Monday 3-Feb
We packed up and made our way towards Busselton. On our way we stopped in a lovely place called Cowaramup. As you may have noticed there are a lot of places here where their name ends in up. The reason for this is because in the Noongar language, an Aboriginal dialect spoken in the region, “up” means “place of,” so many place names essentially translate to “the place of [something]” depending on the preceding word; for example, “Nannup” would mean “place of Nann”. So we think Cowaramup might be the place for cows.
Before we setup Arno had to wash both the car and caravan, we have been over many dusty roads and both vehicles were covered in a thick layer of red dust.
We settled in the Busselton Jetty caravan park which is run by the local council and only 220 meters away from the famous Jetty.
The jetty is 1841 metres long over the protected waters of Geographe Bay, the heritage listed Busselton Jetty is the longest timber-piled jetty in the Southern Hemisphere and is home to one of six Underwater Observatories in the world!
It also has a train that takes visitor to and from the underwater observatory, but we decided to walk.
Inside the 9.5-metre diameter observation chamber, 11 viewing windows offer unique vantage points to observe the piles that create Australia’s largest artificial reef. Here we could admire the vibrant forest of tropical and sub-tropical corals, sponges, fish, and fascinating invertebrates that live in Geographe Bay. There was also a very big school of herring swarming around taken shelter between the piles.
Tuesday 4-Jan
Today we will visit the Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse and explore that area a bit. This is a much smaller lighthouse than the Cape Leeuwin one we visited a few days ago. But it had a nice walking path around it of 2 Km that we did.
We stopped at a few more beaches before heading back to Busselton. Arno went for a walk through town while Jen went to explore more around the coast on her bike.
We had a lovely dinner at the Hilton, tomorrow we will move on to Rockingham where the car will get serviced and we will meet Belinda, one of Jen’s former colleagues who will show us around.
Thursday 6-jan
Belinda pick us up after Arno dropped the car for its 60.000 km service and she took us an the Giants of Mandurah trip.
Thomas Dambo is the world’s leading recycle artist. He was taught from a young age about the value of recycling, sustainability, and unlimited imagination. And so to share that message and inspire people to get out into nature, Thomas creates larger-than-life sculptures from recycled wood, and places them all over the world. This is the first time his Giants have appeared in Australia though!
We visited two giants but there are more around. After seeing these marvels of creativity we had a lovely lunch.
Belinda dropped Arno of at the service centre and went back to the caravan with Jen where she was handed the contents of our fridge 😊. The caravan will be parked for two weeks at a nephew of Phil while we will be in Bangkok to visit Sam, Paul and the grand-kids.
This blog will resume in 2 weeks time.
