Paradise Found

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29/5/11
Paradise Found…

Dear Family and Friends,
It has been a while.
We arrived in Perth a few weeks ago but had to wait for interviews to join the nursing agency, so while we waited we headed down to the south-west of Western Australia. And, in a place called Denmark, we found paradise! But more of that later…
Our first stop was lovely Bunbury where my older brother and sister were born a long, long time ago!! It's right on the beach and is picturesque and pretty, though more than 50 years ago when Mum and Dad were there I imagine it would have been not much more than just a dusty little town. While there, we met a family who insisted we should visit Gnomesville, so of course we did! So what is Gnomesville, you may ask! It sounds rather corny doesn't it? Well, it's a little spot near Bunbury in the bush where you will find a community of gnomes, more than a thousand of them, in fact!! No-one knows how it started but the most common story is that when the local council were building a roundabout, the workers placed gnomes there for their cricket stumps and it grew from there. The gnomes just sit in the bush on the side of the road and people come from here, there and everywhere to add their own! There are gnomes in trees, playing cricket, getting married, playing chess and apparently really enjoying life together. We saw gnome-sick gnomes, Gnomer Pyle, The Rolling Gnomes and gnomes declaring that There's No Place like Gnome, that Gnome is Where the Heart is and that To Gnome Me is to Love Me!!
That evening we stopped in a free camp - a road-side stop by a pine-plantation with a picnic table and a camp-fire. We were the first to arrive so we nabbed both of those! We were soon joined by three different groups of back-packers in their tightly packed kombi vans and four-wheel drives converted to include a bed in the back on top of drawers and space for esky's, bedding, a portable stove, pots, pan and dishes etc!! They joked about how difficult it was to turn over in bed as the bed was so near the ceiling of the car and of how getting changed in bed required great dexterity and creativity!! So there we were with our comfortable van, hogging the only picnic table and fire-place for miles, while they were sitting in the chilly dark night outside their campers eating pasta (actually I don't know what they were eating, but from memory, pasta is about the only thing back-packers eat!!). So, we invited them to join us by the fire and what a night we had! It was great! There were 2 French Canadians, 2 Germans, a French guy and an Italian guy with a great accent who took over my job as fire-poking pyromanic! I felt like an exchange student again! One of the French guys, Tony (I remember his name because he had it very conveniently tattooed on his arm in huge letters!) was never without a cheeky, charismatic smile. He brought out a guitar and we tapped our feet to all kinds of international music including "The Streets of London" in German!! Well, the first half of the first verse anyway. That's all any of us could remember of that in any language!! They all joked about the worry of their cheapish old cars breaking down in the middle of no-where. We advised them to join the RAC and not to watch the film "Wolf Creek"!! The next morning, it happened. No, John Jarrett didn't come out of the bush with an axe, one of the cars wouldn't start. They are now members of the RAC!!
The next few nights we camped in a lovely national park near Margaret River called the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park where the Southern and Indian oceans meet. The camp-ground was called the Hamelin Hollow which sounds charmingly like something out of Alice in Wonderland! We visited Bussleton, famous for its 2km long wooden jetty which takes a 90 degree turn at about the half-way point! Remember I told you the 1.5km wooden jetty in Port Germaine SA is the longest in the southern hemisphere. Apparently they're fibbers!
We visited the famous Margaret River and watched in awe as people surfed great massive waves so big they had to be towed out onto them behind a jet-ski. The waves weren't as big as I remember them to be from my last visit to Margaret River many years ago, but I suspect my memory of that time is somewhat distorted for I remember those waves as being something just slightly smaller than the tidal waves in that movie where New York is wiped out! We visited the Margaret River chocolate factory and I must say the chocolate was very creamy! But, I warn you. If you visit one day, and see a lovely "tester" jar of "Chocolate Body Butter" with wooden spatulas beside it, don't assume, as I did, that it is a lovely edible product designed to enhance intimacy. It isn't. It's skin moisturiser and it tastes disgusting!!!
Our next stop was the wooded Pemberton surrounded by glorious giant Karri forests - trees which grow up to 85m tall, may be up to 300 years old and grow only in that part of WA where there is high rain-fall and deep red soil. (The only trees in the world which are taller are in California). They are tall and straight usually with branches only at the top and look very majestic indeed. The most famous is the 61-metre Gloucester Tree which has a girth of 7.3metres and since 1934 has been used as a fire look-out. Before it was pegged as a lookout, forester Jack Watson climbed it with boots and belt. It took him 6-hours to ascend and descend! With the aid of steel pegs it took me about 40-minutes return going V-E-R-Y carefully and slowly peg by peg with three points of body contact at all times. I must have looked silly to the young ones who climbed briskly as if they were 5 metres off the ground rather than 50!! I did climb it many years ago and don't recall having found it as frightening then, but perhaps it's that now being older (and wiser??) I kept thinking that if I slipped I would be D-E-A-D!! Anyway, I got to the platform at the top with heart pounding glad to be able to pause and feel safe again at least for a few brief moments before having to step off the security of the platform and start the descent! Finally back on solid ground, beside the people feeding the birds, next to the sign that read, "Do not feed the birds" I staggered as my legs quivered. And the for next three days I could hardly walk at all! I am pleased to report I am fully recovered now. Just don't ask me to do that ever again! 