As I've said elsewhere we've been on holidays to the south western corner of WA.
Perhaps not the best time to go travelling, but we had no problems filling our little rented MG, the weather was good (more or less) and we had a good time.
As always most of what we did was really only of interest to ourselves, but I'd certainly recommend a trip out to the west of the west.
We flew to Perth and spent a couple of days adjusting to the time difference before picking up our rented car and driving south to Margaret River.
We didn't stay in Margaret River, but in the small coastal community of Gnarabup, which while touristy - a couple of good swimming beaches - is not over run with backpackers and campervans.
While in Gnarabup, we had a day trip to Busselton, stopping for coffee in Cowaramup where the locals have done this whole cow thing installing fibreglass cow sculptures on the main street
and souvenirs such as fresian patterned bucket hats and t-shirts.
Busselton has a decent art shop, which allowed J to stock up on art materials for the trip. While there I had a gander at the anomalous post box - it's very much a nineteenth century New South Wales post box
still in use and made by the Paragon Foundry in Pyrmont - how it ended up on the other side of the country is a bit of a puzzle, especially as pre Federation WA post boxes are a simpler hexagonal design as in this example by J & G Ledger from outside the outpost of the WA museum in Augusta
From Busselton we drove back via Cape Naturaliste and its lighthouse - Virginia wasn't in - and where we had a little bushwalk through the coastal scrub and I realised that I knew nothing about the plants and animals of WA.
Sure there were plants that looked like what you would expect in any windswept coastal ecology, and doing the jobs you expected, but when you looked closely, they were different, in some cases very different from their east coast equivalents.
After Gnarabup we moved on to Pemberton, looping down via Hamelin bay where the stingrays come in to the shallows to interact with these funny pale skinned bipeds on the beach and Cape Leeuwin, where the lighthouse is hidden behind a fairly ugly chain link fence, and then on to Augusta, before heading inland through the Kari forest to Pemberton, once a logging town, then a centre for the Orange People, and now simply a town trying to adjust to a changing economy.
While we were in Pemberton, I turned seventy, and to mark that event we had a ride on the tourist tram that runs on a section of the old railway line
Cheesy and geeky, but fun to let my inner railway nerd out, and what better a time to do it than on my 70th.
From Pemberton, we spent time in D'Entrecasteaux national park before driving along the coast to Denmark which was in the news a few years ago when an emperor penguin washed up on the coast, but is basically just a relaxed surfy kind of place.
While in Denmark we doubled back one day to Walpole for a high octane ecological boat tour - The guide, Gary Muir, talked at about a hundred kilometres an hour for the whole tour, about how the local quokka population had developed a natural resistance to the 1080 bait used to control fox and feral cat populations, about microplastic pollution, the impact of chytrid fungus on native frogs, and much more besides.
From Denmark we moved on to Bremer Bay, a little township on the edge of the emptiness, before heading back to Perth via Katanning.
Katanning has a reputation as a vibrant multi cultural centre with a substantial Cocos Malay population.
Not on a Sunday. The town was closed - perhaps the fact it was also Eid didn't help, but all the interesting ethnic restaurants were closed and we ended up with a very nice pizza and a couple of beers in the hotel bar.
After dropping the car off in Perth, we got the train down to Fremantle
where we stayed in a short term business apartment for a few days, which allowed us to have a day on Rottnest island, a swim, and to see the quokkas
not to mention some New Zealand fur seals
characteristically sticking their flippers out of the relatively warm water to keep cool. And the water was relatively warm, allowing us a final swim at Little Armstrong Beach.
And then our holiday was over, and there was a cyclone threatening. The day before we left it was blowing half a gale when we walked to the shipwreck museum to see the hull of the Batavia
On the morning we flew out it was pouring with rain - like serious cyclonic rain - and the plane was over Esperance before we left the cyclonic weather system behind. It had been raining so heavily when we boarded the airbridge was leaking and there was a man standing by the leak with a strategically placed umbrella to deflect the worst of it...
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