Esperance

The Southern Coast road follows the coast east from Hopetoun and we got to some pretty good bays along here before rejoining the highway leading into Esperance.  This is a very nice place, with its amazing beaches and easy access to some fabulous national parks.  We spent 3 nights at a yabby farm of all places - the people welcome campers for $10 pp per night which includes hot showers, toilets and shelter.  Lovely friendly people too.  This made a good base for exploring as it was only 5 minutes from 'town'.

Seriously some of the loveliest beaches anywhere,
all within 20 minutes of Esperance.

There's a 20km drive we did which hugs the coastline and we visited these beautiful beaches. Fortunately we had a warm sunny day - it turned very windy and a bit chilly that night.

Cape Le Grand NP was one place we especially wanted to see and we spent a couple of nights down there. We managed two half-days of sunshine and were able to spend much of it at Lucky Bay ("Australia's whitest beach").  The sand's not only extremely white, but also has a really unusual consistency (sort of like icing sugar we think).  It squeaks no matter how hard you try not to squeak it!

We walked across to Thistle Cove and had this lovely view
back to Lucky Bay

A bit of overcast weather didn't stop the sand sculptor!  Another
life-size dolphin in the making

The family that was camping at Tozers Bush Camp during the really heavy rain was camped here at Lucky Bay too, so we got together for 'happy hour' and some time on the beach.  There's another bay down here which was just as nice as Lucky Bay; it's called Hellfire Bay and we walked the length of the beach and up over the rocks.  This overlooks the Recherche Archipelago, part of the Southern Ocean which contains about 125 islands.  It's a great area!  Once again though, the wind and rain intruded on our beach time :)  Maybe we'll be lucky enough to return some time.