Day 406 | camping at Munglinup Inlet: a day spent walking on a windswept beach

12 km | Heading west total: 14,471 km

this spot was quite a find, and I ended up having a couple of nights here although the campsites were a kilometre apart

I had rolled down towards Munglinup Beach last night but stopped a few kilometres short when I spotted a two track 4WD path off to the side of the road.

Hmm. That looks hopeful.

I trundled down for about a kilometre flipping between each side on the hard sand pads until I hit the inlet and found a great spot to put up the tent overlooking the water.

Awoke this morning to a cloudy day. Gloomy.

When I say awoke I mean re-awoke.

I hit the tent not long after 6pm last night as it was slowly getting dark. There’s a good reason to wake up at 2 30am: I’ve already had 8 hours kip. After 12 hours horizontal I bounced up to have brekkie, but being Saturday morning and knowing I wasn’t going to be making great distance today, ate the muesli and drank my cup of coffee back in the tent.

Plenty of bird life this morning with magpie geese flapping past at speed, honking as they went, more graceful Royal Spoonbills with the little spoon on the end of their beak and for some reason, crows.

The cloudy day makes it ambiguous as to what time it is. Today no hurrying was involved.

As usual it was blowing a bit at the beach but I had a great walk first to the left around some smooth granite rocks with monster surf pounding and then to the right to where the inlet breaks out about once every 3 or 4 years after heavy rain. The beach is really quite steep and the waves shoot up every now and again to wet the feet and wipe away the footprints.

After the day exploring I find there are 3 places to stay around here.

There’s a commercial campground about 3kms from the beach which remained uninvestigated, but with hot showers and power for the caravans; a “bush camping” ground down at the beach which has pit toilets, cold water showers and a rainwater tank all for the cost of $10 a site a night, (this was popular with some converted buses and off road caravan); or back to the estuary.

Guess which option the antisocial GJ took after filling the water bottles.