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Published: August 12th 2006
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Lake Cave
Hanging table I had to prod the receptionist to return my key deposit to me when I checked out, which put another tick in the debit column for YHAs.
Continuing south down Caves Road I passed yet more vineyards, including Voyager, which looked so beautiful that I had to stop and look around. The buildings had all been constructed in a whitewashed Dutch South African style which, with the blue sky and yellow/red foliage on the withering vines, was extremely easy on the eye.
Next stop was Lake Cave, one of a series of caves in the Margaret River region. They had a 10% off deal for the public holiday, a refreshing change from many of the restaurants I'd seen that were slapping on an extra 10% for the same spurious reason. Naturally there were hordes of children on the tour of the cave. The guide was informative but her delivery sounded as though she was reading off cue cards.
To enter the cave we had to descend a steep set of steps into a bowl (a collapsed doline is, I believe, the technical term) in which some karri trees (one roughly 500 years old) were growing. Further steps took
us down through the rock into the cave itself. "Lake" is actually a misnomer as it's more like a stream. There were various calcium carbonate formations, including the expected stalactites and stalagmites, straws (thin, hollow structures), a hanging table, etc. Though there were some interesting reflections in the water, the abiding paleness palled after a while and I found myself wishing for a burst of colour.
After the claustrophobic confines of the cave, I motored down to Cape Leeuwin, which is the south-westernmost point of Australia, and where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet. It was too sunny for the seas to appear as awesome as they probably do in duller weather, but the place still felt significant in the same way that Kanyakumari in India did.
Having had my fill of YHAs, I inquired at the Leeuwin Hotel as to the availability of dorm rooms, and was pleased to find a similar arrangement as I'd had in the namesake town Port Augusta in South Australia, i.e. more like a motel room.
None of the town's eating establishments particularly grabbed me so I knocked up my signature pasta dish, washed it down with a bottle of local
wine, and caught up on the events in the Big Brother household until sleep overtook me.
The following morning I went on a whale-watching trip. Though it was rather early in the season, there had apparently been some good sightings over the last couple of days. First we had to navigate out of the river into Flinders Bay, during which we were accompanied by a school of common dolphins, swimming and leaping in front of the prow of the boat. After only a short time in the bay, the captain spotted a whale breaching off in the distance so we set off in hot pursuit.
For the next hour and a half we moved from one set of whales to another - there were about 7 humpbacks in total. They were clearly in entertainment mode, demonstrating their breaching, pectoral fin slapping, tail slapping, and blowhole-emptying prowess in a display that the crew said was one of the best they'd seen. I was rather disappointed with the photos I got - the motor-driven zoom on my camera is just too slow to zoom in on the action when a whale is in the frame, so the options are to
either not have zoomed photos or put the camera on maximum zoom and keep your fingers crossed that a breaching whale appears in shot. After a series of useless pictures, I gave up and simply concentrated on enjoying the spectacle with my own eyes, storing it away in my brain rather than on an SD card. Up close, the sight and sound of these creatures is awe-inspiring, and it seemed special to encounter so many of them in such a playful mood, especially given the thousands of kilometres of ocean that they swim through annually.
I came away feeling as though this would be one of the highlights of my visit to Australia.
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