Wildflower Way: Wongon

I spent the night at a rest stop outside of the town of Wongon, my first stop on wildflower way. First thing in the morning I went to town and walked a wildflower walk. I saw many sticky sundews and bright yellow wattles, as well as a variety of other flowers. After I stopped by the visitor center and the volunteers excitedly encouraged me to go on another trail and gave me sooo many pamphlets about the nearby areas. They were so cute. 

I went to the trail called Christmas Rock and as I walked I passed by a woman and smiled and said hello. A moment after passing she calls to me, and asks if she can walk with me. She said her husband is worried she’s going to get lost, but he’s working and she still wanted to walk. I welcomed her to walk with me and we chatted a bit. She’s a Filipino woman who recently married and Aussie and moved here. Now she travels with him while he works and she gets to explore the areas he works in, but she isn’t very confident in nature and so she gets nervous hiking on her own. She told me about her life as we walked and looked for orchids. We found spider orchids and blue bell orchids and had a great walk. 

After the walk we parted ways and I headed north toward Dalliup, another stop on wildflower way (and a bit drier so I won’t get hit as bad with the upcoming storms hopefully). I went to town for a short walk and met a local gal who gave me a bunch of walk ideas. 

In the late afternoon I went to Xanitppe where I hiked up a small granite hill. The hill was covered in small green leek orchids and sundews and was so beautiful. The small ponds in the rocks had tadpoles which had yellow lines down their backs. Red dragonflies darted around. 

I decided to camp there for the night. It was so dark and quiet. The milky way show bright in the moonless sky. The night was unbelievably quiet, so quiet the loudest noise often seemed to be my heartbeat. It weird when you hear so little that you are the loudest thing in the environment even when you sit still and quiet. Occasionally I could hear the rumbling of a plane way up in the atmosphere, but when it passed the silence was incredible.