Dune…

Driving holidays with no particular itinerary are adventures of a kind. One never knows where the next corner will take one…

We had travelled along a road that became dirt, heading toward what we hoped was the ocean. ‘They’re big sandbanks,’ I said to my husband as we passed hillocks covered in tussocks, boobyalla and teatree. ‘We should stop and walk the dog.’

We knew nothing about this area – Peron Dunes. We thought we’d walk to the top of a little hillock, gaze at the ocean on a brilliantly clear blue day, albeit a howling gale, trot down to the waves and then get back to the car with ease.

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Off we loped with the dog on-lead as it’s a conservation area.

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Up we scrambled, up and up. Pushing between eau de nil coastal grasses and shrubs. Glad of the cold winter wind chasing at our heels.

We reached the summit and stood breathless.

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Not because of the height of the dune we had just scaled, but because of the desert of dunes stretching north and south, even straight ahead due east – to the coast about half a kilometre downhill.

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‘Do you want to walk down to the waves?’ (My husband can be so ingenuous.)

‘And then have to walk back up again?’ I replied. ‘On sand?’

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I gazed around at the smooth humps and hillocks, at the windblown gauze-like skeins of sand floating from one dune to another. ‘I think we’ve wafted through a geographical veil – this is the Sahara…’

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But he didn’t hear me. He’d walked on, he and Dog.

And so I followed.

Easy going down toward the ocean.

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And truly, it was worth the cardiac arrest on the way back up…

***

 But how disappointing to learn that Peron Dunes are ripped apart repeatedly by off-road vehicles and ATV’s. That in this spectacular conservation area, such a mindless pursuit is allowed.

Isn’t it bizarre that the powers-that-be require dogs to be on leads for the safety of wild life and yet vehicles can charge through regardless?

A shame…