Hello lovely people!
I am currently sitting in the passenger seat of Frodo, trying to escape the flies. I’m also four wines deep after having just finished up at a winery….I apologise now for any misspelling and terrible punctuation. Well, more than the usual amount 😉
Been a bit of a mixed bag this week.
We've gone epic free camps to struggling to find a campsite at all. Amazing food, epic country side, flies for days and shark sitings while trying to catch a surf.
We wouldn't want it any other way and we have fallen in love with this part of the country.
It has everything you might want for a bit of an adventure, or not....
CURRENT STATE OF PLAY
Why, out of all the weeks of the year, did we decide to venture into the woods on the night of Halloween?! 👻🎃
We left our cushy hotel room on Monday morning and found ourselves driving through the Perth Forests at 8pm. With a full moon and Halloween in swing, I was seriously stressing we were going to be that couple to end up in the news.
I just imagined the headline being “Couple goes missing in the woods on Halloween”.
Honestly, I was panicking. I could not stop the worst-case scenarios playing out in my mind. This didn't help when we drove past a POW camp! I was half expecting to see an ethereal white face appear at my window.
Gordon, the bastard, was as cool as a cucumber. Even cracking a joke about seeing a light in the woods, AND, wanting to stop in and sight see (at 8PM at night, in the pitch black!!) the POW camp. Not funny Jan!
I cannot tell you how relieved I was when we made it out and into the town where we were going to spend the night. An evening, I won’t be forgetting anytime soon.
Tuesday morning saw us wake up in a small town called Jarrahdale! This was the second time we had come back to camp here - fantastic local council campsite. We got up early and went to the local cafe for a much-needed caffeine fix and toasted sangy. We weren’t exactly sure where we wanted to go next, just that we needed to keep travelling South. Gordon remembered a 4x4 track, called the MundAl Track (a 1,000km off-road track from Mundering, near Perth, to Albany in the South), was meant to come close by. We searched it up and saw that it wasn’t too far away and decided to jump on it. We drove along the MundAl track for around 150ish km’s. The track itself was nothing technical, switching between sweeping forest gravel roads, mining roads and the blacktop. It was more of an off-road scenic drive that took you to lots of cute little country towns. Going back to the mining roads - it’s amazing at how much mining you come across in WA. Of course, it is one of, if not the, largest sector in WA but they are everywhere. And what’s fascinated us, is that they are even in National Parks! Almost every NP we have been too has had some form of mining activity happening or happened.
Anyways, after a few hours of hoofing along the MundAl track and getting a bit frustrated by mining road or forestry road closures (I think our map needs updating), we decided to look for a camp.
We’ve found finding camps in this part of WA quite the opposite to the North. In the North, besides major centres like Broome/Exmouth, freecamps and cheap camping was abundant. Here, not so much. More population has either meant free camps are getting shut down or camps are more expensive. Even the National Parks are not cheap! WA, so far, has had the most expensive NP camping fees. They are also all different. In Queensland and the NT, all NP’s and State Forests are the same price, so you know what you’re in for. Here in WA, they range from $8, $10, $12, $16, and $20 per person, per night. We couldn’t believe it was $20 per person at Leeuwin-Naturaliste NP.
That’s $40 per night for a dirt patch and a pit toilet. Most other parts of the country we’ve paid that price and received electricity with hot showers.
We’ve loved WA, but WA does not care about preserving your back pocket. For such a wealthy State, we’ve found it quite surprising at how many places (non-private) we’ve had to pay an entry fee or day pass for. Busselton Jetty took the cake for this. $4 per person to walk down a rotting hunk of wood (bit harsh, but true) AND there were 9 (NINE!) clerks eyeballing you at the entrance making sure you had paid your fee….. I say no more.
Back to finding our campsite story.
Glen Mervyn Dam.
This must be in our top 5 free camps of the trip!
We couldn’t believe our luck and do thanks the local council for keeping this free. You’re allowed to free camp all the way around the dam, on its banks and in amongst the trees. It was such beautiful campsite and goddam do we love TREES! They shit all over Spinifex.
