Busselton and Margaret River

It’s been a little while since I’ve written an update, mainly because I decided to take a week off, but also because I see Jim filled in the gaps with his story about our trip out to the wheatbelt region.

I’ll pick it up again where we returned to the coast, to Busselton. Busselton is quite a big place and is very long with the main road running through it parallel to the coast. We were staying at the southern end of it in a proper caravan park – our first “real” shower for about three weeks or so. (Just to clarify – we do shower, it’s just that when we’re not in a caravan park the shower consists of a bucket of warm water and our 12v shower head).

As usual we hadn’t made any real plans for Busselton except we both visited the doctor (just routine stuff) and we were keen to spend a bit of time on the beach after a few weeks inland. The beach here is quite spectacular – long stretches of white sand with barely any people. The kids did a bit of swimming, but it was too cold for us. We also took a spin up to Bunbury but it was quite windy that day so after a quick look around we bailed out again.

Hamish had turned nine the week before and we’d had some rather generous cash gifts from the family to spend on him and us. So we shipped the dog off to the kennels for a night and booked ourselves in for dinner and a movie (at the same time – kids thought that was pretty cool!). I always like going to the movies but it’s not like the old days really. We went to see The Marvels – 6pm, Friday night, the opening night of the movie and we were in this huge cinema with about six other people. Not sure how long cinemas can keep operating with that sort of patronage.

But we had a great time, eating our dinner in our seats which reclined by button! Very fancy!

While we were dog-free we decided to go out on the Busselton Jetty, which at 1.8km is the longest around (in Australia? WA? I can’t remember the exact stat). You can take a painfully slow train out there but we decided to walk so we could stop and look at things along the way. There’s also an aquarium at the end which we were going to do, but it turns out that you only get 15 mins in there and get charged a motser so we decided not to bother with that. We also went out to the nearby national park and did a walk or two, then went back to pick up the dog, who’d had a great time at dog-fest.

We were quite sad to leave Busselton, but we were going to Margaret River so the sadness didn’t last long. Here we had a surprise for the kids. We got all set up (in another caravan park even closer to the town than the Busselton one). While the kids were distracted I was secretly coordinating with the grandparents to smuggle them in, get them checked into their cabin, then have them sitting at our tent when the kids turned up. They were suitably surprised that Granny and Grandpa were not in fact sitting at home in NZ, and then very pleased to find out that they’d booked a two-bedroom cabin with a spare bedroom suitable for a couple of kids who might be after a solid roof.

So the kids moved in there and we spent the week in the tent (the dog really does have a lot to answer for).

The Margaret River region is as nice as I remember it from years ago. We spent some time at the national park and the two lighthouses on a day where we’d offloaded the dog. The southern one (Leeuwin) is also in the south-western most corner of Australia, where the Indian and Southern oceans meet. Not surprisingly it was also very windy and a bit cold. There are four different limestone caves in the national park too so we picked the one that sounded the most impressive (Mammoth Cave) and headed there. They had a self-guided audio tour which was quite interesting and the cave really was enormous.

I think the dog had a pretty good time with the dog-sitter too. He even went out for lunch to the Venison farm where he had a venison bone! I’m sure he enjoyed it, but in reality he’s not great on any food that isn’t just his regular, super-expensive Supercoat so we had to deal with the aftermath of that lunch for a day or so.

I took the week off as leave (yet somehow ended up working almost two days of it), so we did have a bit of time to explore some nice cafes, wineries and breweries. It was quite fun doing a few cellar door tastings with mum, and then on their final day with us we had the most delicious lunch at Margaret River Brewhouse (mussels and cerviche snapper) and a very impressive paddle of beer. Jim and I also managed to take advantage of the kid/dog sitting to sneak out to the local pub for dinner. It was quite a novelty to sit inside in the warm to eat (normally with the dog we’re relegated to the outside).

The week seemed to go by pretty quickly and before we knew it we were packing up, saying goodbye and moving on. Not very far though – just to a place called Alexandra Bridge which is about 20 minutes north of Augusta. This was a bush camp, right on the Blackwood River which is a really nice and quite large river that runs right down to Augusta. The camp ground was very popular and we were lucky to get a spot (you can’t book in advance). Normally we don’t arrive at campgrounds at 10:30am but it’s a good thing we did as we would have missed out otherwise.

The first day there wasn’t great – some particularly obnoxious people decided that it was ok to run their generator for nine hours straight, pointed into our site, while they were not there to suffer through the noise and fumes themselves. Thankfully they were leaving the next day so we spent as much time as we could away from the tent to just ride it out. Anyway, they moved on and things improved after that.

We actually didn’t spend a lot of time at the site there. That was in part because we were camped in a heavily wooded area so for once Starlink (our internet) was struggling. (It needs clear line of sight to the southern sky). We also had poor phone coverage, and since I was back at work and had a backlog of stuff to do after a week off we had to go out to get things done. I spent a morning back at Margaret River in the library which was reasonably productive, and then another few hours in a park at Augusta. The rest of the time we just muddled through.

It did force me to take another day off though, which we spent in the nearby town of Pemberton. Annoyingly, we’d been planning to go to Pemberton to do the tree climb, but they closed it for a year just two days before we got there. Had we known, we could have gone there earlier, but by the sounds of it, it was a government decision that was a surprise to everyone. So instead we went on the Pemberton Tram which goes out into the forest to The Cascades waterfalls and back again. More importantly, it was dog-friendly so we could all go together. We did that in the morning, and then took turns in the afternoon going out to the national park to do a walk out to the “walk-through tree”, which is a huge Karri tree that you can walk through the trunk of. We finished the day at the Pemberton Hotel before driving the hour or so home again.

We also spent another day down in Augusta giving the fishing a go. We started near the mouth of the river where we got millions of bites from little whiting but kept getting snagged. So we then moved further up the river to the jetty where we also got a lot of bites and caught plenty of little fish but no keepers. It was quite fun getting the constant bites but sadly no fish for dinner. We did see dolphins and stingrays though, and had a very persistent pelican who wanted us to give him the fish rather than throw it back (he got one but the rest went back in).

We spent five nights at Alexandra Bridge then packed up to move on. We’ve done very short hops since leaving Perth around five weeks ago. This time we went a little further (around 3.5 hours) to Denmark, a town on the south coast. We’re here for a week so I’m sure we’ll get a good look around.