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Published: January 10th 2009
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Before we left Perth we wanted to head down south a bit to the Margaret River region which is known for its scenery its surfing and its vineyards! We hired a car from Hertz, a wee Toyota corolla thing, and booked a cottage just outside the town of Margaret river.
We drove down on Sunday late morning and stopped at a place called Mandurah which has Sunday art and craft markets so we stopped for a look around. They also have a lovely foreshore area with a coffee shop or two and a really good ice cream shop which we had a wee tester of.
Margaret River itself was very nice and quaint with lots of little restaurants and quirky shops to have a peek in, we arrived early evening so we just had a chilled out evening in the cottage with a wee bottle of local sauvignon blanc and a Chinese takeaway. The next day I booked a surf lesson at Rivermouth Beach on Surfers Point. Paul came down to watch and take pictures and possibly chuckle a little at my surfing attempts! The waves were really big and they instructor said there would be a strong undercurrent which there
surfing...
...or attempting to! definately was, the hardest bit was getting out deep enough to make it worthwhile, it seemed like every time i got far enough out a big wave would come and wash me underwater back towards the shore. This all meant that by the time I got out onto the board I was exhausted and full of saltwater and this is all a very complicated explanation of why i wasn't able to stand up! I think I’ll give it another go on a calmer sea! it was great fun though and I did body board a few times on a big wave or manage to kneel up which was fun as well but not quite as spectacular! However I do now know how it feels to be inside a washing machine, a very salty washing machine...
In the afternoon we wandered round the town looking in all the little stores attempting to stay out the sun as I had managed to gain the ultimate surfing accessory, a sun burnt nose and forehead!
The next day was even better as we cruised around the local vineyards, poor Paul had to drive so I did the majority of the tasting, we had
a few favourites, Cape Lavender was a nice unusual one where they had field of lavender growing that they infused the wine with. It sounded a bit weird but we gave it a go and it was actually pretty good. The white wine really had a taste of lavender and the bubbly was the best so we purchased a wee bottle for the boat skippers Andrew and Marian who have been kind enough to take us out a fair few times on their boat. Vasse Felix was the first vineyard set up in the area and was lovely. They had a long list of wines you could taste so I selected a few that sounded nice and bought a wee pressie for the landlords, Aunty Anne and Uncle John, I thought I had pushed my luck a wee bit with the number of tries but was soon reassured this wasn't the case when the couple next to us informed the server that they would start at the top of the list and work their way down!
The nicest grounds were at Brookland Valley where you could walk around the lake or eat at the restaurant overlooking the lake. The restaurant,
Flutes, had come highly recommended so we treated ourselves to lunch with a view. The food was lovely and the wine was even better. We also made time for a wee stop at the Margaret River chocolate factory and had some free samples there too before heading up to Dunsborough where we were staying that evening.
Dunsborough is at the top of Cape Naturaliste and a short drive to Sugarloaf Rock so we packed a picnic and drove up for dinner at sunset. The view was spectacular but we aren’t quite sure what the sugarloaf reference means.
The next day we drove up to Busselton who’s claim to fame is having the longest wooden jetty in the southern hemisphere, so we paid our tickets and walked the 2.5 km jetty to the end, its was very windy and a bit creaky and nerve wracking but we made it there and back safely. That night we stayed in a very very small town called Yarloop at a deserted little guest house where we got to see Bandicoots which are very small marsupials, or characters in a playstation game!
On the last day of our down south adventure we stopped at
cape lavender
me posing at cape lavender Mandurah to have go on the inflatable water park but we were there pretty early and it wasn’t set up yet so we gave it a miss and just drove north to Freemantle for some lunch and to pick up our passports from the Chinese embassy complete with valid visas, how exciting…
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