After a great night
in our A-Frame cottage at The Cove, we woke up bright and early to pouring
rain. We had originally organized a ride to the start of a nice hike with the cottage owners, but decided to cancel due
to the rain. That meant we suddenly had
the whole morning free! By this point in
our trip we were pretty exhausted, so we decided to relax all morning. I went through pictures and tried to identify
the birds we had seen so far, we played board games, and had a nice warm
fire.
Denmark also has a
lot of little gourmet food and wine shops, so we decided to have a nice
vineyard platter for lunch. Vineyards
take our traditional cheese/meat/bread picnic lunches and kick it up a notch to
make it extra delicious. It was so
delicious that we ended up getting a case of wine shipped home from the
Singlefile Winery! It just arrived here
a few days ago so I'm looking forward to opening some when Ryan gets home. After that we sampled more cheese, fudge, and
toffee, and managed to get some pasta sauce and cheese for our dinner.
The main attraction
in Denmark, though, is its unique coastline.
We went to a place called Greens Poole for a short walk down the beach,
and despite the patchy weather it was really beautiful.
Just a little bit
down the beach was the other main coastal attraction, Elephant Rock. The way the path led us, we had to wait for
the waves to go out and then time it just right and run through these narrow
rocks before the waves came back in again.
Not sure why the path led that way, but it was pretty fun! There was a different path leading out
though, so we only had to do it once.
 |
| Typical Ryan |
That night we just
packed it in early in anticipation for a long next day. We left as early as we could on the 27th and
did the short drive east to Albany for a quick look around and some brief whale
watching. If we hadn't had so much fun
in Denmark we probably would have booked a whale watching tour, but
unfortunately we only had enough time for some quick stops at popular lookouts
where whale sightings are common. We
didn't see any whales, but we saw a pretty cool black cockatoo (watch for it in
my next bird blog). I'm sure Albany
would have been nice, but it was a bigger town and I don't regret spending the
time in Denmark instead.
Our final
destination for the day was Hyden, but we had a lot of road to cover before we
got there. If you look back at the
original map you can see how far it was (basically a quarter of all of our
driving). Luckily it was through some
beautiful and new scenery, so we had lots to look at. First we passed through the majestic but
brief Stirling Ranges National Park. I
say brief because what you see in the pictures was basically all of the
mountains. Having seen the endless Rocky
Mountains in western Canada it was kind of surprising. There were also tons of fields of yellow
flowers, which made it particularly special.
This was definitely
the most remote road we had been on yet, passing only a few cars an hour, so it
was kind of random when we came across this tourist attraction:
The final
interesting thing we passed on our long drive was a pink lake. It wasn't "the" Pink Lake (about
400km south east of where we were), but I've heard of a few pink lakes in
Australia. The lake turns pink at
certain times of the year due to a change in the algae in the water, so it was
a great surprise to pass one of these on our trip. Unfortunately it was also very hard to
photograph the colour, but here's Ryan's best shot without editing.
Only one more
instalment of our South Western Australia Adventure to go. Stay tuned!
Looks pink to me!
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