The Great South-West

This may turn out to be quite a half-hearted attempt at a documenting my trip as i’m writing it all on my phone but here goes anyway..

My first week in oz saw my uncle and i travelling along the south coast through Walpole and albany. After 6 hours spent on a train and then a bus, we were finally in the ‘town’ of Walpole. Clearly the idea of scale down here is somewhat different to what we have a scotland as sleepy little Walpole is really more of a well facilitated village than the rural hub than its classification implies.

Thanks to our host, dave, we saw a number of the best bits of the area including the tree-top walk, giant tingle trees, climbing mount franklin, the circular pools on the franklin river, denmark and mandalay beach which, gave me my first contact with the great swell of the southern ocean.

The latter half of the week was spent in albany, which initially i didn’t see the justification for being called a town. Once we braved the wind and rain to cycle to one the lookouts over the town it was a bit more apparent that the place does sprawl quite a bit. Staying at the Bay Merchants hotel near middleton beach meant that we didn’t have the luxury of having our host chauffeur us to the sights but they did have a set of bikes to use and which were in better nick than anything i’ve rented in oz. Unfortunately almost every day saw some rain and somewhat more wind so we were limited to covering the length of middleton beach and the lookout over the city.

After a week in a climate comparable to that of a scottish autumn i was quite happy to get back to the relative comfort of perth although freedom and warmer climates would ensure that I wouldn’t spend too much time hanging round there either.

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