South Western Australia Adventure: Bunbury, Dunsborough, and Busselton

Yesterday Ryan and I got home from our latest adventure in South Western Australia.  We flew in and out of Perth and explored a 1750 km loop in the area, covering everything from treetops to caves and all sorts of great food and wine in between.

We had a lot of great moments on this trip, but unfortunately the first two days weren't fantastic.  Our flight arrived around 1:30pm so we drove directly to Bunbury that afternoon.  I expected Bunbury to be a lot more interesting, but instead it was a large town surrounded by factories.  The main attraction there was supposed to be their dolphin centre, but even if you paid to go there you had no guarantee of seeing any dolphins.  The visitor centre recommended a hotel to stay in, but it was really crappy.  The room had so many drafts it was like a wind tunnel!  Luckily we had a great breakfast included, which was  good start to our second day.

We left Bunbury on Day 2 and headed to  Busselton.  This was one part of the trip that I was really looking forward to because they have a 1.8km long jetty with an underwater viewing platform at the end.  Unfortunately, this is where the day got crazy.  When we showed up at 9:30-10:00am they had already sold out of tickets for the 10am, 11am and 12pm tours because the jetty hadn't been open for a few days due to weather and they also had a few school groups touring that day.  We opted for the 3pm tour thinking we could do a few things in the meantime.  So off we went on the 50 minute drive to Margaret River!  In retrospect that was a bad idea, but we wanted to book a food and wine tour for the next day and get some info on whale watching.  We should have just done this from the Busselton visitor centre, but hindsight is 20/20!  Upon arrival they informed us that in fact the best whale watching in the area was in Busselton or Dunsborough!  Oops!

The trip to Margaret River wasn't a complete loss because Ryan convinced me to check out a hedge maze!  It was called "A-Maze-In Margaret River" which I think is quite clever.  Honestly, I was very nervous about the maze.  I have absolutely no sense of direction and the thought of navigating a maze was worrisome. 

In my hand is a map of the grounds, but sadly they didn't put a map of the maze on it.

Despite Ryan's attempts to run away and leave me fend for myself, we made it out of the maze successfully! 

It was well worth the detour and actually very fun.  The grounds were beautiful too and we were the only people there for most of it.  Before we left there was another puzzle to do where you had to move from once circle to another by following the paths in the order of "white, red, black" to get to the middle.  Turns out this was more challenging than the maze, and I only succeeded after Ryan's help.

As you can see, it was quite an exciting place!

Still thinking we had plenty of time we jumped back in the car and drove another 40 minutes or so to Dunsborough, stopping on the way to pick up some subs for lunch.  We thought we could whale watch and eat lunch, then drive back to Busselton for our tour.  Turns out the whale watching place required a 10 minute walk to get to the viewing area, and we were already running way behind.  We walked briskly to the platform and found a few people there looking for whales.  No one had seen any, but they were looking way far away at rocks where "if you looked really closely you can see some specks that look like seals".  As it happened, I spotted some seals right in front of us on the shore line which no one else had seen yet!  Time for my favourite game: spot the seals in this picture!

Ryan and I each had a possible whale sighting in the 15 minutes we stayed at the platform, wolfing down our subs while peering out through binoculars.  When we left the platform we had exactly 40 minutes to get back to our car and drive 45km to Busselton for our 3pm tour.  We had a bit of a buffer period because the 3pm start was when the train left to take us down the 1.8km jetty.  Our other option was to walk/run down the jetty in time for the actual start of the tour at 3:25.  After driving as fast as I could safely go, we made it to Busselton at 3:10pm.  Our only remaining option was to run down the jetty!

See that tiny bump on the far right??  Yes, that's where we had to be.

Did we make it?  Cliffhanger!  This post is far too long already so you'll have to find out tomorrow!

I leave you with this piece of advice though.  Watch out for shark helicopters.  They'll get you every time.