SWAA: Hyden and Perth

And now finally, the last instalment from our South Western Australia Adventure.  Brace yourselves, it's a big one!

After our long drive from Denmark, we arrived in Hyden around 3:30pm and went straight to the main attraction of the area and the purpose of our massive detour: Wave Rock.  I was a bit sceptical that the rock would be impressive enough to merit the extra hundreds of kilometers, but in the end it was pretty cool.

Someone had to do the surfing stance!

Next we headed just a few seconds down the road to the far less impressive "Hippos Yawn".  I'm not really sure what made this so special other than the name, but it led us to take some silly pictures.

The obvious - us yawning

Ryan getting eaten by the hippo

For some reason because I was wearing a red shirt Ryan really wanted me to be a uvula.  Didn't really work, but it was funny to try!

And that was it!  All of the attractions in Hyden in less than an hour.  That night we stayed in the hilariously out-dated Hyden Hotel/Motel.  For dinner the hotel offered the "exotic" option of selecting your meat for dinner and then grilling and seasoning it yourself on a massive grill in the dining room.  For some reason this made me really grumpy, which was compounded by the buffet "salad bar" they had (comprised of pasta salad, potato salad, and coleslaw) along with some weird cooked sides.  Even though dinner wasn't great, they had a really nice lounge room with a massive fireplace.  It was really cold that day so instead of hanging out in our room we brought our board game and a bottle of wine and enjoyed a few hours by the fire.  It was a great way to end a disappointing evening.  To be fair to the restaurant, I think if you go to many country towns in Canada you would end up with the same country style cooking, but I think I was just spoiled by our fine dining in wine country.

The next day, September 28th, we got an early start for our drive to Perth.  The drive wasn't very exciting, but we did pass some random tourist attractions (most notably the dog cemetery) and some really beautiful orchards in bloom.  The day before we had called many hotels in Perth to try and find a room, but we were very unlucky.  We ended up with one above our budget, so we were expecting it to be really nice.  It was called the Somerset, located right downtown Perth, and it was a huge letdown. 

Since this was to be our last day of the trip, and our only time in Perth, we got right out on the town to do some exploring.  For me, Kings Park was the only thing in Perth that I had any interest in seeing.  It is one of the largest inner city parks in the world, and it had fantastic views of the city.  It's also where their botanic gardens are located, so we got to see a great show of the wildflowers in bloom.

During our walk through the park we also found this "tree top walk" which was nice.  It wasn't nearly as high as the real one we did in Walpole though!

The downtown was more modern than Adelaide, but about the same size.  Surprisingly it had a lot of designer stores, which Adelaide doesn't have.  That evening we did a short walk around downtown Perth and decided to eat dinner at the hotel restaurant.  That was the best decision all day, since the food was awesome!  We started with delicious cocktails (the winner was Ryan's "Japanese Slipper" made with equal parts Midori melon liqueur, Cointreau, and lemon juice), entrée of scallops, and our mains were an Asian shrimp salad and a pizza (brie, bacon, chicken, cranberry sauce, mozzarella, and spinach - great combo!).

The next day, September 29th, our flight didn't leave until 5:30 pm so we spent the morning shopping at some outlet stores and lounging/napping in King's Park.  We THOUGHT it was the perfect end to our trip, but then things went horribly wrong.

When we tried to do the auto check-in at the airport, the machine abruptly said "please see attendant", which has never happened to me before.  When the guy at the counter looked confused, I jokingly said "haha we probably missed our flight or something stupid" and he unfortunately said yes.  Turns out we missed it by an entire day! 

I know, I know, this doesn't seem like something I would do.  To be honest, there were so many signs pointing us to our real flight but somehow we brushed them all off.  First, and most obvious, was when Virgin emailed me a flight confirmation on the 27th.  I looked at it and said "huh, that's weird, they usually send it 24 hours ahead, I wonder why I got it 2 days ahead"!  Next, when we picked up our car rental the woman tried to confirm our return on the 28th.  I immediately corrected her and extended it to the 29th.  And finally, the trip just felt like we had loads of extra time on our hands.  Now, Ryan isn't completely blameless.  He emailed his boss saying we would be back on the 29th, but of course he meant he could start work again on the 29th.  For some reason I guess that date was stuck in my head, and he never corrected me and neither one of us looked it up.

