Wanderung 33

Loop drive around Albany

Given our schedule, we could only spare 1 full day to see the Albany area, which really wasn't enough. After some discussion, we decided to first return to the Treetop Walk that was northwest of Denmark, as that type of forest is found nowhere else in the world and a walk through the canopy of it promised to be unique.

In reality, the Treetop Walk is in a national park that is almost 30 kilometers west of Denmark, so the drive back there took well over an hour. We arrived just in time, however, to catch a 10 o`clock guided tour of the Valley Of The Giants walkway that adjoins the Treetop Walk, so we did that first.

Our guide explained that there were really 2 gigantic trees in this forest area, the Karri Tree with the tall, slender, white trunk, and the Red Tingle tree, which looked for all the world like a 2/3 scale Sequoia tree! She further explained that the Karri Tree gets that smooth white exterior because it sheds its outer layer of bark at the end of each winter season, which is an evolutionary adaptation I had not heard of. That explained how the bark-molting process would ultimately completely erase the holes left by losing the lowest branches as the tree was growing upward, which I had wondered about.

The Red Tingle Tree was even curiouser, because it had co-evolved with insects and fungi that would eat out the rotting hardwood at the center of the tree as it expanded by growing outward the ring of sapwood and outer bark at its circumference. The advantage of that really curious symbiotic relationship was that the tree became a hollow tube of living wood that was far lighter and stronger than a normal tree with the central heartwood would have been.

Even stranger, our guide discussed the presence of water sacs in the interior of the tree that could be released to keep any fires INSIDE the trunk under control so that the tree could survive them. As strange as all this sounds, we did indeed see several clear cut examples of hollow, living, Red Tingle Trees that had completely hollow and burned out interiors. Good heavens. At the end I asked about any relationship to the Sequoia trees of California and our guide informed me that there was no relationship as the Red Tingle was a Eucalyptus tree and the Sequoia was an ancient form of evergreen.

Then it was time for our walk in the treetop canopy! We bought tickets and entered a gate that could be used to control how many folks were on the walkway, and once we were walking on it we could easily understand why! I have been on a lot of suspended pedestrian bridges, and that suspended walkway was by far and away the most trembly, shaky, insecure-feeling walkway I have ever set foot on. We each had to walk 3 meters (10 feet) apart to spread our weight over the structure, and even on the central supporting pylons a maximum of 10 people at a time were allowed.

However, it really did, as advertised, allow us to walk through the top level of the forest of Karri and Red Tingle trees. We followed the shaky ramps up almost to the tops of the shorter trees at 40 meters or about 130 feet above ground level. Some of the tallest Red Tingle trees were still spreading out another 10-20 meters above us, but we were high enough to get up close and personal to many of the treetops. And what a magnificent view it was!

The tops of both Karri and Red Tingle trees are fairly sparse compared to the compact, leafy structures of oaks or maples back in the US, so even though we were right at the level of the tops of most of the trees, we could see quite a fair distance into the forest at our height. I suppose a koala bear gets that kind of view quite commonly when they take their daytime nap, but for us it was a rare and exciting experience.

But once back on the ground, we realized 12 Noon was fast approaching and we were both hungry. The car needed petrol (American: gasoline) as well, so we drove back to Denmark, and stopped both to refuel the car and to have lunch. As gasoline is about $5 US per gallon, filling the car was a bit more expensive than having lunch at the cafe attached to the local bakery. In general, we had good luck eating at cafes attached to bakeries in West Australia, and they reminded us of the Imbiss cafes in Germany, which have a simple, limited menu but serve very solid food at reasonable prices.

We drove back to Albany by a more rural, southerly road, called the "Lower Denmark Road", that gave us a nice view of a mostly pastoral countryside. But along the way I ran over a completely innocent lizard of some type, because my brain was so primed to see kangaroos, turtles, wombats, wallabies, bandicoots, and other exotic critters that I just hesitated 1/2 second to decide yes, that really was something like a Gila Lizard stumbling across the road in front of me. Had I been sharper, I would have avoided it as I had avoided several large branches appearing on the road during the preceding days of driving, but instead I thumped over it and almost certainly killed it. Sigh. In any event, once in the Albany area, we turned out onto a peninsula to see a couple local attractions.

The first stop was the Torndirrup National Park ($13 AUD admission), where we turned off to see The Gap and the Natural Bridge. Fortunately they were both just a short walk from the parking lot up on a rugged bluff overlooking the Southern Ocean. The Gap was just that, a narrow cut in the Rocky cliff into which the ocean swells crashed incessantly.

Even on the relatively calm day we had there, the swells really frothed inland into the narrow gap. We watched the fascinating wave action from a specially-constructed stainless steel platform that projected out over The Gap a bit so that we could look directly down into it. The platform swayed a bit, but after our morning experience on the suspended Treetop Walk, that seemed like nothing and the view down was superb.

The Natural Bridge was far more massive and blocky than the rather graceful ones that we have seen at The Arches National Park in Utah in the USA. But this natural bridge did actually have real water lapping under it, at least when the large wave rushed inland. Although it looked quite sturdy, we were not allowed to walk on it, unfortunately.

Since we'd already paid our park admission fee for the day, we decided to see the next seaside attraction in the park, the Blow Holes. Those turned out to be a rather long walk down the cliff at the next parking lot. We persevered and reached the correct place, only to find that the mild swells on the day we were there were just sufficient to cause a bit of light huffing and chuffing through the blow holes, but no actually spumes of spray. Although the view of the rugged cliffs to the East and the coastline to the West were really great, I was a bit disappointed in not seeing the blow holes in full form, so to speak.

Our final stop of the day was across the peninsula at Discovery Bay, an old whaling station now turned into a museum and tourist attraction. By that time it was well after 4 o`clock and the museum shut down already at 5, so in the end we decided that we were just too tired already to make the short museum visit worth while. Instead, we turned on the GPS and let it guide us back to our hotel where we collapsed for the night.