It’s a lovely walk along the beach at Eagles Bluff; north as far as a small creek too deep to wade across and then south a kilometre or so until the boardwalk we visited yesterday comes into view. There is absolutely no one else here and the beach is pristine. Sheltered by sand dunes, it is perfectly calm, not even a ripple or a whisper of lapping waves. We then head for Denham and a commercial caravan park to catch up on laundry and have a shower. Denham is a charming little town with a population of 1140. It’s rather laid back main street fronts a calm ocean and the small jetty is popular with anglers who seem only to be able to reel in tiddlers too small to warrant gutting and filleting and in any case are outside the official bag limits. We spend a quiet afternoon sitting on the jetty in the warm sunshine and at last Andy catches his first (edible) fish of the trip albeit too small to keep.
Denham is also the first town where we have seen emus walking down the main street – or any street for that matter. Tourist literature as well as Lonely Planet tell of emus strolling around the streets of small towns, but these are the only ones we have seen outside Cape Range National Park. The latter are timid and avoid human contact, whilst those in Denham seem unphased by people and traffic as they wander down the centre of the road.