Anyways, having seen enough episodes of The Amazing Race I knew that there were ways of getting flights at the airport.  First we decided to wait and see if the 5:30 flight back to Adelaide on Virgin (our airline) was full.  There were still 6 people who hadn't checked in at 4:55pm, but unfortunately by the 5:00pm deadline 5 had showed up.  After checking other airlines we found it was impossible to get any flights out since Qantas baggage handlers were on strike already causing flight cancellations, and the Grand Final in footy was the next day in Melbourne and people I think were being diverted through Adelaide.  Luckily the guy at Virgin got us on the morning flight out, and took pity on us so he didn't charge us a cent! 

Without going through all of the details, suffice it to say we decided not to sleep in the airport and instead got the closest, cheapest hotel we could find.  Ironically, that night was far better than the first one we had in Perth for half the price!  We stayed at the All Seasons Hotel and ended up in an "upgraded" room due to limited availability.  We asked what the difference was for the $20 more, and they told us that our room would have a window.  I kid you not, this is what it looked like:

In case you can't see, the window has glass, but then that's a wall with a picture of SYDNEY Harbour!  Seriously, that made our day.  There was actually a tiny skylight in the window so it made a difference in the morning to have some natural light, but hilarious beyond belief.

Yet again, we had a delightful night of board games, wine, and room service potato wedges, and that really was the perfect way to end a fantastic vacation.

SWAA: Denmark, Albany, and the Road to Hyden

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!

SWAA: Mini-Putt, Lots of Trees, and The Cove

After an allergy-filled sleep at the Karri Valley Resort we had a buffet breakfast in a nice dining room overlooking the lake.  It was your typical breakfast but Ryan discovered these  delicious croissants that were so warm and squishy that we stole one for lunch (which of course would again be a picnic on the side of the road, so we also stole butter, an apple, and peanut butter).  I spotted a banana from across the room and made a beeline for it because they're so expensive here (down from $18/kg to $12/kg!), but turns out it was plastic.  Yet another disappointment at that hotel. 

Sorry, enough about the food.  Before we left we decided to play a quick round of mini-putt at the resort.  As a side note, no one calls it mini-putt here and they're thoroughly confused when I call it that.  I can't remember what they do call it though…  ANYWAYS without going into to too many details, Ryan kicked my butt but we were both very over par.  There was one hole that was a par 3 and I got it in two shots (picture victory dance) but then Ryan got a hole in one! (picture him not gloating and me pouting...and maybe hitting my club on things and stomping around like a child) 

When we were picking up our clubs from the "fun shack" or whatever it was called, there was randomly a tiny black lamb wandering around and being all cute following people.  As if that wasn't funny enough, when we went to return our clubs there was an 18 month old Western Grey kangaroo in a harness (without the leash) hopping around the shop!  Only in Australia can you have a kangaroo for a pet, but I still can't explain the lamb.

After our morning of fun we decided to head to Beedelup Falls, which supposedly had a suspension bridge over top of it.  We knew it was close to the resort, but when we showed up we could actually see the hotel from the lookout.  Turns out the falls were feeding into the lake we were staying on...oops.  Serves us right for being too lazy to do the short walk to the falls that the resort advertised!  Actually, it was kind of lame in the end.  The falls were really small but the suspension bridge was sort of fun.  They have random radio stations that you can tune into for a narration of the park you're in, and we should have listened when the guy said "some people from other countries can't believe we find these falls so exciting because they're used to much bigger falls…"  Seriously, it was like 3m high.

  

Now on to more exciting things, like the Giant Tingle Tree!  We went on a nice quiet walk through a tingle tree forest in Walpole-Nornalup National Park (which randomly had lots of info boards about dinosaurs) and saw these absolutely massive trees.  They're interesting because all of their important growing mechanisms are located in the outer layer of the tree, so when there's a forest fire they burn through the middle first and end up hollow but can still keep on living.

Moving right along, our last stop for the day was the Tree Top Walk.  Basically this was equivalent to climbing a giant tree, but it was wheelchair accessible.   This walk was very well done and absolutely beautiful, so Ryan and I took our time and decided to bird watch.  It was really cool because the walk took you up a slow incline, allowing you to see the trees and birds at all of the different levels.  At the top there was a long pathway 40m above the ground which was also really neat, and arguably much better than the 75m tree I climbed.  It was certainly more relaxing!