Waking up to the smell of pine trees and looking out of the tent in the morning, felt like you were waking up in the treetops. This must be one of the quietest campsites we’ve stayed at. The temperature also dropped during our stay and just made everything feel cosy. It was a struggle to get out of tent in the morning - especially the one morning when we got a bit of a rain shower - yes rain! What is this?!
It’s camps like these that really make it for us. We have space, peace, and the ability to swim and exercise while being able to work on TKE stuff. Absolute bliss.
But like all good things, our time at Glen Mervyn Dam came to an end. Busselton was the next major stop for us. I had heard it was a nice costal town with the longest jetty in the southern hemisphere.
So funny how often, most times in the space of a day, we go from one extreme to another. This can be from extreme kindness to selfishness of people, or environments we find ourselves in. This day was one of those. We went from the quiet serenity of the dam to the humming and pumping vibes of Busselton. Oh, my it was busy! There were markets, a school fete, kids sport, adults sport 😉.
It was a lot!
We suppose it was a weekend, but it felt like all of Perth was out and about. The plan was to take a walk on the Southern Hemisphere’s longest wooden jetty. But I’m sure you can figure out our keenness for this once we found out it was a paid venture. Yes, $4 is not a lot and it’s, allegedly, meant to go to the restoration of the Jetty. But when you are confronted by the Busselton Eager Beaver Society, acting as Jetty gate keepers, we weren’t keen - it became a principal thing for us 🖕.
The town of Busselton was beautiful. like so much of the Southwest, but we decided to skip the crowds and head to Dunsborough. Here we went for a nice walk along the beach and spent the rest of the day on its pristine white sands.
I (KL) FaceTimed friends back home for a very special event. One of my best friends is having a baby and she did a gender reveal! It’s a baby girl!! 🥹💕 It was so lovely to be a part of such a special moment so far away from home.
That evening we commenced our ‘find a campsite’ game we like to play.
Being the considerate people, we are. Namely me (KL) being a goody-two-shoes, I like to try and sleep at legit campgrounds. Gordon, on the other hand, would be happy sleeping in a ditch next to a dump. But I prefer not to sneaky camp and in Frodo, she’s not that stealthy. This is not to say we haven’t not done no sneaky camping 🤫 but the extra population of the current regions we are in has made this undesirable. In the end we found a packed-out State Forest camp and slept in the day use area. Huzzah.
In finding said packed out camp site, it led us a wee bit further South than we were expecting and in the preservation of fuel consumption, we decided to stick to our Southward waypoint.
Meaning, we drove into Margaret River!
What a cute little town. We can see why there is a such a draw to come here.
The countryside is stunning - vineyards, orchards, lush green fields and forests right next to dramatic coastline is something we haven’t seen on this trip yet.
An obligatory walk down the main street, led us to a second coffee where we were meant to plan our next few days. But instead, we procrasti-baked and ended up calling around to friends n’ fam.
Gordon was humming for a surf (we had heard Margies was meant to be a spot) So we hoofed out to the coastline. Redgate beach was, apparently, the beach to be at for us novices, but it seemed that every novice and grommet in the South-West was there too. The waves also weren’t up to spec and with a chilly wind, we opted for option 2.
WINE TASTING!
Shame eh.
By accident, we ended up picking the smallest winery in the region - Mr Barval’s Winery.
We could not come to Margaret River and not go wine tasting after all. We opted for the 4-glass tasting paddle or in Vino connessoir terms, Tasting Flight.
Gosh, it’s hard pretending to be posh.
LOOKAHEAD
This week upcoming sees us trying to hunt down more Margaret River Waves. The weather and wildlife is not making this easy for us. By that I mean WINDY (classic) and the second beach we rolled up to all the surfers were zooming out of the water and up the beach. Strange we thought, but we went about our business, until one of them paused Gordon while he was undoing our surfboards straps and whispered a surfer’s worst nightmare:
Shark.
Well, our surfboards are still bone dry as you can imagine 😬.
Outside of wave riding, we’re gonna make the most of Margaret’s fine dining situation and continue our forest explorations for some bigg ass trees! This countryside is famous for them.
We hope you are all having a lovely week!
Keep on keepin’ on and as always.
Thanks for reading 🙂
Love KL & GL.
Key Travel Stats:
Distance travelled: 23,770kms
Wild animal of the week: Tipsy KL
Current Map posi:
