We knew the great weather couldn’t last forever and as we left Augusta to continue northwards rain hit with a vengeance. The little town of Cowaramup which had looked cute when we had passed through previously was still worth exploring but more than a little damp. The highlight (apart from the cows) was definitely Temper Temper where chocolate is made onsite and we can verify was delicious!

The caravan park just north of there was our destination and despite parts of it being almost submerged, our spot was relatively high and dry and proved to be a good base for the next two nights.

As we prepared to leave the next day the sky looked clearer and indeed the rain stopped after an hour or so on the road toward Collie.

Nearby Collie sits in a jarrah forest area and is home to WA’s only coalfields. The town once known as a ‘dirty mining town’ has transformed itself into a popular tourist destination mostly through local community participation, a large part of which is the mural trail.

The Collie Mural Trail incorporates over 50 murals throughout the town which depict the heritage of Collie and its people and create a link to the spectacular 8,000 square metre Wellington Dam mural painted by Guido van Helten and titled Reflections. We had fun traipsing about town and managed to visit all but a few of them.

We really enjoyed our time here, we had a camp fire (still perfecting the damper 😉) and had a chance to catch up on each others news from the last week or so before diverging again for the next few days.

I really wanted to see the “Mandurah Giants,” the work of renowned Danish sculptor Thomas Dambo. Thomas is the world’s leading recycle artist, he creates larger than life sculptures and places them all over the world and this is the first time they have visited Australia. Each sculpture has a clue which you need to collect and then when you have them all they reveal the location of the final one. They are all placed somewhat off the beaten track with varying length walks to their locations, in some instances several kilometres, but were absolutely worth the walk and very popular! We managed to visit these three….

After our short stay in Mandurah it was time to head north, through Perth and on to an overnighter in Yanchep National Park which I had visited some 40 + years ago before Yanchep basically became a suburb of Perth. The National Park was a lovely old fashioned type park, the buildings somewhat reminiscent of Belair National Park in SA we thought and we had a fantastic site in the campground surrounded by all types of birds and numerous local kangaroos.

Tomorrow we continue north, aiming to meet John and Steph again in Cervantes, home of the Western Rock Lobster and more importantly, the Pinnacles.

The drive up to the burbs was uneventful and we checked in to our rather ‘cosy’ spot in Coogee Beach mid afternoon after stopping for lunch in Bunbury en route.

The wharf area in Freo was just starting to wake up on this week day and we had to search for a coffee but ultimately found one at Cicerellos where we watched the local parasailing and jetboat rides set up for the day.

We wandered around the quirky little streets of Freo’s shopping precinct, I got a pedicure and we were just ordering lunch when we got a text message to say our vehicle was ready to collect! Not sure if this was good news or very bad we set off back to the industrial area where Jason told us that some wires had come loose from the motor and it was all now fully functional. I gave the guys a box of chocolates, so thankful that they had been able to fit us in, we paid the fairly modest bill and we were hooked up and on our way south again by about 3pm and looking forward to a fully stretched out sleep tonight 😂

We overnighted on an oval reserve in Capel and the next morning drove the short distance to Busselton to visit the iconic jetty again and check out the underwater observatory at the end of it.

Wow! Hadn’t Busselton changed since we were last here! Many more commercial businesses near the foreshore including a very swish looking brewery and a multi storey hotel under construction. It was bustling with tourists all wearing eye protection of course as this was THE day the total eclipse was occurring some 1500kms north of us in Exmouth.

Busselton experienced a partial eclipse at around 1130 when we were on the jetty but it was hardly noticeable and the acrobatics of a local dolphin were far more interesting. The short visit to the underwater observatory was reasonably good and by the time we completed the 3.6km round trip back to shore we felt we had earned our bakery lunch.

Back on the road again we continued south toward Augusta on the south coast where we were allocated a top spot in Turner’s Caravan Park, no sea view but no kids either 😉- the lower area was crowded with families cramming in the last weekend of the school holidays in sublime weather so we were all happy.

We spent our first evening strolling the shore, talking to local fisherman and enjoying more dolphin activity as they chased the SUPs under a beautiful sunset before relaxing at home with a G&T.

What a beautiful little town Augusta turned out to be, (I actually checked out the real estate,) we ended up extending our time here as the warm weather continued to hold and there was so much to see. Over the next couple of days we visited some great attractions including historic Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse, ‘turned on’ in 1896 and although now fully automated, is still using the original Fresnel lens. It is also the spot where two oceans officially meet, the Indian and the Southern.

One night, watching the news, we saw that an international surfing contest was taking place at Prevelly Beach and decided we should get involved. We could only drive as far as a dirt paddock about 5 kms away and then caught a shuttle bus to a headland heaving with archetypical surfies. It was warm, with no shade and lengthy queues for the few food trucks but a great atmosphere nonetheless and we found a vantage point to watch world class surfing for a few hours, not on our original radar but great fun and I even bought the T shirt 😉

Not surprisingly we also managed to fit in a few wineries in Margaret River, some great locales and some nice wines as well, our fave probably Glenarty Road. We visited during the ‘golden hour,’ sampling a lovely rosé, chardonnay and a fumé blanc and had a wander around the beautiful grounds.

