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The squeaky sand not only squeaked (kept me amused for longer than it should have, that) but was also surprisingly white and so fine it felt more like paste than sand when it was wet. And yes, scooping it up and rubbing it through my fingers also kept me busy for a while. The panorama shot of said sand (at the top of the mosaic above) is Lucky Bay, the second nicest beach . . . a bit flat was all . . . ah how quickly one's standards rise. And the winner was . . . Hellfire Bay (named after the St Elmo's Fire blue light that used to be seen from ships' masts . . . supposedly ). This bay had me when it first showed me a wave that looked like the stylised 'rip curl' shapes I'd only ever seen in graphic designs before now . . . with almost every wave across the little bay. Bean kind of liked it too.
The whistling rock didn't whistle for us, just looked a bit whale-like from certain angles (not this one), but the bay this one was on had some lovely rock sitting places (amidst the very scary signs about how to tie bow-lines and anchor points designed to stop rock fishermen from meeting untimely demises).
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Here's Bean taking a photo of some moss half way up a very windy hill in the NP called Frenchman Peak (we think because the top looks like beret from a certain angle, not this one, which isn't even of the aforesaid peak, as we were on it at the time).
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And here's Bean looking at birds with his new binoculars (I'm not allowed to call them field glasses unless I also add wireless and gramophone to my vocabulary . . . and why not indeed says the increasingly hairless semi-centurian . . .). This was by the side of the road, on a non-bird sanctuary, just before we walked around a wetlands bird sanctuary and saw no birds at all for most of the walk.
Also, and I suspect this may be a South Western WA thing, as well as rocks and sand, and birds in non-sanctuary places, Esperance offered the sorts of shrubbery growing by the side of the road that you'd normally find in a nursery or open to the public garden (not our garden of course, as the Banksia I ran past the other morning reminded me of the various sad attempts at growing Grevillea bushes on the block at home . . . supposedly very happy in central Aus, but not at our place).
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Esperance also does cold damp winds quite effectively too (our last night camping left us feeling a bit pathetic really, even with young Piggy going full blast to show off to his new friend the wok)
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