Apologies for a mega load of photos in this post, this is the condensed amount but Cania National Park didn't disappoint, and was worth every picture taken. The walking trails were easy and there was plenty of interesting things to see and do. We did the park trails over two days, the first day we hiked around 5km, the second day we hiked around 8km. The kids did amazing! Our two eldest walked the entire way, plus more when you add up all the climbing, back tracking and additional exploring they did. Our two younger kids walked sections and still had lots of fun climbing and exploring caves and waterways, mum and dad carried them the rest of the way.
The caves were so much fun! While they were only small they still had so much charterer and each one so different from the other. Two Story Cave was my favourite, it really did have two story's! And it reminded me so much of my childhood when my siblings and I used to build two story cubby houses out of fallen sticks and trees, we even built one that went underground! I was a homeschooled child along with my 4 siblings, my husband went to a public school, we often compare childhood memories and experiences, while we both had great childhoods, we could both see the benefits of giving kids an active and creative learning environment, this is how we both decided that we would love to give our own kids the enjoyment and freedom of an "untraditional" schooling method. Coming back to the caves, our kids loved Dragon Cave, you needed a great imagination to see the dragon on the cave wall, but of course the kids made up their own fun pretending they were in a dragon cave, they started out with pretending to feed the dragon, however, an older gentlemen who was also hiking the trail, came up and joined in on their play telling the kids that dragons may like to eat them and they may need a sword to protect themselves, the kids immediately found some sticks, which in their eyes were swords and began to search out the dragon, lucky for us it didn't come out.
Fern pool was beautiful, we thought it was an almost identical, but miniature, version of the fern pool in Karajini National Park, which we explored back in Western Australia. We enjoyed a lovely picnic lunch by the little pool before hiking up the big hill to Giants Chair Lookout.
The variety of rock formations and flora of the park was amazing. Hanging Rock was another one of my favourite places, the reflections in the water were stunning! The light was perfect for reflecting, so much so that I somehow managed to get a double reflection of my little boy wearing a fluoro shirt. His reflection in the water was reflecting back onto the rocks behind him.
The double reflections, not quite sure how this worked out, but I think it's a pretty interesting photograph.
We stayed in a small town called Monto not far from Cania, Monto Shire offer camping grounds for self contained motor homes to park up for $5 a day right in the centre of town! The pub across the road from the grounds had a 'kids eat free' offer on and $15 adult meals, this was an amazing end to our 2 days of hiking! We enjoyed our 4 nights in Monto. Although the first day was pouring with rain and we decided not to do the National Park until the next day, the kids still had fun floating makeshift boats down the storm drain.
To get to Monto we took a road which had around 100km of dirt, unsealed road, after a recent deluge of rain the road was somewhat muddy and rough, a good test run for the few hundred kilometres of unsealed and rough road we're planning to do in a few weeks time!
