Well, we left Perth on Tuesday having collected our hire car, a Hyundai Accent (an upgrade from the smallest of the small car so we're pleased) and headed south to the Margaret River wine region of Western Australia. It's about 300 km south of Perth so the journey took us about 3 1/2 hours with a quick picnic stop by the ocean for lunch. It's not the 'sea' over here but the 'ocean'!!.
We arrived in Margaret River at about 5ish and stopped in at the visitors centre to collect our accommodation booking which we had made earlier in the day.. We weren't sure where we were staying because it's the peak season here and so anywhere is better than nothing. Turns out we were in a great resort in the middle of the bush with lots of Kangaroos and Possoms just hanging around in the back 'yard'. There was a communal kitchen and barbie so we had our first BBQ in Australia!! We are getting used to going shopping in the supermarkets and getting to the back of the store where we'd usually find the alcohol.. and it not being there. They have 'grog' shops in the main areas but they're not linked to the supermarkets! Doh. However they have some pretty good deals.. A bottle of Hardy's red wine only 2.50 pounds! Yum yum. (so good I'm drinking it as I type!!).
On Wednesday we booked ourselves on a 'Wine for Dudes' tour...! A tour of 4 vineyards by a surf dude who knows about wine but isn't pretentious. Oh and he pretty much lets you drink as much as you want! For those that know me well, my 16th birthday was spent going round a French vineyard and I got pretty merry then so you can imagine what a few years more wine drinking experience did for me...! We had a great day, we stopped off at chocolate and cheese factories and then a brewery for the boys.... Carl and I also won the daily quiz, the prize for which was a bottle of wine. We had that with our second barbie that night...
Thurs we headed north to Cape Naturaliste and then followed the coast all the way down to Cape Leeuwin via some of the most incredible deserted beaches we have ever seen. (Check out the photos on Flickr over the next few days). We stopped in Augusta overnight in a great hostel and bumped into a couple we had met in Bangkok nearly 2 months ago! It really is a very small world.
Friday we drove to Hamelin Bay nr Augusta to see if we could see the sting ray who visit the beach daily... We did. Two huge sting ray which come up to the shoreline. Quite incredible. After that we headed south to Walpole, a nice drive through the Karri Forest National Parks. Karri are trees which grow pretty tall, on average 65 m above the ground. The drives we went along were pretty specatular and we even took our little Accent 'off-road'!! It now has bright orange tyres with all the road dust on them!
We arrived in Walpole and found our hostel. An, erm intersting place. Similar to 'Heidi-Hi', we had our own chalet with very kitsch bedding!
Today (Sat) we had an Eco Wilderness Cruise through the inlets and river systems near the town of Walpole. Our guide, Gary Muir, was pretty incredible. Very enthusiastic and very very knowledgeable of history and ecology. His family had been in Oz for 6 generations, the first Muir coming over from Scotland. We later found out he's a big name on the West Coast and does formal speeches and guest appearances...! In the afternoon we went to the Walpole National Forest, famous for the 'tingle' trees. Giant trees basically. Some clever chaps have built this amazing tree top walkway through the canopy of the trees and it's engineered to sway in the wind as the branches of the tress do. This meant that Carl tried his hardest to wobble it and make me fall off. Thanks.
We're now in Albany on the Southern most tip of WA in a great hostel. Albany has a bad history of whale hunting but nowadays there are just museums here so we're off for a days touring tomorrow and maybe some shopping, my flip-flops have a life of their own at the moment, and then we're heading back North to above Perth (over 700km in one day!) to the Pinnacles............
Love to you all.
Becs and Carl xx
