We spent a week at Manjimup in the southern forests area of WA. We were here last year, and we left just before their annual cherry festival, so we decided we would come back this year for the festival weekend. It started on the Friday afternoon, with a golf tournament. John didn't have a very good day, but Wendy managed to hold it together to win second prize - a bag of cherries and a bottle of local wine.Saturday was the main festival extravaganza, with the highlight being the cherry pip spitting competition. The winner managed to spit a cherry pip over 10 metres, and will be off to NZ next year to represent us in the Australasian titles. Who knew cherry pip spitting was such a serious sport? There were many other festival attractions on Saturday - cooking demonstrations, fashion parade, wood chop competition, timber furniture exhibition, street theatre and heaps of standard festival stalls.
On Sunday we attended the festival long lunch, held in a local cherry orchard. The conditions were perfect, sunny 29 degrees, and the lunch was fantastic. It started around 11:00 with champagne (and cherries) and canapes, and finished not much before 6:00 with a plate of local cheeses. In between there was appetiser, entree, huge main and dessert, each course accompanied with local wine. The attendance was restricted to 200 people, and we had tickets 183 and 184, so we almost missed out!
For the rest of the week, we played golf a couple more times at Manjimup plus had a game at Bridgetown, 30 km north of Manjimup. We also spent a day exploring Bridgetown, and another day in Nannup, 50km towards Perth. The local Nannup legend says that they still have Tasmanian Tigers, although this is quite unlikely. These towns are all green and leafy, even in this year's drought, and provide a total contrast to the parched wheat belt further north.
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