Throughout the day we had patchy cell reception, so we were a bit frustrated trying to find a place to stay that night.  We ended up calling this place in Denmark called The Cove that sounded nice in the tourist pamphlet we had.  They had one cabin left, which the owner explained on the phone was usually reserved for groups.  He suggested that we look at it before we committed but was willing to give us the single room rate.  Thinking he just meant it was for families, we were not phased at all and decided to stay there.  Upon arrival, however, we were warned again that maybe we should look at it.  The drive in was so beautiful and it was located in a very secluded forest, so stubbornly we again declined to look at it first.  Then the owner brought us to this:

Yes, that was the "A-Frame" we were staying in.  All by ourselves.  And the inside looked like this:

(pause for effect)

Yes, the table seated 25 and if you look carefully you can see some cots lined up on the right of the picture.  There were 19 beds in the cabin.  What  you can't see are the amazing sky lights all above the table, and how massive that fireplace is.  It was absolutely beautiful (and built by the owner and his family), so needless to say we stayed two nights instead of one!  We pulled two couches up to the fire, grabbed some blankets, and drank wine and played Ghost Stories (my favourite board game) all night.  And by all night I mean until like 9:30 when I passed out.  From being tired.  Not from the wine.

SWAA: Jewel Cave, Bicentennial Tree, and Pemberton

Our last day in Margaret River started really well, with a delicious breakfast at the hotel and a trip to the local Saturday market.  As I said before Margaret River is well know for its local produce, so it was great to see the local market and pick up more food for our picnic lunch.

Our first destination for the day was Jewel Cave, but along the way we drove through what I'm going to call the "fairy forest" (actually called State Forest No. 45).  I knew one of the main attractions of South Western Australia was the beautiful karri tree forests, but this was the first time we had truly driven through one.  Someone had accurately captured the mood of the forest by "editing" this road sign, and it didn't seem like anyone was keen to fix it.

Our other main reason for going to this area of Australia was because it is wildflower season, and the forest floor was just starting to become blanketed in flowers.

The Margaret River region is home to about a dozen limestone caves, and Jewel Cave was supposedly the best show cave in the area.  If you have any questions about the cave, as usual, ask Ryan.  It was difficult to get good pictures, but it was definitely a beautiful cave system.  Unfortunately because it's a "show" cave they had some weird lighting effects and laser lines to point out certain features, which kind of cheapened the beauty of the cave. 

If you look closely, it kind of looks like a karri tree forest.

After the cave we headed to what was my personal highlight of the trip: the Bicentennial Tree in Warren National Park.  Now this isn't just any tree; it is the tallest climbing tree in the area.  Soaring to 75m high, the Bicentennial Tree is equipped with a re-bar spiral "ladder" and multiple platforms, originally used for spotting forest fires.  Those of you who know me know that I am a wuss - I don't take dangerous risks and I really don't do anything I don't want to do.  For whatever reason, ever since hearing about this tree, I just knew it was something I had to climb.  I never even climbed apple trees as a kid, so I have no idea what possessed me to do this!  To put this in perspective there were no guides, no ropes, no harnesses, and no safety net.  Really, this kind of thing would never pass safety standards in Canada and I can't believe it's allowed to exist here.

Now to set the scene.  Ryan and I rock up, all confident and ready to climb this thing.  There are a few weary people at the bottom watching their friends/family climb, but the place is relatively deserted.  Without much hesitation, we both start the climb to the first platform, about a third of the way up the tree.  Once at the platform we look at each other and go "yup, that's all I'm doing!" and "boy that was insane"!  Really, it was pretty damn scary.  At that point we're both shaking in our shoes working up the courage to go back down, but as I become more confident I realize I'd be mad at myself if I didn't just suck it up and finish what I started.  After a few more minutes, I was ready!  As Ryan headed back down, I worked my way to the top.  Surprisingly the first bit was the hardest, and once I got into a rhythm I was completely fine.  Ready for a picture?

The bottom arrow is the first platform, and the top arrow is the top platform.

 If you look really closely you might be able to see me in a red shirt on the top platform.  Now for some pictures from the top!

You can see Ryan at the bottom.

View over all of the trees from the top.  It's bleached out, but I could see massive sand dunes in the distance.

This was my descent from the lowest platform.  I was feeling brave enough to take a picture!