61-metres looks high from the ground, but it looks three times higher from up there!! Just so that you know, despite those large metal pegs having been thrust into the trunk of that amazing tree, it is still very much alive and thriving. So, I went to speak to the very friendly ranger at the gate as I was amazed that people are actually still allowed to take such risks. She informed me that no-one has actually fallen (amazing) but that there have been some incidents. Apparently one stupid woman allowed her 4-year old to climb and people rushed to the office to report what was happening and they closed the climb until the child descended safely all the way from the top!!! Another woman wanted to assist her 18-month old to climb and when the rangers told her she couldn't do it, she left the child unattended at the bottom while she herself climbed!! Apparently one man got most of the way up and froze. He hung on for ages until the SES arrived from the closest town and helped him down with a harness!! But the most amazing story of all was of the man who'd had heart surgery only two weeks before he climbed. To "Climb the Gloucester Tree" was on his post-surgery bucket-list. Well, let's hope it was the last thing on his bucket-list because while he got to the top, it was the last thing he ever did. The SES had to retrieve his body from the platform at the top of the tree (exclamation mark intentionally omitted in reverence for the deceased).
The next day we visited another Karri fire-lookout, the Bicentennial Tree which was built in 1988 to commemorate the bicentennial! (believe it or not!). I thought it so ironic and fitting that the way to commemorate the settling of Europeans in this country - which brought immense destruction to the Indigenous people and to the environment - was to thrust large steel poles into a beautiful ancient tree!!
Our next stop was the "tree-top" walk near Walpole in the midst of the giant Tingle Tree forests. Tingle trees grow up to 75 metres tall and have a circumference of up to 20 metres. Initially there were thought to be two varieties, the Red and the Yellow, but many years ago, a Mr Rates identified a third variety and it was named the Rates Tingle. He died when a tree branch fell on him (exclamation mark intentionally omitted in reverence for the deceased).The Tingles mature with a very broad base into which people used to drive their little cars and stand smiling for the camera. Little did they know that the weight of the car compacted the soil causing the roots and hence the trees to die. Ignorance is bliss I suppose. The Tree-Top walk is a walkway 40 metres above the floor of the forest from which one can walk near the tree tops without having to actually climb the Gloucester Tree!
We visited the Warren River in the Warren National Park and walked the path along beside the river. It was such a beautiful, quiet, peaceful and serene place with no other people for miles. I couldn't help but think of a family I saw in Cairo from the hotel in which I was staying. They lived on the roof of the next building in a shanty of tin and I would be very surprised, even to this day, if any of them have ever had the opportunity to have ever left that hot, dry, dirty, dusty, noisy, crowded city. How fortunate we are.
And, talking of fortunate… I found paradise at our next stop … Denmark. Not the one in Scandinavia (which I also liked a lot) but the Denmark down on the South coast near Albany. LOVED IT!!!! Lush, green, spectacular coastal scenery, clear water and white sandy beaches. If it weren't so remote, it would be one of the most popular spots in Australia. Just as well it's remote! Sue says to wait 'till we get to the Hammersley and Kimberley region in the north before declaring Denmark one of the most beautiful places in the world, so we'll see...
So that was the end of our wonderful South-West trip.
And here we are back in Perth. We have bought another van and only three days after putting the ad on "Gumtree" to sell the other one, we sold it this morning for more than we paid for it in Melbourne! (things cost more in WA so the van we have just bought here will probably be sold at a loss in Melbourne at the end of our trip so I suspect it will all balance out in the end)! So why the change-over? Long story… and it has been a time-consuming and tedious process (including a road-worthy inspection and changing over the rego), but though the new van is actually older and smaller it will be so much easier and quicker to set up and pack up and will be much more user-friendly.
We are in a great van park 10-minutes north of the city which has a huge hot outdoor spa which I loooove! Though the nights are chilly, we are enjoying warm, clear, sunny days. We are on the best site in Australia right by a small lake with ducks, pelicans, spoonbills, black swans and water-hens as our companions. We learnt quickly not to feed the birds, as the first time we did, birds came at us in droves from all corners of the lake. It was just like "Attack of the Killer Birds" for while a black swan is graceful on the water it is rather intimidating on land when waddling at you at a great waddling pace along with 100 of its feathered friends flying in from as far away as Broome! I also had to change the alarm sound on my phone from ducks to something else, as I kept thinking my alarm was going off!
We start work tomorrow in neonates with the government nursing agency known as NurseWest, so I reckon I won't even need to wear a name-tag!!
So that's all for now.
Take care,
Hope all is well with you all…
Ros (& Sue)
xxx
PS Scroll down and go to page 2 for more photos. Also if you want to see the photos in an enlarged format, click on any photo!

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Photos

Gnomesville
Wedding!