The beauty of WA

Australia is massively big! A small understatement I know, but having driven about 1400 miles we've only covered a very small corner of the South West. We'd been told that Western Oz was beautiful, but that is another understatement, it's breath-takingly beautiful! Since leaving Albany we've been pootling through some immense forests and more gorgeous coastlines and have now come full circle back to Perth, just for a few hours to do some house keeping before we head up north.
We'd camped in a carpark in Albany overnight to save a bit of cash and woke up to views of the beach and to see a whale jumping out of the water, how cool is that? We set off again in our beloved van, heading for Denmark of all places, where we stopped for a spot of lunch and to chat with a clearly inbred local who told us about a secluded beach down the coast we could go to. We've seen Wolf Creek mate, so no thanks and off we drove again. The sceney in this part of the world is ever changing, drive a few hundred k and it all changes. This time the landscape became an endless forest full of 60 meter high trees. I've never driven for so long through a forest and you're gawping out the window the whole way, it's like driving through a Tolkien scene. We headed for Walpole - Nornalup National Park where you can find the Valley of the Giants. This is a section of the forest where some of the giants of the tree world live. Tingle, Marri and Karri trees to be exact. They've built a metal walkway 40 meters up that you can stroll around getting a birds eye view of the forest, this is at least our third canopy walk now and they're all good, there's nothing like being that high off the ground, with vertigo and staring down, I genuinely love it :)

After crooking our necks staring up at stupidly high trees we headed through the forest again in the camper and stopped at a caravan site for the evening. We parked by an inlet where a stingray called Stumpie apparently lives, along with sharks and all sorts of other great fish. It's nothing to do with Steve Irwin, but Stumpie lost his tail somehow, hence the name. Like many of our evenings, we ended up playing Scrabble, drinking wine and eating on this occasion Thai noodle soup (again) which I made some spicy pork balls for mmmmmmm :)

The next day we headed for Pemberton and the Gloucester tree. This is a 60 meter Karri tree that's well known as you can climb it to a lookout post at the top...if you're a mental! There is a kind of ladder that winds its way all around the tree to the top, we watched some nutters climbing it and that was scary enough. For us scaredy-cats there were some very brightly coloured parrots at the bottom which we took numerous snaps of.
During our drive through the forest we also saw our first wild Kangeroos. We've seen quite a few dead ones by the side of the road, in various states of decomposition, so see some living ones was a great relief. I'd heard somewhere that you had to be lucky to see them, I don't know if that's true, but we've seen a fair few now and one at very, very close proximity. We were driving along when out of the corner of my eye I saw a grey blur heading towards us and sure enough a Roo bounced across the road right in front of the van. I slammed on the breaks and the Roo skidded, fell over and slid on its arse in front of us, narrowly avoiding the wheels. I was sure we were about to feel a sickening bump as we hit it, but we looked over and saw it bouncing off into the forest. What an adrenaline rush that was :)

Next up was the town of Margaret River, a gem of a place, just off the coast and of course, a river. For geography fans out there, check out this interactive map of OZ and have a look down at the furthest south western point and you'll come to Margaret River. It's the heart of the Southern Australian wine region and there are hundreds of wine producers in the area. You can virtually drive down any road and you'll come to a winery. Even better, when you get to a winery you can go in and taste the wine.....for free! That's probably not a surprise to those in the know (Mum and Dad), but as you can imagine we were quite pleased with the idea of free quality wine. and on that note, we headed straight down the....pub and tried out some more Oz lager! Our one night out of the van that was, basically as it's well expensive in Oz, in fact things are generally the same price as they are at home, which came as something as a shock, I thought it would be a bit cheaper here, but no, so Croom has us on a strict budget which can only be broken if we need posh food or fine wine and hopeful a couple of dives :) Oz lager is proving a bit of a mixed bag, Tooheys is very nice, Carlton Draft is very good to, but avoid Redback at all costs, disgusting :( Luckily I was able to wash away the taste with a chicken pie, (its good to be back in a country that can make a decent pie)! The next morning we went for a walk along the banks of the river, followed by lunch at a place called Gracetown, where for the first time it was warm enough to get the camping chairs out and have lunch in the open air, the waves round this bit of the coast are pretty big and I went for a walk down to the rocks. It's an amazing experience watching these huge waves coming towards you, before breaking on the rocks, thousands of tons of water surging at you, real power of nature stuff!

In the afternoon we went to Howard Park winery for a spot of tasting, they make wine under the label Madfish. The grounds were really pretty, with vine groves stretching into the distance and the winery itself was an interesting modern design. We tried a few varieties of red and one white, our favourite being a very fruity little Pinot Noir. It generally wasn't the greatest wine in the world and a bit pricey, with the cheapest bottle being about 7 quid (they went up to $70). We headed up the coast after that to a town called Busselton, where Anna, a girl we met in Borneo lives, to say hello and have a look at the famous jetty there. Anna is the manager of the underwater observatory, situated 8 meters below the surface at the end of the 1.8km jetty. We all went for a beer and then camped up in the carpark of the jetty overnight. The next morning Anna drove us along the 140 year old jetty in a little car thing to see the observatory. The whole thing was built up the coast in Freemantle and then all 500 odd tons of it were floated down before being sunk to its present position today. Unfortunately due to poor visibility it was closed to visitors when we were there, but Anna took us in and you could see a few fish hanging out, but not the normal 20 meter visibility, you could see how cool it would be down there though. A unique phenomenon occurs around these parts where the warm tropical Leeuwin current mingles with the temperate waters, thus forming tropical corals and hence fish, usually not observed in colder waters.

Anna gave us some advice on what to go and see round about and we had a brilliant day. We first went to spend some money on my ear again at the G.P.'s and now it finally seems fixed, although I'm resigned to the fact that I've got crap ears, not only to the make me look like a monkey, but they also get blocked up with infections.....great. Some beans and snags cured my ear depression and we headed for Cape Naturaliste to check out the lighthouse. We spent a couple of hours strolling around in the now really warm sun, (its seems to have shot up at least 10 degrees in the last few days here) and sat on the hillside looking out to sea trying to spot whales. What we did see were some sealions frolicking about in the waves below us and also a mad looking lizard right next to us. It was about a foot long, really fat, lazy and had a short stubby tail. After taking a load of shots of the lizard we headed for Yallingup and saw some even more impressive waves. There were some surf dudes out there and I can see why people are so into it now. Being able to ride on these monster waves must be such a buzz, I felt excited just watching them, I'm definitely gonna get myself a surfing lesson while I'm out here, grow my hair, dye it blonde and eat nothing but kangeroo snags! Hamble spent the time taking photo's of a heart she'd made out of shells :) Yeah Dude!

Driving back to Perth along the coast line was again, just incredible, the scenery all along the coast is spectacular, the colours of the sea range from the deepest blue to the brightest turquoise, from being totally calm to ginormous waves smashing against reef and rocks. Again it's another one of those things I'll always remember, just driving about this side of the country is a real privilege and its no wonder most of the Ozzies you meet are so happy and chilled out, cause their back garden is Eden!







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