Dark clouds blanket the sky, hanging low, and teasing us with sprinkles of rain on the day we've chosen to venture off the beaten path into Cape Le Grand national park, 65 kilometers east of Esperance. The campsites fill up quick there, so off we went early, and scored an ocean view lot, along Lucky Bay, one of the most picturesque little bays in the entire park. Just when we thought we couldn't find anything more beautiful than what we'd seen, we hiked to another amazing beach, Thistle Cove, which had been off limits for the past 12 months, due to a beached whale that had been decaying, and the cove full up of sharks feasting on the carcass. Lucky for us, it had just stormed weeks before we arrived, and washed the rest of the remains out to sea, leaving a small portion of the skeleton on the beach. Aside from the skeleton at the far end of the beach (which was difficult to even know what it was unless someone had told us), the beach was the finest we had seen - it only took us 2 hours of uphill hiking to get there during the high heat of the day. The sign said it was an easy hike and that for moderate to hard hikes, you'd need hiking shoes. So we wore our chacos, and had a tough time just in those. The degree of difficulty scale here is a bit different that that we'd see in the US. I wonder what 'hard' degree of difficulty looks like. Nonetheless, we loved it, hiking hours over granite rocks and low lying bush land. The air is so fresh, the ocean water so pure, it's so revitalizing here.
