Timber land

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Escaping from Pemberton as quickly as I could, I made my way to the Gloucester Tree, another famous fire tree that's climbable by the public, and another famous fire tree that was to remain unclimbed by me. There was a short walking trail through the woods nearby, at the beginning of which were umpteen brightly coloured parakeets (?) pecking around on the forest floor, chuntering to themselves like guinea-pigs and behaving to all intents and purposes as if I wasn't there. The size of the karri trees is impressive, and you find yourself walking around with your head back, like on a first visit to downtown Manhattan. Karri is apparently a popular wood in the building industry because of its length and lack of knots.

I'd picked up a leaflet describing the Karri Explorer scenic drive, which linked up all of the places that I wanted to see. Next on that circuit was Big Brook Dam, where I did a 4km loop walk. The wisps of mist drifting across the reservoir lent a slightly eerie feel to the place, but I saw nothing and no-one, either natural or supernatural. Warren River Cedar, which I was hoping would be some monstrous cedar tree, turned out to be nothing but a clump of cedars, and the marri (red gum) forest was barely distinguishable to my untrained eye from a karri forest - OK, the former has rougher bark than the latter, but put a few hundred of them together and the overall impression is of something large, green and brown.

Beedelup Falls came next, a benign waterfall enlivened by the nearby bouncy cable suspension bridge across the river - the sort of thing you'd normally expect to see slung across a bottomless gorge in the Amazon jungle. I forced myself to cross it several times, in an attempt to make my brain realise how irrational my fear of heights is.

The next section of the drive was called Heartbreak Trail, but for no obvious reason. There was a short walk available to the Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree, the third publicly climbable fire tree in the area. I preserved my record of a perfect 0 in that regard. With a final look at The Cascades, a tame set of rapids, I headed for Walpole. Though the YHA had an appealing name (Tingle All Over YHA), my vow from this morning was fresh in my mind, so I plumped for the Walpole Lodge instead.

This turned out to be a good decision. Apart from being the second cheapest place that I'd stayed in so far in Australia, it was in excellent condition. There were only a handful of guests in residence, so the owner gave me a single room for the price of a dorm bed, and later forced me to partake of some prawns in garlic sauce that he'd made for some friends, as well as plying me with white wine. I returned his generosity by saying what a great hostel it was, especially compared with the dump of a YHA in Pemberton - at which point he revealed that not only did he own the Walpole Lodge, but he also managed the Pemberton YHA. As I hastily tried to backtrack, he put me at my ease by saying the Pemberton YHA was indeed rather grotty but that the new owners, who had no previous hostel experience, were going to invest a wodge of cash into it. He was also unsure why I'd been put in a workers' dorm.

I met a couple of German girls who were driving around in a Wicked campervan. As I may have mentioned in an earlier Melbourne blog, Wicked vans are easy to spot on the road because they have unique paintwork - this one had a montage of Beatles faces. Leif and I had tried to get one for our Great Ocean Road trip but none were available. The girls weren't massively impressed with their van, claiming that it drank fuel, so I felt a little better about the fact that we hadn't been able to get one.

I spent part of the evening chatting with the owner and one of his friends, though I suspected they were unable to resist the temptation to wind up a Pom when they started telling me in all seriousness about a movement to replace the notion of the Easter Bunny with that of the Easter Bilby (with a bilby being a type of bandicoot). This led me to take all their subsequent comments with a pinch of salt, including when the owner's friend showed me a scar on his back that he claimed was from a shark attack. Shortly after this I retired for the night, figuring I wasn't sufficiently awake to be interested in sifting fact from fiction.

I subsequently Googled the Easter Bilby and found that they had been telling the truth. Still not sure about the shark attack though ...

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Photos

Karri tree
With car for reference