As well as notable wine, Margaret River also has some pretty remarkable caves and we had saved an afternoon to visit one of them – Lake Cave – turned out to be a pretty decent workout after our afternoon ice cream and well worth the climb.

Nearby Hamelin Bay was also pretty but a little too rough to view the rays that the area is famous for, we had seen more in Augusta than here.

Augusta however had perhaps saved it’s best until our last afternoon, we stopped a little pull over because there seemed to be an unusual amount of action there and we were rewarded with the funniest sight. A full grown elephant seal was sunning himself in the seaweed much to the delight of the locals and tourists alike – National Parks staff had erected a “do not disturb the wildlife” type sign and he didn’t have a care in the world. Elephant seals are not commonly seen in this part of the world, nearest colonies are known to exist much closer to Tasmania and New Zealand (Macquarie Island for example) so he quickly gained celebrity status and was still in situ when we went back on our final morning. Males can weigh as much as 5,000 kg, swim as fast as 8km/hr but have a face only a mother could love 😂😂

We felt very privileged to have enjoyed sunny skies and the diverse scenery and wildlife that this part of the world offers but after five days it was time to resume our journey northwards to check out the Cape Naturaliste area and perhaps a few more wineries 😉

Albany was wet, very wet and in fact as we set up for our one night stay it actually hailed! Not that conducive to site seeing but there was one spot I had to re visit having last seen it 41 years ago – the iconic Dog Rock. We found that and had a quick look at the Port area but more storms were rolling in and we decided to call it a day.

To our dismay we had no luck getting anyone interested in looking at the Moho slideout so continued on toward our next destination, stopping en route for lunch in lovely little Denmark. A coffee shop in a book shop will get Russell’s vote everytime and the gallery next door got mine. I saw a beautiful canvas drone shot of a local coastal scene and did some research about the location, Elephant Rocks, and we decided to drop in there for a quick look.

Of course as soon as we pulled into the carpark torrential rain started falling but we waited awhile and eventually it abated so we scurried down the path toward the lookout. I couldn’t quite reproduce the beautiful greens that I had seen in the canvas, the weather didn’t help but we still thought it was a beautiful spot.

Back on the road it was a very picturesque route past icecreameries, wineries, breweries, cideries (who knew?) and many other quirky little stalls that we didn’t have the time or suitable weather to visit until eventually we rolled into Walpole and our quirky little caravan park on the shores of Nornalup Inlet.

The locals affectionately describe Walpole as ‘the belly button of the world‘ – “you’ve got the South Pole, you’ve got the North Pole and you’ve got Walpole” …. It proved to be a a little town with lots of options for us. Russell managed to get in a game of bowls whilst Steph and I visited the spectacular Valley of the Giants tree top walk which afforded a unique view of the mainly karri forest interspersed with the wider based tingle tree.

Someone we met in the Esperance caravan park had highly recommended the Walpole eco tour run by the extremely knowledgable and very entertaining “Gazza.” If ever you are in the region, don’t miss this! We spent a couple of hours touring the inlet learning about history, ecology, geology, biology, the indigenous population and other facts so diverse you wonder how they could be strung together in an a very enjoyable narrative which was topped off by Gazza’s mum’s cake for morning tea.

About 1.5 kms off this coastline is the “The Right,” one of the most challenging waves on the planet apparently which has infamously only been surfed by a select few very experienced surfers.

I had made several phone calls trying to get the Moho looked out without success, some offering to look at it in July (!) but had eventually found The Caravan Shed near Fremantle which had agreed to see us in a week so we had adjusted our itinerary to allow a (hopefully) quick visit to Bibra Lakes and so temporarily parted company with John and Steph the next day as we started northwards.

On the way was Pemberton, another little gem I had last visited forty one years ago but some things hadn’t changed at all, namely the gorgeous local pool.

With Easter coming up fast we belatedly began searching for a ‘home’ for this busy weekend and eventually locked in Bushlands Holiday Village in Esperance. Not the fanciest and with questionable Telstra reception and internet but with ‘large sites and friendly managers.’

This left us with two nights to kill before then and we checked in to the cute little caravan park in Salmon Gums, a tiny community between Norseman and Esperance. It’s main claim to fame, not surprisingly, is the abundance of beautiful salmon gums throughout the area – Eucalyptus salmonophloia – but for us it provided a quiet spot with power and water and a much needed washing machine for Steph and I to utilise.

The local pub did quite a nice parmy and was full of interesting memorabilia.

It was around this stage we began to suspect that we were having issues with our batteries, solar didn’t seem to be topping them up and we resolved to get them checked in Esperance. Much discussion ensued about the benefits of lithium if we needed to replace and the fact that unlike other Conquests, it appears that we don’t have a DC to DC charger, meaning that the ‘car’ battery does not top up the ‘house’ battery when driving as we had thought it did ….

