Adventure in a van.: Week 33- Saturday 29th October- Friday 4th October

Denham, WA

Star Rating:★★★★☆

★=Full Star☆=Half a Star

On the day we got to Denham it was raining, but when the rain stopped for a bit we walked down to the foreshore playground, it was awesome! The next day Dad convinced me to go on a ride with him, it was fun until we turned around to go back to the caravan park... it started to bucket down! By the time we got back we were soaked to the bone! That day we went out and explored Eagle Bluff and some other cliffs, but we were nearly blown away! However, it was still so beautiful even though it was windy! For the afternoon we went and sat up in the camp kitchen with our friends Deb and Pete who we saw at Orbost (back down in Victoria). Jackson and I went into the games room and watched TV-it was nice to be able to sit on a couch!

On our last day there we went and explored the national park (Francois Peron National Park), it was incredible and there were so many picturesque views (as you will see below in the photos). We saw a sand waterfall, lot of turtles, some dugongs, sharks and even a massive stingray! That night it was Halloween and Jackson went trick or treating and brought back a massive bag of lollies which he shared with me.

The beautiful cliffs and beaches in the magnificent Francois Peron National Park.👇

There was some super cute flowers that looked like jellies!

There was some coral that was half submerged and half above water!

There was a sand fall (a sand waterfall) at one of the beaches (Cape Peron), it looked super!

I had fun climbing lots of rocks.

We saw a goanna at the Francois Peron Homestead.

Steep Point, WA

Star Rating:★★★☆

★=Full Star ☆=Half a Star

We had a windy (we were camped in the tent) but wonderful time at Steep Point, which is the most westerly point in mainland Australia. It was fun to go swimming and snorkelling in the bright blue water. I also spent a lot of time at our beach campsite sewing the bag that I started making at South Lefroy (on our second time there). But my favourite thing that I did started when Mum and I went out for a paddleboard together on the second morning we were at Steep Point...…..

The water was crystal clear when Mum and I went for a paddleboard, from above the water you could see everything there was to see below the surface. For the first 45 minutes we didn’t much though (except for a couple of starfish). When we stopped so I could do some snorkelling around the rocks I saw lots of large clams (I also saw a tiny, baby one) and heaps of sea urchins! After I got too cold, Mum let me lay on the back of the paddleboard with my face in the water while she paddled me around the coral so I could still look at it.

We had already started to paddle back to camp when we spotted some dolphins in the distance, Mum paddled wildly to catch up to them! When we got pretty close they kept lifting their magnificent tails up in the air! It looked awesome but sadly I couldn’t take a photo because the batteries in my camera had run out. As we were getting thirsty we turned around and began heading into camp. On the way in Mum spotted some big, dark shapes that looked like they were moving, when we stopped we realised they were moving so we started to paddle closer. Thinking they were big stingrays we paddled until we were quite close to them (they were heading in our direction too). As they swam towards us we realised they weren’t just stingrays, they were big Manta Rays!!! As they swam under us (they literally swam under the paddleboard quite close to the surface, Mum told me to hang on because she was worried they’d flip their wing up and tip us off) we saw that the larger of the two was over 3 metres wide! The smaller ray was about 2 metres wide. We think that it was a mother with it’s baby because the mother kept doing something (like flipping its wing up) then the baby copied. Soon I put on my snorkel and jumped in. Sadly they were too fast for me so I didn’t see the big one, but the smaller ray looped back so I got to see it underwater. The Manta Rays were spectacular, as was Steep Point.