Southwest of Perth (click for Pictures)

We get out on the street in front of our hotel just as the city is waking up. There is a café right next to the hostel and we have coffee and muffins ($13.50 yikes). We are walking around looking for an Internet site using listings in our Lonely Planet, but everything in Perth seems to be moving and being rebuilt, so we end up in a cubbyhole on a main street with construction outside, run by an older East Indian/Pakistani(?) guy who barely speaks English, but helps me get some email off. On our way there we found another listing from L.P., the Kakulas Brothers market that is touted as having International offerings, and it was fantastic. [Not busy early, but very crowded when we returned to shop.] Wicked Campers opens at 9 AM and we walk several blocks to get there and take delivery of our Mazda van that has the Bat Mobile painted on the sides and “Dunna nunna nunna nunna - Batman” printed on the back. It has a 5 speed stick shift on the left of the driver which I tried to master as we sped back to the hostel to pick up our backpacks. Then we wind our way through down-town traffic and onto a complex freeway system. It seemed like we went through suburbs forever and got lost near a navel base where the highway we were on suddenly ended. We were very relieved to see the houses give way to trees and pulled off the highway on a road that offered the Bouvard Winery and an area to view thrombolites.

No we didn’t make up thrombolites after stopping for tastings at the winery. They are microorganisms that, along with stromatolites, a close relative, are perhaps the oldest known living organisms, having lived on earth for 600 million years. Lake Clifton where we found them has salinity 10 times that of ocean water. Not much else lived in or around the lake, which is a long body of water about a kilometer inland of the ocean beaches. Thrombolites are believed to have transformed the atmosphere into a mix of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide that we live in today. Besides the rock-like mounds of the thrombolites, there were floating masses of jelly-like substances with a crusty exterior, perhaps related to the thrombolites. We camped on the ocean side of Lake Clifton on one side and another similar water body, but without the thrombolites, Lake Preston, at Martin’s Tank campground that we expected to be crowded but was almost empty and eerily quiet. It seemed to have one or two crickets, one crow, one bee, one moth… We did have to ask our one neighbor if they could help us open our bottle of Bouvard Shiraz because our one corkscrew had been confiscated at the airport. I’m not sure what they thought of our Wicked Campervan, since they were in a huge caravan, but they were very nice [as most Aussies we’ve met are].

In the morning we got to talk with a ranger (that’s a Park Ranger, not a Bushranger!) about the dying tuart trees in the park. It was a mystery perhaps related to too much or too little fire, heat, water… Many of those around us were 200-300 years old. After a quick look at Preston Beach, we headed further south and stopped at Bunbury, a big city by the sea, to use the Internet and managed to get some emails off using Google Mail. Then we got squared away heading toward Margaret River at the center of a wine-growing region known for white wines. Most of the wineries are on small roads off of Caves Road but we headed straight for Margaret River, stopping just north of there at a regional wine center in Cowaramup. We bought a bottle of organic Semillon Blanc, untasted. Margaret River itself, far from being the quaint little wine town on a river, was a bustling tourist trap with lots of boutiques and no place to park. There was some kind of surfing contest going on that weekend and the place was jumping. (There is great surfing all along this coast.) We bought groceries and got out as soon a we could, heading to Leeuwin Natraliste National Park (I am not making these names up.) It is also along Caves Road, so named because there are many limestone caves along it. We hoped to see at least one of them after we camped at Contos Field campground that night, but arrived too late in the day and decided the expensive tour of the caves and late departure time were not for us. We wanted to drive to Walpole the next day.