Southern Swing

Pictures: top left: Cape Leeuwin; top right: Karri Valley Lodge, where I stayed in Pemberton; bottom left: Tree Top Walk, Valley of the Giants; bottom right: Skeleton of blue pygmy whale (that's right, this is the small version of the blue whale!) at Whale World (still haven't figured out how to manipulate pictures, which also seem to reproduce in reverse order to the way I choose them!)

Bunbury, WA (that's Western Australia, in case you were wondering)

Hello! Me again. Sorry about the delay between posts. Turns out I'm getting first-hand experience of one of the joys of travel - the unexpected. I assumed that internet access would be conveniently available everywhere. While I suppose there has been a way to log on in most places (but not all), it certainly hasn't been convenient for me. I hope you'll forgive me for not wanting to spend precious vacation time hanging out in internet cafes, especially in towns where they tend to close at unsociably early hours. However, I'm currently in a position to make up for lost time, so this will be an extended post.

Enough of that, though. I've spent the last week touring around the south/southwest of the state of Western Australia. The marketing people have come up with wonderful names for the regions I've been to - the Great Southern, the Southern Forests, the Margaret River Wine Region and tonight, Geographe. I've been driving myself, which has very much reinforced the size of this country. This is really only a comparatively small part of the whole, yet the distances can be quite daunting. The upside though is that getting from point A to point B is generally pretty straightforward. For example, the directions from my hotel in Perth to the hotel in my first stop, Albany (on the south coast), were as follows: Leaving the hotel turn right, then right again. Go three blocks to the main street and turn left. Continue straight out of town and the street becomes Route 30. Continue for 400 kms. Hotel is on the right.

Another thing I guess I hadn't appreciated is how empty much of the area is. On that long drive down to Albany, there were long stretches when I didn't see a car in either direction (bearing in mind that the "highway" is a two lane road), and very little in the way of signs of human habitation. Of course, the beautful scenery helps, and it's interesting to note the differences in the landscape among the different regions (ok, between Perth and Albany, it is a bit monotonous . . .).

One other very unexpected thing has been the weather. Apparently we've been having very unusual weather - it has been very rainy and chilly. In fact, everyone has been commenting that this is much more like winter than summer. I've been very glad indeed that I tossed a few long sleeved shirts and a fleece into my suitcase - who would have figured they'd be necessary in Australia though?! I guess I should be thankful for small favors though - I could have been in Adelaide where it's been well into the 40s celsius (well over 100 degrees farenheit) for the last several days. Indeed, most of the eastern states have been having heat waves, while it's been unusually cool here in WA. Very peculiar, everyone agrees.

Albany has the distinction of being the oldest settlement in WA, having been founded two years before the Swan Colony (now known as Perth). It has a very large natural harbor (hence its attractiveness for settlement), but these days is rather sleepy focusing principally (as many of the towns around here do) on tourism as pretty much all of its other industries have gone. One of its most interesting destinations is the site of what was the last active whaling station in Australia. The place shut in 1978 (due to economic reasons rather than protests against whaling, though to some extent two are related), and has now been turned into a museum (with the somewhat unfortunate name of Whale World). Interestingly, it neither glamorizes nor demonizes whaling but is actually quite informative. It doesn't gloss over the political issues, nor the fact that capturing and "processing" whales was a dangerous, bloody, ugly process. Well worth the visit.

A highlight of the journey to my next stopping point, Pemberton, was the grandiosely named Valley of the Giants. In fact this is a walk through a tingle forest. Tingles are a particular breed of tree that grow to significant heights,. They have shallow root systems and therefore broad bases which over time seem to decay leaving them reasonably hollow. As a result, they're actually very convenient as shelters from the rain (though I don't think I'd want to be in one of them if there was lightning). Back to the walk, though. There's a small trail at ground level, but the real draw is the so-called Tree Top Walk, which is constructed to allow you to walk up at the level of the canopy. Not for the faint-hearted as it does vibrate a bit, but certainly an interesting perspective.

