The South West!

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April 18th 2005

Published: April 30th 2005

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adam and steph

Albany Coast

Hills meeting the sea at Albany

Phew! Back to civilisation! For those of you who know our itinerary may have noticed we have just arrived back from the North West. Well here is our blog from the south west as we didn’t get time to update in between. Oh.. such a busy, hard life we lead! Not!
Ok, well the south was great and (as we now know) very different from the north! The south west is not what springs to most people’s minds when they think of Australia. It’s very picturesque with rolling hills, dramatic costal cliffs, green, huge forests and mountain ranges. The weather held out for the most part but you may spot the odd cloudy photo.

We started off our trip from Perth and headed through Bunbury to Busselton. Busselton is a great little sea side town famous for its 2km jetty. At the end of the jetty there is a new underwater observatory which is like one of those aquariums except it’s the real thing!

Then we drove through Dunsborough to the Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse (see picy) and on to Margaret River through the hundreds of Wineries (hic up).
On the way further south to Augusta we stopped at Lake

The "VamperCan"

Our house on wheels, wow!

and Jewel Caves. Wow, I must have taken these for granted as a kid because they were out of this world!

Augusta was gorgeous as ever, so peaceful. Around Augusta we visited another light house and saw where the Indian and the Southern Oceans meet (Steph’s still looking for the big red line!)

After a bit of a relax, it was then a long drive to Pemberton in the heart of the Karri tree forests. The Karri trees are massive! I climbed the Gloucester Tree (yep dad just as dodgy as when you did it!!) and the Bicentennial Tree Lookouts. These were used as fire lookouts and are basically a 60 metre high tree with a platform bolted to the top! You are free to climb these trees (at your own risk hehe) which is done without steps or hand rails or anything except big pegs nailed into the tree (see pic from bottom and from top).
After spending the night amongst the trees we made our way down to Albany stopping at another high attraction, “The Valley of the Giants Tree Top Walk”. Steph wasn't scared of being 40m up, realy!

Albany was a big surprise

"Roos"

What more can I say, we're in Australia after all.

to us both, just not what we expected, far better! A beautiful town nestled in the hills which roll into the harbour. Almost reminded us of the lake district but with beaches and no rain!

Before leaving Albany we saw “the gap” and “the natural bridge” (see pic) and headed on back up to Perth through the Stirling Range National Park.

Additional photos below

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