Day 91

2 May 2013

Today we had already decided to head off early to try and beat the heat of the sun to do a walk around the Mandu Mandu Gorge. The days here have been consistently 34 degrees or over which makes for beautiful snorkelling and swimming weather but not much out of the water!

The gorge is only just up the road from where we are camped and then it's a 3km loop walk around the gorge and when I say around I mean around! Obviously at the moment there is no water in this gorge so you first walk through all the river rocks of where the river should be and then there is a steep climb to get to the top of the gorge, you then walk along the top and steep climb down and then up the other side of the gorge, along the top and then back down to the car park. It was a challenging walk actually, like climbing up and down things for some reason, was fun.

That out of the way, we wanted to check out some of the other bays here for snorkelling. Along this NP road would be about 15 different beaches, bays, gorges or camp areas that you can go in and check out. Today we went to Oyster Bay which looked spectacular for snorkelling, however it was low tide and the coral is too shallow, you end up harming the coral if you try and snorkel so you have to snorkel on high tide. Off to Turquoise Bay which is the most popular and most talked about. We know why now, beautiful spot and the snorkelling was much better as current wasn't as strong and didn't have to swim quite as far to see things. There are two snorkels here, the drift loop which was amazing, so much coral in all different colours and fish everywhere, saw some eel fish looking things with really long noses on them, weird looking things! And then you can walk around the other side of the bay and just do your own snorkel around, there wasn't quite so much to see under the water here but such a fantastic location for swimming, just looked like a Fiji brochure or something, the water so clear and so many different shades of blue/green! Pictures just don't do it justice!

Back to camp for lunch and this is where we have stayed all arvo. Very windy here the last couple of days, which is probably good to ease the heat but can get a bit annoying too!

Flathead and homemade chips for dinner tonight.

Off to Red Dog statue tomorrow! Yay!

Carly & Joel

 

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