As you can see the view from the top was kind of underwhelming, but that's not why I climbed the tree.  And although I probably wouldn't do it again, I'm glad I did it!

With my feet firmly back on the ground we headed for our hotel that evening: the Kerri Valley Resort in Pemberton.  Because it was Saturday night we had to splurge since lots of places were fully booked for the night.  We ended up in a large 2 bedroom cottage in the middle of a  beautiful forest on a lake.  I know to Canadians lakefront property isn't that exciting, but in Australia it's a novelty if it's freshwater.  We didn't know what to expect so we were kind of shocked when we showed up to this:

Quite a bit more lavish than we were expecting!  Overall though the place was way overpriced and I was allergic to it so it must have been mouldy.  They had also fully booked their restaurant, so we had to have take-out for dinner instead.  That aside, we got to enjoy another lovely evening of wine, board games, and chocolate, this time with a lake and a fire place.

Ryans "classy" face

SWAA: Busselton Jetty and Margaret River

If you recall from yesterday's post, Ryan and I arrived late for our Busselton Jetty tour and had to run/speed walk up the jetty to catch up to the group.  Amazingly, we made it only 5 minutes late!!!!  We were of course sweaty and out of breath, but we did it! 

The tour was really cool.  We descended to different viewing platforms, ending up 8m below the surface of the water.  There had been a great white shark sighting that morning just down the beach, so we were told that if we saw a large school of fish to watch out for the shark as well.  I'm not sure if it was unlucky or lucky, but either way we didn't see one.  It was kind of stormy so the water was pretty murky, but we could still see some neat things.

After the tour was over a small train picked us up so we didn't have to walk back on the jetty, which was actually a relief after the stressful day we had.  At this point we were very much looking forward to checking into our hotel and calling it a day, so we were pleasantly surprised with how awesome the place was.  It was called "Heritage Trail Lodge" and the property was absolutely beautiful.  Set on a small hill on the main road leading into Margaret River we were surrounded by forest, flowers and birds, and it had by far the most comfortable bed of the trip.  This was the only hotel we booked in advance, and I'm so glad we did.  The owners were very friendly, there were free movie rentals, and the continental breakfast was delicious and made from all fresh local supplies.  Needless to say, that's when the trip started to look up.  We stayed two nights and tried to stay a third but unfortunately they were all booked.

That night for dinner we decided to check out the closest restaurant that had a flyer advertising "French Vietnamese Fusion" food.  We had absolutely no idea what form that would take, but it had a picture of a delicious spring roll so we thought we'd give it a go.  Turns out it was Italian Night (go figure) and it was the chef's first day!  Despite that the atmosphere was cozy and the food was delicious so well worth the trip.  The salad dressing (a balsamic vinaigrette) was a special concoction which we loved and even bought a bottle to take home.  Before eating we bought a bottle of wine since the restaurant was strictly BYO, which we promptly polished off and made for a fun walk home in the dark. 

The next morning after a great night sleep we took a short walk to the actual river behind our lodge called "Margaret River."  Along the way we ran into a really fun playground.  Ryan and I (mostly Ryan) usually make a point of playing on them, which led to this great picture (but truth be told I took a turn too!)

Click picture to enlarge and see Ryan's "serious working face"

Now for some actual pictures of the walk.

  

During that afternoon we went on a wine/gourmet food tour of Margaret River.  The area is very famous for wine (specifically a blend of Semillion Sauvignon Blanc - yum!) but also for how much food they produce locally.  Most people on the tour had already been to two wineries by the time we joined the group, but we still managed to hit a brewery, cheese factory, Fermoy Estates winery, an olive store, chocolate factory, Evans & Tate winery, and a venison farm.  It was a pretty full afternoon!  Our goal was to pick up enough stuff for dinner (and we had already bought a baguette from the local bakery), so it gave us an excuse to actually buy things.  We out-bought everyone else by far!  The group was great to tour with; they loved that we were Canadian and asked endless questions and made lots of jokes all in good fun.  We got our digs in "a-boot" the Australian way of life too though, so it wasn't all one sided!  Anyways, when we got back to the hotel we set up dinner on the patio set outside our room. 

Unfortunately I broke that delicious jar of tomato jam right after this, but the pesto and cheese did us for another few lunches like this!

And now Ryan's making his "serious eating face"

I told you the place was awesome!

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.