Dec 5 (Day 309) - Guilderton to Lancelin

150km today

After carefully heading back to the main road we drove about 6km down to Guilderton. After finding the main carpark was now a paid ticket carpark, we drove up to a public carpark on the cliffs overlooking the ocean and Moore River.

Guilderton / Moore River

The town of Guilderton is about 90km north of Perth, and sits at the mouth of Moore River. Moore River is unusual in that it normally doesn't flow through out to the Indian Ocean! There's a sandbar between the end of the river and the ocean, and over time the river fills up more and more until a combination of its rising level and the ocean crashing over the sand bar causes the river to break through the bar and all flow out to sea. The bar then closes back over and the process starts again.

Looking east from the cliffs to the broad swimming area in Moore River

Looking south to the mouth of Moore River (left) -
nearly joined up with the Indian Ocean (right)

A very windswept tree on the Moore River foreshore

Bodyboarding in the Indian Ocean

We took the body boards and the canoe down to the ocean and the kids had a nice swim while Mim and I had a nice chat.

After some time the kids were done so Jude went back up to the car to collect the sand board we'd borrowed from Mim's parents, as there's a reasonable sandboarding spot on the side of one of the dunes here. We had a good hour of fun trying out different sand dunes, making small jumps and having a general ball including falling off, tumbling and getting mouthfuls of sand!

On the sandhills at Guilderton

Jude

Matt

Bek

Mim

Greg

A couple of jumps!

Mim

 

 

We got a message from Mim's parents to say they'd had mechanical troubles with their campervan and were getting this looked at, so given they were still a few hours inland and weren't sure how long they'd be, we carried on up the coast to Lancelin.

Lancelin

Lancelin is located on the coast about 120km north of Perth, so only about a 30km drive from Guilderton. We'd only been here once before, and only to get some lunch, so we knew nothing really about it.

Lancelin - the town's down the bottom, but
can you spot the sand dunes?? :D

At the information board at the entrance to town, it became apparent that one of its main attractions were the enormous sandhills - and looking at a satellite map it's not hard to see why! They are simply enormous, so much larger than the ones at Guilderton which were fine in themselves. Our plan had been to drive north of Lancelin to a free camp on the side of the road and do the sand boarding on the way back, but eventually decided to visit the sand dunes while we were here given Mim's parents still hadn't joined us.

The sand dunes are obviously a pretty big feature of the town. On the way through town we saw a few signs advertising sand board hire for $10/hr, and once we got to the dunes there were commercial operators hiring out quad bikes. While reading through the information at the entrance to the dunes, we saw a dune buggy on its way out, as well as a late 90's (AU) Ford Falcon with a big suspension lift and large 4WD tyres on its way in! While we found a spot and parked up there were a few 4WD's driving along the side of the dunes with engines revving, sliding sideways and throwing plumes of sand in the air. So all in all it was a bit of a 'wild west' type of environment where one needs to keep their wits about them and think ahead.

On top of the sand dunes at Lancelin

We climbed a dune and had a good hour or so more sliding down. These dunes were considerably higher and steeper than the ones at Guilderton.

Panning west, through north, east and around to the south

Jude at the Lancelin sand dunes

 

A number of cars, including the Falcon, were tearing around the dunes

I took the Pajero for a bit of an explore around the sand dunes too, although since we hadn't let the tyres down they dug into the sand quite a bit.

Once we were done we looked at the route out to the free camp we were heading for, which showed us we could travel north from the sand dunes, then around to the highway and then further north to the free camp. This was better than doubling back south to the highway and then north to the free camp.

Hmm. Well that's the theory 'according to the GPS'. It turned out that the 'road' north was simply a track through the sand dunes, and once we were a little way along it we quickly realised it wasn't the best track for a caravan, even an off-road one! The track went over a few small mounds which were quite up then down then up then down, and given the sand was a bit soft we couldn't take it as slow as we would have liked to as we'd have lost momentum and gotten stuck in one of these dips. When we made it through to a flatter section we stopped and took stock of the route ahead. It was just getting softer, so we made the decision to go back. This however was harder than it looked, because the track was fairly narrow and there wasn't anywhere that was both flat and firm. We were about 30 metres past an opening which dropped down slightly to the base of some sand dunes, so we reversed about as fast as I dared to straight back, then swung the back of the van around and pushed it back up the start of the dune a little. So far so good. The challenge now was getting back up the slight incline and around onto the track, and this didn't go so well. Initially the wheels just dug into the sand, especially as the track we were trying to drive across and onto was quite rutted, so the wheels were thrown up a little as they crossed the ruts, causing us to lose precious speed and traction. I rolled back a couple of times and drove forwards and backwards a few times to compact the sand which helped, but each time the ruts in the main track foiled our path. So we bit the bullet and let the tyres on the car and van down to about 15psi (for reference, vehicle tyres are normally about 35-40psi) as this provides better traction on soft surfaces, we smoothed the ruts out on the main track to allow for a smooth entry, and drove back and forth several times to get our entry as firm as possible. Then, backing up as far as we dared, we eased forward to get moving, then accelerated along the firm track we'd made and roared across onto the main track. We'd made it!

Excitement over, we drove south through Lancelin, bought some supplies to make tea, reinflated all the tyres, and then headed out of town. Once again we wondered if there wasn't some spot nearby we could stay for the night rather than driving a long way up the highway to this free camp (which was right by the highway and didn't sound that nice anyway). So once again we checked the satellite map to see what we could find. And what did we find?

Our initial three freecamping options

Well this! There were a few options which had promise. Option 1 sadly had a gate across it so that was the end of that one. Option 2 was around some water tanks. We explored the track in either direction a little but it was more overgrown than when the satellite photo was taken so the path was quite narrow, it went up a steep hill a little way to the left and there really wasn't anywhere to pull off along it. The track running at 45 degrees a little to the left of the number 2 was in very poor condition too. So we reversed all the way back up the hill to the water tank and headed off again.

Option 3 turned out to be very good, although we hadn't actually had that in our plan. It was a gravel patch to the side of the road which we'd seen on the way in but forgotten, and which we pulled into on the spur of the moment on passing it and remembering it. In itself it would have been a reasonable place to stop, but out the back was a little track into the scrub which took us into enough of a clearing to pull up and set up. Again, the path was fairly overgrown in places so we had to do a bit of tree pruning to get through easier, but once we were in it was a great spot!

It looks like these may have been access tracks for workers at some stage for a project which has now finished, not sure. But either way it was good enough for what we needed. It wasn't particularly wide and you could still hear a little road noise from both Lancelin Rd and the main highway, but we were well sheltered visually and the noise wasn't intrusive at all.

We had a little panel-beating to do on the van as we'd bumped into a lump of concrete while exploring Option 2 which we discovered had made a bit of a mess of our step! But a hammer soon persuaded it to roughly resume its original shape!

 

Poor step! But it was soon back in shape.

I installed the new rubber seals under the bonnet of the Pajero we'd bought at the wreckers yesterday.  

Mim's parents weren't having any luck with their camper van unfortunately. It seemed the starter motor had failed so it was getting towed back to Perth and they were going to hitch a caravan onto their car and drive up to join us.

So that sorted, we settled in for the night with our dinner of Nachos and all had an early night.

-- Greg