I had already left messages with a couple of air conditioning guys as we had determined that the car air con was not working and to my great surprise received a call at 3pm on Thursday from a lovely fellow offering to come look in our caravan park at 0900 on Good Friday! Craig’s Autocare turned out to be our best discovery in Esperance ….over the Easter weekend he fixed the aircon, replaced our AGM batteries with a new lithium and installed a DC to DC charger!

Very happy we were, especially since we we were able to leave him to it whilst we visited beautiful Cape Le Grand National Park and the stunning local Esperance beaches that make up the coastal loop drive.

 

So what makes these beaches so white and the water so magically blue?

“Obviously, a pristine environment helps. Another factor is the distance from rivers, which deliver coloured organic and clay contaminants to the coast.

The geology of the area and the source of the sand are also critical, with quartz seemingly a major requirement for fine sands. Most white sandy beaches are derived from granitic, or less commonly sandstone, geologies that weather to produce fine, frosted quartz sand grains.”

Lucky Bay has consistently been named whitest beach in Australia and it was easy to see why when we visited even though it was a rainy day.

 

Thirty minutes after this picture was taken we were at nearby Thistle Cove in bright sunshine (header picture.)

At the risk of sounding repetitive, the coast along this part of Western Australia is consistently stunning. Each little cove is different than the last and we could easily have spent a week in this region and still not seen enough. On a side note, the ‘Pink’ Lake that I visited 40 years ago is now no longer pink, sign boards explained why but many tourists feel a bit miffed 😉

Easter Monday with our new battery and charger doing their thing, we packed up ready to leave and shock, horror, the slideout wouldn’t come in!!! Many of you would know that we have some issues recently with our slide out and these had been resolved ….. until now. A bit of clever manoeuvring and some brute force enable us to get it retracted and we crossed our fingers that someone in Albany in a few nights time would be able to address the problem, we are not game to take it out so will be sleeping in foetal position until then 😒

Leaving Esperance we planned to stay at the very popular 48 hour RV stay in Hopetoun, a small coastal community south of Ravensthorpe. No bookings are taken and there are only ten sites so we hoped the long drive would be fruitful and it was. By lunchtime we were checking out our local beach (100m away) and researching the tides.

Mid afternoon saw us getting our lines (and feet) wet and pulling in (some) decent sized tommies and sand whiting, culminating in enough for the four of us for dinner.

 

Hopetoun also provides the eastern access to the Fitzgerald River National Park, known for its biodiversity and more stunning scenery.

We tried our luck fishing again in the afternoon but the weather was deteriorating and we gave up with half a dinner catch which was very kindly supplemented by the people fishing up the beach from us so we had fish for dinner again 👌

With our 48 hours expired (and regularly policed by the ranger) we moved on to beautiful Bremer Bay. You may have seen Bremer Bay in the media of late, it is becoming quite well known for the relatively recently discovered Bremer Canyon which lies about 50kms off shore and is home to an amazing array of oceanic predators, amongst them the Orca or ‘killer whale.’ We had been very tempted by the charter which visits this area especially as a pod of Orcas hunting a blue whale had been seen only last week but had decided that it was either Orcas or Whale sharks in Ningaloo not both 😒

Bremer Bay and surrounds had lots of other sights to see though and despite an oncoming very cold front we managed to see quite a bit and had a lovely stay in the Bremer Bay Beaches Tourist Park (although thought for next time the other CP is in a better fishing position 😉)

Hello friends! Red and Rusty are on the road again, this time chasing the setting sun toward Western Australia with our fellow motorhoming friends, John and Steph.

So far en route we have stayed at some familiar spots including Port Augusta, the great free camp at Wudinna, Ceduna and our first visit to the isolated Fowlers Bay.

A couple of nights in the Fowlers Bay CP enabled us to do a bit of exploring in the Jimny, the windmills at Penong, breathtaking coastline, picturesque Port Sinclair where the local kids were having swimming lessons and the (usually very) pink Lake Macdonnell. We also had enough time to do some moderately successful fishing (enough tommies for dinner) off of the jetty.

The Australian Hydrographic Society defines the bight ( not BITE) as stretching from Cape Pasley, Western Australia to Cape Carnot, South Australia, a distance of 1,160 kilometres and it is stunning.

To be able to camp literally on its edge is both exhilarating and somewhat terrifying. Early morning calm conditions had me brave enough to launch the drone to capture some classic off shore shots and once on the road we visited a couple of lookouts that also afforded great views.

The ‘13km peg‘ was an interesting overnight stay, 13 kms from the SA/WA border and affording vistas of a much gentler slope down to the shoreline with distance glimpses of the sandhills at Eucla.

Despite the numerous free camping spots along our route the sheer number of recreational vehicles meant we were rarely completely alone. Seeing a single car with no tow vehicle on the Eyre Highway became the anomaly not the norm. It seems the whole nation owns a camper trailer, caravan or motorhome now and why wouldn’t they!

We reached Eucla early enough to disconnect the cars and head toward the coast to check out the old Telegraph Station ruins and the picturesque jetty remains.

With a favourable tailwind and mild temperatures we completed our leisurely journey across the Nullarbor yesterday and are now restocking at Norseman, named after the horse that discovered gold near here 😉

Tomorrow we turn south toward Esperance and the easter hordes 🙂