By the time you get to Pemberton, the dominant tree species is something different - the karri. These trees are quite magnificent, growing very straight and as high as 90+ meters, with branches not starting until well up the tree. In fact, so tall are some of these trees that in years gone by, they were used as fire spotting sites, with platforms set up at the tops of the tree to allow spotters to check to see if there were fires in the areas. It's still possible to climb to these platforms, using rungs inserted into the side of the tree. I confess that I took one look at the structure and said "no way" to attempting the climb!

The hotel I stayed at in Pemberton reminded me of nothing more than a summer camp. It's set on the side of a lake (indeed my room was in a building that juts out over the lake (see picture), with wooden lodges and lots of camp-like activities (which I'm afraid I didn't have time, or inclination, to participate in. What I did do (thinking of my brother and nephew) was take a tram ride on the old rail line deep into the forest. An unusual and very convenient way to get out into the surrounding area. (A bit of an aside: unlike many other towns, Pemberton retains a significant lumber mill, which means it has more of a reason for existence than just tourism.)

My next resting place was Margaret River, which is at the heart of a well-known wine growing region of the same name. The statistic people there like to throw around is that although the area is responsible for only 3% of Australia's wines, it produces 20% of its premium wines (but please don't ask me what, exactly, makes a wine "premium"; I assume it has something to do with the cost). The region is on a bit of peninsula and on the way to Margaret River I stopped at the southermost point, known as Cape Leeuwin. This is also the most southwesterly point of Australia and the point where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean. There is a lighthouse (not surprisingly as it's a notoriously treacherous area for ships) and also constant, extremely strong winds. It was so windy that I had difficulty staying upright at times, and could only think of the poor families who lived there when the lighthouse had to be monitored manually (today it operates automatically). I'm not sure how the women in their long skirts weren't picked up and blown away!

One of the great frustrations of travelling on your own through wine-growing regions is the inability to stop and do some tastings. The solution is to park the car for a day and take a guided tour of the region. This normally gives you the benefit of local knowledge and also lets you sample some of the product. On the tour I did, we visited six different wineries, and sampled between six and nine wines at each. I'll let you do the math . . . . As expected, some were quite good, others less so. I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for the ones I liked though when perusing wine lists in the future. I'm not entirely convinced we got much benefit of local knowledge though this may have been due to the fact that the driver was being trained and the owner, who was doing the training, seemed more interested in telling him what he had done wrong than in making sure we were getting information (and to be fair, there are an awful lot of wineries in a small area, so who's to say which are the "right" ones to visit?). Having spent the better part of the day drinking, I was not too unhappy at having to skip a drink at dinner, which was necessitated by the fact that my hotel was just a bit too far from town to walk in for dinner. What surprised me about the town, though, was how early everything closed, and how dead it seemed, especially for a Friday in what is a popular weekend destination. That's actually been a theme throughout my time in WA - things close remarkably early, even in Perth, and the towns are pretty dead by about 8:00. In the smaller places, it's not even possible to get dinner later than about 8:30, and the central part of Perth is a ghost town after the shops shut at 6:00.

Today I wandered up the coast from Margaret River to Bunbury, which seems to be a pleasant exception to the dead town syndrome - things were still jumping (well relatively speaking!) at 9:00 this evening. I stopped on the way at Busselton (where things are really quiet - the shops close at 1:00 in the afternoon on Saturdays!), whose principal claim to fame is a jetty that extends 1.6 km out into the sea. Unfortunately, it's undergoing renovations which mean that (a) it's closed and (b) in fact, large chunks of it have been removed in order to be replaced. Rather a disappointment!

Well, that just about brings me up to date. Tomorrow I'll explore the area around Bunbury and then head back to Perth. I'm hopeful that this time through I'll have better internet access and therefore won't go so long between posts, but we'll see.

P.S. In response to my last post I've been asked how tall Wave Rock is and also how tall the pillars in the Pinnacles are. Wave Rock is about 15 meters high and about 100 meters long. The pillars in the Pinnacles are all different sizes, though the highest ones are probably about 3-4 meters high.