It turns out that Denmark is surprisingly large, both in terms of its enormous (and spaced out) suburbs and its general store. We stayed at the 'Blue Wren Traveller's Rest (aka the YHA) which had a washer/dryer and no requirement for police callouts, putting it 1-0 against the Walpole YHA in the acommodation stakes. Other excitements were the pub (functional) and the bakery (and cafe, it would seem) where we ate evening and morning respectively. Due to an order mix-up at the bakerycafe, I ended up with a colossal bacon mountain consisting of about 10 giant rashers after Katie received bacon with her egg on toast. I am not certain that I've ever previously been overcome by bacon, but it seems there is a first time for everything.
Irritatingly, the Bibbulmun track doesn't run contiguously around Denmark, necessitating either a ferry ($160 minimum for four people, person who runs it often away) a trek across a sandbar (backtrack 7km, hope the sandbar is intact, bushwhack for several km on the other side to get to the track) or get a lift around ($50 for a car-full). We opted for the latter, but it doesn't feel great to have to grab a lift to continue walking particularly when the rest of the track has been so good.
The gradients have calmed down throughout this last section, and the walking feels easy. There are huge tracts of sea views and the rest of the time is spent walking on the beaches (good at low tide when the sand is firm, terrible at high tide when you have to walk on the deep soft stuff at the top). The sea is glorious here - a true aquamarine where it meets the white sand fading to deep blue as you look further out. The beaches are occasionally populated but often there were kilometres of beach where we saw no-one at all.
This morning I had my adrenaline fix for the trip when I trod on a snake lying in the path. Fortunately for me it was relatively small and I trod on it in such a way that it could not get around to bite me. Fortunately for it I also didn't break it, and when I jumped away half a second later swearing to high hell it simply made a break for the bushes and vanished. The rest of the day was spent suspiciously eying up sticks and twigs and shadows and letting my imagination turn them all into snakes, which was just as much fun as it sounds.
We have made it safely, snakes included, to our last shelter - Muttonbird (Australian naming always puzzling). I am writing this sat at the picnic bench in the shade cast by the shelter roof, and looking out over the sunlit Australian bush. There are some of the ever-present flies, and a cricket in the vegetation somewhere to my right chirping away. There are wildflowers in pink and blue everywhere, and Katie is sat out in the sun reading, her phone charging off the solar panel. It's going to be a great loss as well as a triumph to get in to Albany tomorrow and finish off the track that has been our home for the last 39 days. There are certainly things I won't miss - the normal flies, the march flies, the mosquitoes, the sudden shock of standing on a potentially lethal reptile - but there is something wonderfully simple and straightforward about a life where you just walk, and get in at the end of the day to good company, then eat and sleep and walk again.
I don't know the date or the day of the week, but today is day 39 and I've got walking to do tomorrow.
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