The Great Southwest (Part 1)

My second-to-last Saturday working in Nannup, I was surprised by a knock on my door and opened it to find Shaun, my friend from Nottingham who I had met in my first week in Sydney. He had just moved to Perth, bought a car, and come down for the weekend to see what the southwest was like. I had to work in a few hours, so we didn’t think we could drive around further than Busselton [a nearby town], but Shaun wanted to see the coast and I wanted to walk the Jetty, so that’s where we headed. Right off he asked if I wanted to drive, so I got my first driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road experience. It wasn’t too bad, especially when we were just driving along the highway and I didn’t have to make any turns, but shifting gears with my left hand (the car’s a manual) was a bit tricky. The weather was really nice, and the view of the trees and countryside around was lovely and green as we got out of Nannup (only my second time out of the town in the month I’d been there).

We made it okay, even with my driving, and started our walk up the jetty, which is supposedly 1.8km long and the longest wooden jetty in the Southern Hemisphere (there are all these headlines in Australia about “the [insert definitive ‘-est’ adjective here] in the Southern Hemisphere,” and sometimes I want to remind people that there’s not as much inhabited land in the Southern Hemisphere anyway so it’s not as impressive a statistic, but I wouldn’t want to offend anyone and I get a bit excited about those taglines in spite of myself…if I could only remember what other “the ______ in the Southern Hemisphere’s” landmarks I’ve seen so far). Here’s the opening view of the jetty and the view looking back with the signpost sculpture.

We saw some schools of fish off the edge of the side, which were fun to watch as they swirled around and changed group size. Shaun was excited to see the coast after spending 3 months in the middle of the outback in Queensland (if you’re from pretty much any country except the USA, you can extend your working holiday visa for another year if you spend 3 months working or volunteering in remote rural areas). I was excited to see a new bird species for my list (or at least to have noticed a new one): some kind of tern. This photo’s a bit blurry, but I like the way the tern (a juvenile) is arching its head and tail, it makes it look happy and excited about life. [Note: I really need to look up birds in my book, this is my second lazy posting where I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I keep forgetting. Hopefully I will remember to go back and fix these “some kind of something” sorts of comments with the proper species].

1.8km is actually a decent distance, but we weren’t going to break down and take the train (you could pay to be driven up and back) and the view at the end was a nice shot of the ocean looking to the west, with the shore distant behind us. Here’s Shaun posing.

And here’s me, with a sailboat coming out of my head. We did get a group shot, but we’re both making weird faces in it so I’ll post the individual ones instead.

I got this splendid tern photo with the sun on its front before we turned around and walked back.

I was worried about making it to Nannup in time for work without driving during the kangaroo-hour when we were in danger of totaling Shaun’s car (along with making life rough for a kangaroo). We cut it a bit close by the time we made it off the jetty, but Shaun’s experienced left-hand driving on the way back got us there in good time.

It was an insanely quiet night at the pub, since everyone in town was at the football club after watching the local team play some other team (Aussie Rules Football, of course). I had planned on checking out the game, and seeing if it was any easier to follow in person than on the “telly,” but Shaun’s arrival coincided with the start of it so I didn’t catch anything, oh well. At any rate none of the locals were in and all of the pipeline workers had gone back to Perth for the weekend, so I spent most of the evening serving Shaun ciders and hoping some more people would turn up. Fortunately some pool-players came in after dinner and kept us open all the way until midnight, which was good for me since I hadn’t been getting too many hours since we’d been closing early when it was so quiet.

Anyway the next day Shaun and I went on a mini-tour of the area directly southwest of Nannup. First we visited the Barrabup Pool, which was only 15km away from town but still far enough for me to never have been there with my limited walking capabilities. The water was a bit murkier than I expected, but it looked like it would be a nice place to go if the weather was nice and you could swim.

They had all these photos from when the Barrabup Mill was operating, back at the turn of the century, with pictures of men with huge saws and trees that they were logging before the main activity shifted to Nannup. We wandered around one of the trails for a bit and I saw some cool plants. One was a type of banksia.

The other was some sort of cool spiral and spiky umbrella leafed plant that looked vaguely familiar, but I’m not sure if it’s like one of the ones we studied in Queensland, or just that everything is sort of blending together now.

It was another glorious sunny day and we were planning on heading to Pemberton first, to see some nice forests containing karri trees, and maybe climb this big tree they had set up in town. We took the wrong road out of town, though, and ended up closer to Augusta instead, so we went to the coast first and left the trees for later. Andrew, one of my friends from Perth, had recommended visiting Hamelin Bay to see some semi-tame stingrays, so we navigated there first.

Though I searched and searched in the water (which was quite warm and really nice to wade through), I didn’t see any stingrays and the waves seemed too strong for them to be hanging around. Maybe you have to get there at the right time of day, or maybe there’s some sort of feeding show. Either way, the bay was still gorgeous and we enjoyed chilling on the beach for a while. Here's an awkward handheld photo.

Even though I had by now been to innumerable beaches in every Aussie state and at every ocean, it still was beautiful and I took too many pictures that all look like all my other Aussie beach pictures. This one of the dilapidated pier was nice, though.

We were running out of time to get all the way to the forest town of Pemberton, since Shaun had to make the 3-hour drive back to Perth in the evening, so I asked a random family if there were any karri forests nearby, since I was determined to see those trees (there’s a famous tree-top walk in the area too, that takes you through a different type of forest, but unfortunately that was too far south and I was not fated to make it there this time around). So instead of Pemberton, we took the “Caves Road” up to Margaret River, a famous surfing and winery area further up the coast. There are limestone caves in the region, but they all charge like $20 to visit and we didn’t have the time for that anyway (besides, I was feeling pretty good about the amazing caves I saw near Sydney…I know I never posted about that but it was really cool). But the point is the road wound through some stands of karri forest, which were amazing!!

We found a little side-lot where we could get out and measure up to the trees from ground-level. They’re really tall, as you can see, and amazingly straight (Shaun kept commenting on this, which makes sense since he’s a carpenter and would think about those things). I was inspired to pose as a tree in front of them, although I wasn’t nearly tall enough to pull it off.

Too many pictures of trees, I know, but I was excited and the sun made them perfect. Here’re the tops of them.

We were still running out of time, but when Shaun said he had never been to a winery, I said we would pull over if we saw one out of Margaret River (granted, I’d only been to a few myself, the first over in Tasmania, which I know I never posted about at all, even though I do have a few things written…wow I’ve been lazy!). We sampled the Brown [something], trying a few whites and a nice red, although my favourite was the muscat, which was last. It was very sweet and tasted like plums. Shaun insisted we pose in front of the vineyards, and I especially like how the dog joined in.

I drove us safely back to Nannup (further improving my left-hand skills) and found out that I needed to help cover the Chase-the-Ace game [I know I haven't written a post about the pub yet, but in a nutshell it was a 2-hour time block that encouraged everyone to buy drinks for a chance to win the pot, which was raised every week until it was won]. It was a completely crazy several hours, even with three of us working, since the stakes were at AU$3000 so all the locals were crowded inside and demanding constant drinks and tickets (fortunately I knew everyone’s preferences by this time, so I wasn’t totally overwhelmed). The only downside was that I had planned on taking the bus to Augusta the next day, which left at 7am, so I stayed up pretty late to pack and was a bit groggy in the morning. No time to post more, so I'll leave that as Part 1 and I will try to write/post more soon!