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!

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.

Trip to Victor Harbor

On Tuesday and Wednesday this week Ryan and I decided to take our first solo road trip.  We went down to Victor Harbor which is just over an hour south of Adelaide with the intention of seeing whales and penguins, and just exploring the area.

It was a fantastic trip despite the terrible weather, so there's lots to tell and show.  You're in for a long post today!

We rented a ridiculous little Mazda Metro, but at least it was automatic.  It's really weird driving on the other side of the road, but with two people to navigate it was a lot easier.  The car was pretty old and had next to no power, so in a 100km/h zone going up hill we could only do about 60!

When we arrived we went to the visitor centre to ask about whale sightings, but unfortunately they are really low this year.  The Murray River is draining dirty water into the ocean, so the Right Whales that usually come really close to shore to raise their young were further out than usual.  There had been one sighting in the harbor that morning, but they were much further out than usual.

Because of the weather forecast, we decided to stay in a hotel instead of camping.  We found a hotel called The Anchorage with a fantastic restaurant and a great spa room overlooking the ocean with a balcony.  I spent a lot of time with our binoculars looking for whales off that  balcony!  Also, they had really low mid-week rates which is always appreciated.

Our second reason for going was the smallest penguins in the world.  These were found on Granite Island, which is accessible by a bridge from Victor Harbor.  (A message from Ryan to all you geologists out there: "granite island = pegmattic leucocratic granite")  We did a nice hike around the island, but unfortunately saw no wild penguins since they all go out fishing during the day.   At the end of the walk we got to the rehabilitation centre where they help the injured penguins, so we did get to see them in the end.  I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

From Granite Island looking towards Victor Harbor

That night we had an AMAZING dinner at the Anchorage of beef, scallops, prawns and calamari.  We shared so we could get dessert!  It was so good that Ryan claims I said "delicious" in my sleep.

Wednesday we decided to get a slow start, so I had tea and whale watched from the balcony.  No whales, but I did watch a black circle that could have been a seal or a buoy for quite awhile!  Mostly it was fun just to watch the massive waves with the binoculars.

On our way home we decided to stop at Newland Head Conservation Park, just west of Victor Harbor.  Again, I'll let the pictures do the talking.  It POURED rain (with a lucky burst of sun later on), but it was very beautiful.  We saw about 6 rainbows over the two days - most of them here!  Also, on our way to the park I saw my first wild kangaroos!

The vegetation was really beautiful and this picture doesn't do it justice.

The last thing we did before heading home was stop at Glacier Rock.  I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was a long drive to see an unimpressive rock.  One of the reasons we ended up going though is because the pamphlet was written using excerpts by Alan Morgan - Ryan's first year geology professor at the University of Waterloo!  Geology really makes the world feel small.