We reluctantly left Margaret River on Saturday after 12 greats days, even including Bel’s 6 unscheduled days in Bunbury. We’ll be back. We headed toward the southern coast and made our way to the Southern Forest region. The drive down was beautiful – through giant Karri tree forests, up to 70m tall, lining the road for miles. We eventually stopped and set up camp in Walpole, a small coastal inlet. It’s supposed to be great for fishing but the weather closed in on us with strong a southwesterly and lots of rain – so no fishing.
Walpole is quite central to a lot of the main attractions including the Valley of the Giants where there is a tree top walk amongst giant red tingle trees that can be over 20m wide at the base. Given the weather, we spent Sunday checking it all out.
The trees are amazing. Huge and hollowed out at the base due to infestation and fires, but still flourishing.
We then did the tree top walk, 40m high, and stunning. You are on suspension bridges between platforms that are elevated on tall metal posts – suffice to say that there is a lot more swaying and bouncing than I was expecting, and heights aren’t my friend!!!!
After a lovely lunch at the local fish shop we headed to the Conspicuous Cliffs to check out the coastline. Beautiful, but harsh. The strong southerly made it very uninviting but it was still very picturesque.
The final stop of the day was the circular pools, on the Frankland River. Not particularly pretty, just a local swimming and picnic spot, but it was one of the few rivers we had seen for quite a while and makes you realize how arid the central west is.
Today we headed to Albany, via Denmark. It was surprising how green and fertile the surrounding areas were, with lots of cattle farming – dairy and beef – very similar to the south east coast. We also crossed a lot of rivers (including bow river – chisel???), so it seems to be a much higher rainfall area.
Along the way, we stopped in at Denmark at a great coffee shop called Ravens – awesome coffee and great cakes too. It’s a beautiful little town, very lush, on the Denmark river. It reminded us of Bright.
We arrived in Albany early afternoon and set up camp. The wind was still blowing a gale so we decided to just relax for the afternoon and cooked up some smoked chorizo that we had bought in a Margaret River winery. Beautiful with an SSB from the same winery👍😜