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Published: December 28th 2011
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'Busso' to Walpole
Today we hitch on the Trakkie and leave Busso…but, our first stop this morning is about 200 mtrs from our caravan park, The Goose, for a last coffee! At long last we are under way and it feels good to be back on the road and quickly we are into the swing of researching the places we will be visiting along our route to Walpole.
Heading out the Vasse Highway our first stop is Nannup. Nannup is an historic Mill town in the Blackwood Valley. It is known also as the ‘Garden Village’ with beautiful public and private gardens, tulip and daffodil farms and wildflowers. And as if to accentuate this we drove over the Blackwood River bridge into town and were greeted with the sight of magnificent Jacaranda trees in full flower. The countryside driving into, and around Nannup, is lush rolling pastures alongside Jarrah forest and plantations. Nannup as a town presented as a very pretty, quaint village in a valley setting alongside the Blackwood River. The old wooden buildings were well restored, or kept, and housed businesses that catered for not only a local community but also a passing tourist trade.
After
Nannup we felt we needed a break from the ‘ blacktop’ so headed out the Brockman Highway to do a ‘short cut’ from Karri Gully through the Whinston Hills down to Manjimup. Turning off on a dirt road into the forests at Karri Gully which clearly showed you could get to Manjimup we felt pretty good driving through these mountain forests and made many remarks comparing the area to the back of the Otways in Victoria. After half an hour or so we came to a magic camp site at Willow Springs but were also confronted with a cross road and no signs…surely it must be straight ahead ! logic and looking at maps suggested this would be the case and ‘Mrs T’ (sat nav) had no idea as these roads did not exist to her! Two hours later after wandering through the forest and hills we hit ‘blacktop’ again and were presented with a sign saying Nannup to the right, 14 Klms !! Oh well we saw some country you would never get to see and Jackie saw an Emu which made her day as it ran down the track in front of the vehicle for a couple of
Nannup
'Main Street' hundred metres before slipping off to the right and into the forest. It took only minutes to work out we had hit the Vasse Highway heading south out of Nannup towards Pemberton. A quick adjustment of our route for the day saw us head south looking for a turnoff to the One Tree Bridge on Graphite Road. Back on track we arrived at the One Tree Bridge. Back in 1904 a giant Karri tree was felled so that it dropped across the 25 metre wide Donnelly River forming the basis for a bridge. From here it was not long until we came out of the forest and started to see rolling pasture and orchards. We had finally arrived in the township of Manjimup which is the gateway to the South-Western regions tall timber country (not sure what we have been driving through for the past three hours then !!!). Magnificent Karri forests and rich farmlands surround the town. While Timber is the town’s main industry, Manjimup is also the centre of a thriving fruit and vegetable industry. The area is well known for its apples and is the birthplace of the Pink Lady. But of more interest to us are
Nannup
have a Pub photo ! the cherries it is also known for, in fact we missed the cherry harvest festival by only 1 week. Trish had ‘researched’ our coffee spot and DejaVue was our destination, good coffee, and as usual we asked a ‘local’ for town gossip and info, particularly about where to get farm fresh picked cherries. Answer…you won’t get any! The weather has been too wet this year and the little crop that was picked has gone!! Bugger ! So cherry less we left Manjimup. Manjimup is quite a big centre with all the supermarkets and shops necessary to support the surrounding community. Not particularly appealing as a town but in a great part of the South West where there is a lot to see. By now, ‘according to our original schedule’, we should have arrived in Walpole so we made tracks down the South Western Highway to our destination. The road took us through towering Karri Forests where we stopped occasionally to take photos and look at the vast array of Kangaroo Paw that was growing alongside the road and in the undergrowth. Interestingly we noticed that all the Kangaroo Paw flowers here were green as opposed to along the coast around
Nannup
This is what it is all about down in the SW, timber Mason Bay where they were all are dark Maroon colour. We quickly ate the Klm’s and arrived at our destination in Walpole where we would stay for a couple of days to explore the
‘Valley of the Giants’ amongst other things on our list.
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