The first leg of our journey started two Thursdays ago, the 23rd of September. We picked up our Getz in the morning, drove it around town a little to get a feel for the car and to run some errands, then after dinner we set off for Lancelin (all of us had class we had to attend or it would've been earlier).
Lancelin is a town about 2 hours or so drive time north of Perth along the North West Coastal Highway. Although it has some nice beaches and good surfing, what it's really famed for, and what we were there to see, are the massive sand dunes that are just north of the town. We got there around 9 and, it being a full moon, were able to spend several happy hours frolicking on, climbing up, and rolling down the dunes. The sport of choice for many people who visit Lancelin is to go sandboarding (snowboarding on the sand dunes). This looked awesome to us, but a little expensive, so we instead opted to bring some big sheets of cardboard along with us and try to use them like sleds. We had seen this done successfully on youtube, but unfortunately it didn't work out so well for us and none of us could slide for more than a few feet.
Nevertheless, just being out on the dunes under the full moon was pretty darn incredible, and since we didn't have any set accomodations for the night, after climbing out to the top of the tallest dune we decided that would be a pretty epic location to spend the night, so we hiked back to the car and got our sleeping bags and pads. Unfortunately, the night air feels a little warmer just after you've been climbing dunes for several hours than it does when you've been laying down for a while. Longkuan, who didn't have a sleeping bag (just blankets) and who is used to a slightly warmer climate in Singapore, just about froze. Noam and I had two sleeping bags we'd borrowed from my RA. One was a fleece, insulated bag, one was not. We didn't know that at the time, however, and each grabbed a random bag from the dark car. I ended up with the warm bag and had a fine night's sleep. Noam did not have as good of a night.
Luckily, we were only up on the dunes for about 5 hours or so, since we all wanted to get up to catch the sunrise. The two other guys were pretty chilly standing around waiting for it, but they managed to put a brave face on (we did some dune sprints, too, which helped):
And the sunrise was pretty darn epic.
Plus, not only did we get a sunrise, we also got a simultaneous moonset.
Imagine this with the opening music from The Lion King and you'll get a sense of how awesome it was.
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