Wanderung 33

Drive from Margaret River to Albany

It's hard to predict how long a drive will take in a foreign country, so I was apprehensive about the 350+ kilometer stretch from Margaret River to Albany on the southern coast of West Australia. It did in fact turn into an `all-day` type of drive of over 6 hours, which would have been a snap if we had switched drivers like we do in Europe and the US, but a longish one for me driving alone. However, to compensate for that was the fact that this was a very FUN drive. You really never know what to expect on a road trip, and Australia is full of surprises. One little town we stopped at to refuel was called "Witchcliffe", and the folks there had taken that "witch" theme and used it in every possible way to adorn the town's businesses!

The weather was perfect except when we wanted to try out the Treetop Walkway in the Valley of The Giants. At that point we had the first overcast skies and light rain of our entire time in West Australia! We drove through mostly forests and occasionally past ranch lands with sheep, beef and dairy cattle for the first 3 hours.

Stopping at Pemberton for lunch, we inquired at the tourist Information Center about a small logging railroad through the Kiri Forest, but I was immediately caught by a small, 2-room pioneer museum located in the back of the building. It documented the pioneer lumberjacks and their families who had come to cut down the Kiri forests, but then stayed on after the forests were gone to settle down. The photographs, written descriptions, and old artifacts were roughly grouped, but crowded chock-a-block in the two rooms. And clearly those pioneer folks worked like the very dickens to make a living in the forest.

It was vaguely disturbing to see things that I used in my youth, like an old Remington manual typewriter, now sitting in a museum--it just rubs my nose in how old I am, I guess. But I was not alone! Monika found some old, manual adding machines that were the same as she used during her apprenticeship in the Deutsche Ring insurance company. Other artifacts, however, like the old wall phones, were clearly from a much older era than our era, around 1900, I'd say.

It was all absolutely fascinating and I could have happily spent hours reading and examining everything in detail, but Monika was getting restless so we continued on our way. We decided to not do the climb up a tree trunk to the old fire-spotting station as the close-up pictures showed folks climbing on a staircase made up simply of iron bars stuck into the tree trunk, and we weren't sure our ankles were up to that kind of stress.

We would also have taken a ride on that old logging railroad through the forest, which I THINK still uses a steam locomotive, but the morning train had alread left at 10 o`clock and the afternoon afternoon train did not leave until 2 o`clock, which was just too late for us. That ride was recommended by a guy who'd done it a few years back, and I regret not timing our visit to Pemberton better to take it in. So if you are driving in the area, make sure to arrive in Pemberton a bit before 10 a.m. or a bit before 2 p.m. to take a ride on thay train (Jerry, this means you!). We did, however, see one of the old steam trains that had been retired into a park across from the museum in Pemberton, which complemented a weird kind of push-cart designed to run on the rails that we had seen in the museum.

The forest around us varied continuously as we drove eastward, sometimes the stately, wide-spaced Kiri trees, sometimes eucalyptus trees, sometimes trees like the silver-topped blooming ones that I had no idea of what they were, and sometimes a kind of green wall of vegetation where the layers were first tall trees, then a set of lower (pine?) trees, and then even lower some kind of green bush growing right alongside the road.

The road itself was also fun in that it was a curving 2-lane road with lots of dips and doodles in it. Most of the time, the road was similar to a secondary rural highway in the US, in that the lanes were 8 feet wide rather than 10 feet wide, we had only a center stripe painted on the road but no side stripes, and we had VERY soft shoulders that would tend to pull you off the road if your wheels went over the ragged edge of the pavement. So I had to concentrate most of the time rather than gaze in wonder at the forest, but the driving was fun (assuming you are used to narrow 2-lane roads!).

As we reached the southern coastal area at Walpole, the forests gave way to the pastureland and sparse coastal development that continued as we headed east along the coast to Denmark and then to Albany. Tired of driving, after signing in at our hotel we stretched our legs by taking a short walk around the tip of Emu Point, on which our hotel was located. That was quite pleasant as the air was coming off the Southern Ocean and felt quite cool, so we could walk briskly. Air temps here depend hugely on the direction of the wind: A breeze coming off the ocean to the South is always quite cool, whereas a breeze from the North or inland is usually rather hot. We experienced that phenomenon becuase during the drive through the interior the air temp was 32-33 Celsius, but once we reached Walpole on the coast the temps abruptly plummeted to 22-24 degrees Celsius and stayed there for the rest of the drive along the coast to Albany.

At the end of the peninsula, We stopped at a beach to take a picture of Oyster Harbour to the North, and then walked out to the tip of the point to take pictures of Middleton Bay to the South. We followed a shoreline bicycle trail back to our hotel and found a very nice carved wooden sculpture of a mermaid along the way. It was a nice end to the day.