Ah, the first days of a road trip are the hardest. Somehow, you are still thinking of all the jobs you should have done before you bolted out the door, whilst still knowing life is a whole series of jobs that never ends, and most of them you make up anyway. So it is that we kinda arrive a little lost - we've been here before, but we're not sure if we're in the right place. Should we be at home? Or further up the road?
I make us stop in a paragliding carpark - there's no 'no sleeping in vehicles' signs so at least we're not going to get the knock on the van door in the early morning (most of the time the rangers don't come past til after 7 am, so as long as you're up bleary eyed and drinking coffee by then, who's to say you slept in that spot anyway?). It's a million dollar view - freezing, but beautiful.
Cape Bridgewater used to be a bustling town, full of fisherman and the like. Now it's so sleepy - there's not even a pub (say WHAT?) and I'm pretty sure there's more cows here than people. There's a singular cafe on the beach. The beach is long and the whole cove used to be a crater. The white sands and azure waters make it look tropical, but today it's bitingly cold and we're wondering why we didn't go north instead.
But we needed bracing cold and wild deserted coastlines to reset us back to a wilder state of being. After rice porridge with mangos and blueberries and a strong coffee, we set off on a cliff walk. The edges of the cliff form the ring of a giant crater - most of it has collapsed into the sea. The whole area used to be volcanic, but now lies dormant.
We walk along the coast walk to the highest cliff point in Australia and the only mainland seal colony which we manage to capture with a zoom lens from the look out. We watched for ages - there's something mesmerising about seals honking and hollering and blubbering over each other, then sliding off into the sea. We were particularly captured by the lone seal having his own spa bath in a rock pool. There's two sorts here - Australian Fur and New Zealand seals, which live side by side in relative harmony.
On the other side of the cape there's freshwater springs and lakes, a blowhole that shoots water into the air and a petrified forest, but we've seen that on a previous trip. We're just thankful just to be somewhere quiet, get out, stretch our legs and shake off the work dust. If you're ever driving through from Melbourne toward Perth, Cape Bridgewater is a really great stop over if you like it quiet and beautiful.
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