A Bushwalking We Had Gone!

We went trekking at the Royal National Park, the second oldest national park after Yellowstone in the USA. It was one of the best days I've ever had in a lo-o-o-ng time. It was beautiful, I can't think of any other way to describe it. Just purely beautiful and perfect.

Of course, it helps that I'm such an appreciative person and a true, true lover of wildness and nature :-) I found everything beautiful, and I, not less than once, heard 'Jerusha, those are just weeds!' I don't care if they are weeds, they were still beautiful to me. I wonder who decided to brand them as weeds in the first place. I can consider them God's ready made garden flowers. Never weeds.
It's been years since I've done any real trekking, but I was surprised at how good I still was. We decided to stray off the track and climb down some rocks closer to the sea and walk along it instead. I still don't run out of energy, I have never needed help climbing down, or up, or squeezing through crevices, and I found out I still don't, unlike the other trekkers, heights still don't scare me, a jump from a challenging height and landing safely still makes me glow a little with pride.

The white sands and limestones were amazingly...white. They hurt my eyes and I couldn't find my shades but conveniently found several strips of aspirin in my backpack. What would I do without aspirin!
We came upon this beach - Little Marley, I think it's called. Completely empty, stretched out all for us. It was like having our own private beach. It was pretty hot and we had been trekking for quite a few hours, so finding this little isolated beach was like finding paradise. And it being there all empty meant stripping and owning the water :-)
This is the rocky side of the beach - look at how clear the water is!And chock full of living creatures. A crag on the sea side will hold so many varied life forms I could understand for a minute what drives people to want to be marine biologists. This little pool of water, what would look like a small puddle on our Mizoram roads after a heavy downpour, had that much starfishes and sea anemones and other molluscs inhabiting it.

One thing that stuck me was how much the people here seem to care for the environment and animals. Everytime I picked up a starfish, or something of the like, Kate kept reminding me to not touch the inside because the sunscreen on my hands would make it sick.

We ate our lunch under a low hanging rock, then trekked back and went for a swim at Wattamolla. And that's Wattamolla right there -
I finally wore a bikini, in public, for the first time in my life. Jinx, you were right. I was so comfortable in it, it felt like I had worn it all my life. Well I'm exaggerating a bit but yeah, I was not overly shy or conscious. In fact, I'm gonna go buy myself a second pair, maybe even a third pair, since I'll be spending a whole week snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reefs soon.

Katie also taught me how to float, I loved it so much that my entire time at Wattamolla was spent floating. I never would have believed I could be such a good floater. I guess it must be the empty head :0)

The whole trip also made me turn green with envy - why can't we have these beautiful, blue waters, these blue skies, these beautiful weeds, these green grass instead of our plastic garbage laden lakes and streets? In the end, I still believe it all comes down to our frigging uncontrollable population. What can be done about this?

*groan* I can't believe I'm moving on to negatives again. Despite all my new found complaints, I have also discovered so many things I never realised before that I love about India. But am saving that for a new post.