Our morning trip was to the Francois
Peron national park, which covers the central and northern half of the Peron
Peninsula that juts up into Shark Bay. With a two-wheel drive, you can get to
the homestead heritage site, which has an interpretive trail around the old
sheep station as well as a natural habitat reclamation exhibit.
The trail ends
at the artesian hot tub, which was a wonderful soak for travellers’ bones, if a
bit algal and murky at the bottom. It was a hot day; the mercury is slowly
rising each day this week so it was about 26 degrees today. Out of the wind,
that felt very hot and we moved slowly as lizards as we wandered around.
Speaking of lizards, we finally got to see some up close and not dangerously
crossing a highway in front of us. That was pretty exciting.
We also saw a
family of emus, with three very cute emu babies, who had come to the watering
hole to freshen up. A clever blind had been set up so we could get quite close
without disturbing them with our human presence. (See Sol's photos on facebook for pix of the emus).
After lunch, Chris and the boys played ball in
the shallow water of Denham beach, while I wandered the town’s main strip to
choose a restaurant for supper. I got to do some yoga in the back yard, with
the wind rushing through the palm trees almost drowning out my internet yoga
class – felt really good to be doing it outdoors, though. For supper, we went
to the Old Pearler restaurant, housed inside a little building made of
thousands of tiny shells compacted and cut into bricks. The speciality is local
seafood, of course. Rio and I had the Red Emperor catch of the day, grilled
with lemon pepper. He said it was one of the best meals he had ever had. Sol
isn’t as keen on fish so he had chicken. Chris had a very tasty vegetable satay
with rice, and didn’t miss eating fish at all. The meal was a nice size, but we
all had room for dessert as well: Rio got the tiramisu, Chris had a
mango-marsala cheesecake, I had honeycomb cheesecake and Sol had lime swirl
cheesecake. There was lots of cross-table tasting – they were extremely yum. We
managed to walk back up the hill to our place with our full tummies, and then
enjoyed some time gazing at the southern night sky. It was very impressive to
be able to see the centre of the Milky Way for the first time, and a big disc
of the galaxy all the way across the sky, obscured in parts by dust but still
thick and intense. I can see why they called it milky.
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