On the Road, Version Australia: Cape Leeuwin and the Tall Forest

Hello from Walpole, Western Australia! I can't believe it, but we're coming to the end of our Western Australia road trip; we're returning our van in just two days. Fortunately we've ended our road trip with some of the best days we've had so far; the southwest of this state is truly beautiful. We could imagine getting stuck here for a while.

However, it wouldn't be Australia without some perplexing tourist attractions. If you've been reading the last couple posts, you know that Justin and I were both strangely excited to go to Cape Leeuwin, where the Southern and Indian oceans meet. Some ladies on the train from Sydney had told us that it was "really obvious" where the ocean currents crossed, and Lonely Planet had described the lighthouse marking the spot in characteristically grandiose language ("you feel like you're being blown off the edge of the earth!"), so we felt we had to go there.

We approached the lighthouse and were a little surprised to be charged $10 for entry. Skeptical, we still sprung for it; after all, we'd driven all this way. The lady at the front desk told us to stay off the rocks because there were crocodiles. No, there aren't. But we remained hopeful.

We approached the lighthouse. Justin procured it for me.

And then we wandered past the nonexistent crocodiles to the place where the oceans supposedly meet. It was helpfully designated with this sign.

But, as Justin's face indicates, we could not figure out for the life of us where the oceans met in the actual water. As we sat fecklessly scanning the horizon, looking at some rocks, an Australian couple wandered over beside us and were making the same curious, hopeful expressions at the water.

"Can you figure it out?" I asked.

"Um, hm. No," replied the Aussie bloke, gently and with a polite grin.

"Maybe it's those rocks," I said, pointing at a rock with waves crashing on it from what appeared to be opposite directions.

"Oh yeah!" the Aussies exclaimed.

We thought a minute.

"Well, maybe that's just a cross-current, actually," said the bloke.

We all sat looking at the rock some more, then decided to take victory shots in front of it just in case that was it, and went on our merry ways with appropriate goodbyes.

We wandered over to another lookout area. This one explained that Cape Leeuwin was the most south-westerly point in Australia. This is a very clever designation. It is neither the most southern, nor the most westerly point in the continent; it's just the one that's . . . most in the middle of those places.

They had telescopes set up at this display, too. Eagerly, I ducked down to see what they pointed at.

Yep. Nothing.

So we went back out to our Improbable Chariot. On the way, we passed a pirate cow.

No, I have no idea why that is there, either.

Australia is kind of like this sometimes. There are, as I mentioned, a zillion signs indicating that a tourist attraction lies just around the corner, even when the tourist attraction is a rock with a plaque on it commemorating something that no one remembers. Our guidebook, the Lonely Planet, corroborates this with complimentary language about every single place they write about. The boringest town is "an eerie memento of how life used to be during the Gold Rushes." A town that closes entirely at 8 p.m. is "sleepy and quaint, with excellent beaches." And in addition to the random inexplicable pirate cows, there are signs everywhere indicating that we should turn left to see "Another Living Window." Another living window?? Another living window? Why are you calling both a cave and a discovery center a window? We're getting used to being perplexed.

All of this faded as we drove into Tall Tree Country. We took a little detour up from Cape Leeuwin through Augusta to Nannup and across Graphite Road on our way to Pemberton, and just kept making exclamations as the trees just kept getting bigger.

We entered the karri forests with happy wondrous uplifted faces. Karri, or Eucalyptus diversicolor, is the third tallest tree in the world (California coastal redwoods, I note with pride, are the tallest). They are enormous, thin eucalypts with silver bark and startlingly straight trunks, most rising to nearly 60 meters tall. They are punctuated by jarrah and marri in the area around Pemberton, which are a bit smaller but also beautiful. The effect, as we drove into Pemberton, was lovely.

Eucalyptus is a very sheddy tree, as we Californians well know. This caused them do have to do a lot of fire management. Like everything else in Australia, fire management is a little, well, in-your-face; they just do gigantic brush burns right off the highway. We saw trees smouldering brightly at dusk on one of our drives, and Pemberton looked like this as we rolled in:

FIRE!

The following day we took the Karri Forest Explorer drive, meandering 86 km through three national parks on alternating dirt and bitumen, to see the area in depth. What resulted was one of our favorite days of this whole trip.

We took a LOT of pictures of trees. The photo uploader here is being slow and strange, and I can only see thumbnails, making it hard to separate the good tree photos from the boring tree photos, so I'll save the majority of them for later slideshows. But suffice to say here: these trees are BIG and COOL.

We also found ourselves hiking on sections of the Bibbulmun Track.

I'd kill to do this through-hike at some point in my life. It extends 950 km from near Perth to Albany, passing through forests and towns throughout the southwest, and at a leisurely pace it would thus take about eight weeks to do. It's named after an Aboriginal language group and commemorates the tribes' tradition of traveling long distances for ceremonies, and the sections we completed in our short tours around the area were stunningly beautiful and really well-maintained.

We also passed by several of the "climbing trees" -- old fire lookouts that have pegs in a spiral staircase around the trunk to reach the top. We opted to pop all 68 meters to the top of the Bicentennial Tree.

Can you see the platform midway up? Look closely. I'm on the pegs.

This was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life.

Those are just metal pegs stuck into the tree in ladder-like fashion. NOTHING BENEATH YOU. No net. The netting wires go over the sides and the top, but not below. I suppose they prevent a pop off the sides and may catch branches falling from up top, but it sure feels like you could just miss a peg and go shooting through that wide ladder. Justin and I were shaking like leaves and trying not to freeze or have heart attacks on our way up. But at 68 meters, we reached a point above all the treetops, and the view was utterly rewarding.

We're going to be on another (safer) view of those treetops today, when we do the Tree Top Walk in the Valley of the Giants near Walpole. We'll spend today and half tomorrow exploring the giant tingle forests near here, then be back in Perth returning our van on Monday.

Miss you all!

Meredith