on the beach that evening :/
We still enjoyed the sunset and spotted a few birds and bats in the area. When we walked back we also saw plenty of Roos along the roadside and in the scrubs. They really are everywhere here, including in the front yard!
Dinner tonight consisted of microwaved food and we spent the rest of the evening writing blogs, sorting out photos and recovering from a day walking in the sun.
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