MONDAY 18 JUNE     KEEP RIVER NATIONAL PARK

I didn’t sleep well, last night – the other bed occupant was “breathing heavily”!

I was, therefore, up and about early, but John slept for much of the morning.

During the night, noticed that the battery level light on the controller system had turned from green to orange. Not a good sign. So John got the generator going for a while in the morning.

M went off from the campground to walk and explore. John was tired after yesterday and wanted a mostly camp based day. He hooked his laptop to the inverter, whilst the genset was going, and had a “fix” of his computer game, until into the afternoon.

After a late lunch we all drove to the Gingers Hill walk, back near the Ranger Station. This was only a short walk, up a hill.

At the top there was a structure that the aboriginals used for catching kites – the “fire birds”.

A man would hide in the shelter, light a little fire to attract the kite to come in, looking for prey that was trying to escape the fire. He would wave a feathered lure from a hole in the top of the shelter. When a kite swooped in on the “distressed” prey, it would be grabbed. Roast kite for dinner!

Drove on to Cockatoo Lagoon, by the Ranger Station. We hoped to see a whole lot of different birds here, but they were not as prolific as expected. We had a survey with the binoculars for a little while, but did not see anything riveting.

Back at camp, M and I had a hair washing session, using her new solar shower bag, which we’d left out in the sun, to warm the water inside. We took it in turns to hold up the bag so the other could rinse. It worked well.

I made a batch of carrot soup, to use up those we had, in preparation for crossing into WA, soon.

Some new campers came in during the afternoon. The result was two lots of very noisy and hyper kids running amok around the campground until 9pm. They were very intrusive as they ran all round where we were trying to sit peacefully around our campfire.

This completed our original three nights here, but we had decided to stay on another night, because a Ranger was giving a talk tomorrow night, about the Park, that we thought would be worthwhile hearing.

Once again, the sunset was brilliant, due to increased clouds in the sky.