Christmas in Albany

We're settled in at Albany, on the WA south coast. We intend to stay here until the beginning of March, so we've joined up at the local golf club, who conveniently offer 3 month memberships. We're now playing 3 times a week each - men's day Wednesday, ladies on Thursday, and both of us play on Saturday and Sunday. It's really nice to be part of a club again, and the course is a good test, especially when the wind howls off the bay.

Unfortunately the weather hasn't been very pleasant so far here. Even though temperatures in Perth, 400km north-west, have been hitting 40 degrees, here on the south coast we've been lucky to see half that, with cloudy skies, a cold wind and quite a few showers. Apart from our golf days, the weather has kept us hanging around the van most of the time.

Despite the weather, we had a very pleasant Christmas Day. John rustled up a scrumptious roast lunch with ham, turkey and duck (leftovers will provide sandwiches for a week) followed by fresh raspberries. He also produced a very fancy bottle of chilled champagne for us to toast Christmas and Wendy's birthday.

We wish everyone the compliments of the season, and hope that your Christmas was a joyful one.

Manjimup Cherry Harmony Festival

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.

Kojonup - Boyup Brook

From Narrogin we planned to spend a few days at a town called Katanning. On the way we stopped at Wagin to have a look at the local 'big thing' - the Giant Ram. They left you in no doubt that it was a ram and not a ewe!

We hadn't booked at the caravan park in Narrogin and when we got there we were quite surprised to find that the park was full of workers, which meant they had no room for travellers like us, so we continued on another 40km or so to Kojonup. Both towns are firmly in sheep territory. Kojonup has a very interesting historical display at their visitor centre, we spent several hours exploring both the European and aboriginal stories given. There were a few shocks, such as the praise some footballers gave for their coach in 1972 when he forced the local publican to allow the aboriginal players into the front bar with the rest of the team at the end of year celebration, instead of making them stay out in the back yard. In 1972! It certainly came as an unwelcome surprise to us to realise how close to the surface overt racism has been in Australia so recently.

On another day we headed back to Katanning to investigate what local delights we had been denied. It turned out that there weren't very many, but we ended up spending nearly an hour at the local saleyards. This is the largest sheep saleyard in WA, trading more than a million sheep every year. We were there the day before sale day when they were unloading the sheep and it was frantic with sheep, dogs and sweating workers sorting and penning the animals. Apart from barking dogs, the sheep control implement of choice appeared to be a supermarket plastic bag tied to a stick, the sheep bolted from this when shaken at them. Or maybe they were just frightened of their shadows, they certainly don't appear to be the brightest of creatures!

Washing day at Kojonup provided a surprise. While John was doing the ironing afterwards he was horrified to find a bee crawl out of the shirt he had been wearing when he had been attacked while we were out walking in Narrogin. It had not only stayed hidden somewhere inside his shirt all that evening, but had somehow survived 3 days in the dirty clothes bag, then a washing machine cycle and all day flapping on the clothes line. It presumably didn't survive being crushed in a paper towel, sealed into a plastic bag and deposited very quickly into the rubbish bin!

From Kojonup we moved a further 90km to Boyup Brook, another sleepy sheep town. While Boyup Brook itself didn't offer a great deal for the adventurous tourist, we took a day trip to the mining town of Greenbushes and did a 10km walk through forest and past evidence of the area's previous mine history - mull heaps, mine shafts, tunnels and lakes formed in old mine workings. The current, still working mine has very little to see, as most of the activity now occurs underground.

Narrogin

Narrogin is a town of some 4,500 souls in Western Australia's southern wheatbelt. In common with the rest of southern WA it has endured the driest year on record (in stark contrast to the floods happening in eastern Australia) so the countryside around is brown, dry and dusty. Like much of the rest of wheat country throughout Australia, there are numerous granite outcrops in the area, we spent a leisurely half day driving around nearby townships and climbing various rock outcrops.

Opposite the caravan park in Narrogin itself there is a bush reserve called Foxes Lair with several walking trails. Our exploration of this yesterday was abruptly curtailed when John went off trail slightly for a comfort stop and disturbed a swarm of bees, they gave him half a dozen nasty stings before he was able to outrun them. Several of the stings are still red and swollen today, if things don't improve in the next day or two he may have to seek professional medical assistance. Before our walk was interrupted we came across the tree shown in the photo at right - it has doggedly overcome its misfortune at germinating underneath a rock!

The highlight of our visit here has undoubtedly been the nature reserve called Dryandra Woodland, about 30km north of Narrogin. We spent a full day at the woodland, doing multiple walks through the dry scrub, including an interesting walk around the traces of a long gone railway line. We also did over 50km of drive trails, scattered not just with numerous information panels but also radio information stops - places with hidden FM transmitters where you not only get to hear some of the history but also sounds of the bush such as bird and animal noises. A couple of evenings ago we returned to Dryandra to do a night tour at Barna Mia, the animal sanctuary hidden in the heart of the reserve. Here they are breeding small marsupials such as bilbies (of Easter chocolate fame), boodies (burrowing bettongs) and rufous hare-wallabies to enable their release back into the wild in areas where populations have been killed by feral foxes and cats. After watching a video on the history of the sanctuary and animals within, the guide took us out by torchlight to view these nocturnal animals in their natural habitat. He cheats somewhat as he puts out food for them, but it was still fabulous to see these shy (and some not so shy) wild animals scurrying around, squabbling and darting almost under our feet. We were strictly warned not to try and touch them no matter how close they come, as a bite could leave you sick for months, but it is hard to resist trying to stroke the little cuties when they are so close. With only 4 of us on the tour it was a fabulous nature experience, the only downside being that we were unable to take any photographs as the flash could harm their eyes.

Of course, as always we did the history walk around town, plus here they have a 'centenary pathway', which was laid out to celebrate Narrogin's centenary in 1991. There are 100 stone tiles, each depicting one or more events in the town's history. The one that amazed us was the one representing 1951, when apparently Narrogin hosted the Australian Grand Prix!

Bunbury

Our trip north from Busselton to Bunbury was less than 70 km, so we had a very leisurely start to our travel day. John's shoulder has recovered enough for him to get back on the golf course, so we have had several games on several courses - Sanctuary, Bunbury (we played in a 2-ball ambrose in the Sunday comp), Collie and Binningup. The last is a sensational 9-hole course, apparently it was built during the heady days of WA Inc and intended as a resort course, but things went pear shaped after the first nine holes were built so it was never completed. There is nothing there but the course, an honesty box for green fees and a portable toilet - no club house, ball washers or even a tap. However, the course is magnificent, with superb couch fairways, large, true greens and a long challenging layout. It included the longest ladies' par 5 Wendy has ever played - at 485 metres into the wind with an uphill start it was a mighty tough proposition. If someone ever builds another 9 holes there it will be one of Australia's premier courses.

Other than play golf we haven't done a great deal here. The caravan park is on the shore of an inlet and we walked the 5km circuit pathway. The photo above shows the park from the opposite shore - if you look very, very hard you can actually see the back of our van second left from the camper van. Bunbury is the largest town we will be in for a while so we also did some shopping here for clothes, shoes and some hardware items for the van.