THURSDAY 19 JULY     CHARNLEY RIVER STATION

It was a freezing night. I finished up putting on both a windcheater and a beanie as extra sleepwear, and was still cold. So much for my theory about closeness to the coast.

A rooster started up at dawn, just to add to the misery. It had a funny crow – there was no “doodle” in it. More like one loud squawk – a very loud one!

From what we could gather, in talk overheard around the camp ground and ablution block in the morning, most campers here had arrived yesterday, and were planning to visit Grevillea Gorge today. So, we decided to wait a day before we did that visit.

Instead, we did the walk that was a circuit from the camp ground. This went to Paradise Pool, on to Tower Hill, and back to the camp ground – about 5kms. The walking was over stony ground to the pool, but was a bit less rocky on the way back from Tower Hill.

The pool area was quite pretty, albeit small scale. There were a couple of little lots of rapids coming down into a series of small plunge pools.

One of the pools was home to a large water monitor, who did not seem particularly perturbed by our presence, but just kept sunning himself on his rock shelf by the water.

The walk was enough – it got rather hot during the walk. Our crowd avoidance strategy worked – there was no one else on the walk.

After that effort, and a late lunch, we were happy to laze around camp for the rest of the afternoon.

Now the sites had dried out, they were not as bad as they seemed yesterday, although there was no respite from the afternoon sun on the front of the tent. We were actually very pleased to be away from the large numbers of mosquitoes that were infesting the desirable sites close to the creek!

One of the free ranging ganders was quite aggressive. I was walking back from checking some information at Reception, across the large expanse of open ground to the camp area, and it started to hiss and make little runs at me as I walked past the group of geese.