What do you do when you’re on an east-facing beach and the rising sun is lighting up the walls of your tent? Well, you can’t go back to sleep!
We all emerged from our cocoons around the same time and either went stumbling along the beach, or stumbling into the dunes with a shovel and paper. The long shadows across the beach lured Michael to take some photos. We found a few dingo tracks, scarily close to our tents, lots of crabs and a carcass of a puffer fish with little more than skin and teeth remaining. We ate, then as we were packing up the site, suddenly a light plane appeared and landed on the beach right in front of us. That distracted us for a while as it dropped off some tourists and took off again.
Northwards we headed again. First stop was Eli Creek, a very popular freshwater creek with a white sandy bed and cold, crystal clear water. If you read the travel guides, the idea is you walk upstream then float back down, so that we did. Several times.
Just north of Eli Creek is the wreck of the Maheno, which kept the photographers and the posers amongst us (all of us) busy for another half-hour or so.
Many tourists don’t go any further than this point, but about 40 km further north is Waddy Point, which I think none of us had been to and had been recommended to us as worth visiting if we had the time. Well, we did, so we drove on up the beach, passing many dunes of coloured sand carved into interesting shapes by erosion. There wasn’t much else to look at… just lots of sand. We had time to stop for lunch at a village called Dundabura where we favoured their fresh-ish sandwiches and hot chips to our own food which was becoming squashed and water-laden in our coolers. We topped up fuel and water, and kept going north.
We had several reports of Indian Head being difficult to cross. The track turns off the beach to go inland, but the sand here is very soft and required a bit more speed and more revs than other sand we had encountered so far. Since it was our first time here, we all stopped just before the turn to check maps. Stopping in soft sand isn’t the best idea. Well, some cars handled it better than others. The Landcruiser (or maybe its driver) seemed to have the least problems getting moving, and the Patrol seemed unstoppable too, but the Hilux had a bit more trouble, maybe because of its thinner tyres or lighter weight. It bogged a couple of times, but at least we learned how to dig a car out and eventually we traversed that bit ok.
Back onto the beach on the other side and another couple of kilometres north was another similar crossing at Waddy Point. We had a bit of trouble here too, but we weren’t the only ones – one European woman who could barely speak English, driving a small Suzuki, actually turned back rather than trying again. Dee needed help with the Hilux again. To add to the problem, the engine seemed to have stopped firing on one cylinder and had less power, so after more digging and pushing, we felt some relief once he was across this last soft-sand challenge for today.
Ced doesn’t really panic much, but right then, he admitted to being pretty worried. While we were pushing Dee, the Patrol, unstoppable up to this point, was safely parked on the beach… until Ced put the pedal down and it dug in. No problem – we’re all experts at digging now – but the waterline was now only about a metre away and the tide was coming in fast! All Ced could think of was the embarrassment of entering the hall of shame with all those other stupid tourists who drowned their hire cars. We all ran to help and a few other guys nearby recognised the urgency and came to help too. No worries! Well, that is to say, we got the car moving in a few minutes, but just as the car drove off, a wave ran up the beach and tumbled into the ditches we had dug. Wow, that was close!
Needless to say, once we were all safely up on top of Waddy Point, we were all pretty relieved. Just down from the carpark is Champagne Pools, surrounded by a rock wall which the waves break over, leaving behind loads of froth. After all that digging and pushing we needed to chill, so we went swimming down there for a while.
Tonight’s campsite was just a bit further up at Orchid Beach. A couple of very drunk locals with nothing else better to do, drove in front of us and led us to an available site. I imagined us in a Cohen Brothers film being lured into a trap by some psychopaths, but in reality they were just really friendly, really dirty not-so-old men. This campsite was further back from the beach than last night and pretty quiet. It had a fireplace which we burned a log on and sat around as we devoured Al and DJ’s falafel and rissole wraps and replaced fluids with water and other more interesting drinks. We were running out of songs by this stage, so we started making them up… the best was the now-classic reggae hit, Bumping and Squeaking, for Aoife who was loving driving over all the bumpy sand.
I still haven’t seen a dingo.
