Myalup south to near Pemberton
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It never really did cool down last night. Hot and VERY muggy and still that way today. We showered, not that it did much good, had a hearty breakfast of steak and eggs and headed out. We stopped at the beach store to tell the “roo man” he was off the hook for any road displays since we had, in fact, seen kangaroos last night. Very nice guy and a bit of a character to say the least.
We haven’t really decided what we’re going to do down here. But to begin with, we need to head to Bunbury to get Les a new digital camera. We found a camera store with some decent choices but since we’re engineers, we needed to look at the other two stores in town to make sure we bought the most ideal camera in town. Which we did.
On the way out of town, we stopped at the Dolphin Experience. This is a research facility around a bay where dolphins come pretty regularly to observe and be observed. They are most active from 8a-12 and a mother and baby had been in the bay before we got there, but were gone. They do boat/swim tours where they take you out to find them and let you swim around near them. But we had missed the last one before we got there. So, we went out and had a swim in the hopes that one or two might come back, but no luck. Les swam out quite a ways, past the buoys, and called to them, but no response. But a nice swim.
We continued down the coast, with no real clear direction of where we were going. This caused some consternation in that I’m getting nervous that we’re not getting east fast enough while Les wants to stay in the west because he likes the remote-ness and thinks the east will be too built-up. We’re ending up compromising just by default since he pushes one way and I push the other. We used to do software development this way too. I’d go too fast, he’d be too careful and between us we’d get a lot of high-quality work done in a short amount of time, so hopefully we’ll end up getting east in time but not too soon.
Anyway, we fumbled and bumbled our way south, at one point heading about 30km the “wrong” way (only wrong in the sense that at the time we were trying to stay near the coast). We found our way, on a nice country road, to Capel and the Tuart Forest National Park. It’s the last remaining virgin Tuart forest in the country. We kind of found our way to it but never really got the sense we were there. I don’t know what a Tuart tree looks like so I’m not really sure if we saw any :-). All the trees are a bit odd here. While headed down one dirt road, we saw some more kangaroos, but they scampered off before we could photograph them.
In the process of doing this, we found the road to Peppermint Beach and headed down that way. It is a beautiful beach. Would have been great for swimming and hanging around. But we didn’t have time. Actually, all the beaches here are fantastic. The sand is very fine and soft, the water is warm. You can’t beat it.
We had the choice now to cut across towards the east or head due south down the coast, then over. We decided on the coast route because it went by a series of caves and we were hoping we could get in to see one before they closed. We got to the first one, Ngigli cave, at 3:20, ten minutes before the last tour started. The cave was really amazing. I’ve never been into a cave before, other than just the entrance of lava tubes and such. This one took an hour to walk through. It had multiple rooms, one of which was multiple stories high. The cave went down 39 meters all together. But the best part about it was it was cool inside (temperature-wise). It was like a sauna coming back out.
From there we headed to Margaret River and points south, then the turn east towards Nannup. This is wine country. There was a vineyard about every 500 feet. Just one right after the other. If wine tasting was your thing, you’d be in heaven down here. The countryside was very pretty. Rolling hills, tall trees and with the late afternoon light on it, it was very pretty. Les said it looked a lot like France except the trees were weird.
As we continued, we headed into the forest. Similar in concept to the forests we’re used to in the Northwest, in that there are long stretches of trees and the road just goes through them. But the trees and undergrowth are distinctly different. Sort of a bizarro world forest. The trees are all twisty. Not the tall straight variety we have. The leaves are odd and the undergrowth has these mutant bushes and things. We saw some different varieties of the weird plants with the Tina Turner hair we had seen the other day.
We had originally hoped to make it to Walpole, where there is a “Valley of the Giants” treewalk. But we didn’t get close. So then we thought maybe Pemberton, the next major town to the west. But, as we were driving there, we passed a small pond with about 6 kangaroos around it. We pulled over and took their pictures. We figured out the trick. If you stop in front of them and get out of the car, they bolt. So we stopped up the road and sneaked down to them. That worked better.
As we were walking back to the car, Les noticed a little dirt road into the forest and suggested we just pull in there and rough camp. Since we didn’t know what awaited down the road and hadn’t seen a caravan park for some time, and it was getting dark, we decided to do it. So here we sit in the middle of the forest, with the birds making wild noises that sound like crazed monkeys (no kidding). Very loud and boisterous. Laughing noises and screeches. It sounds like a Tarzan movie. And bugs the size of field mice trying to get into the van, making loud thumps, now that it’s dark and we have the interior lights on. I’m using my “hat lamp” that my wife got me (a light that clips on the brim of a hat) to see the keyboard as I type. It’s working well.
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