Western Australia

We’ve just visited Injidup Natural Spa, which is a naturally occurring spa pool of foaming and bubbling water set in a chasm in a rocky headland, in south-west Western Australia.  As Indian Ocean waves pour water into the pool it foams and bubbles, creating a spa effect. 

It’s winter now, so there was no one in the spa pool, but I can imagine how inviting this bubbling pool would be on a hot summer’s day!

Our house sit is near the southern end of the Cape to Cape Track, a well know walking path which runs for 135 kilometres between the lighthouse on Cape Naturaliste and the lighthouse on Cape Leeuwin, in south-west Western Australia.  Many people walk this track, usually over about seven days.  We aren’t planning on doing this, but there is access all along the track, and we have sampled it at many places along its length while we’ve been staying here.  

I went for a swim at Augusta’s most popular swimming beach this afternoon, at Davies Road in Flinders Bay. 

Like all the coastline around here in the south-west of Western Australia, it’s a very beautiful spot. The weather here seems to be endlessly perfect, too, with mostly warm windless days and clear blue skies while we’ve been here, as it was today – perfect for swimming and admiring the scenery!

South-west Western Australia has a long association with the timber industry. Before the European invasion this corner of Australia was covered in a huge ancient forest of Karri, Marri, and Jarrah trees.  Timber was being cut here 130 years ago and exported all over the world.  As is usual with the timber industry, the cutting was rapacious and pretty much all of it was cut down. 

We’ve done a walk through Boranup Karri Forest near here, but it’s only re-growth forest (although, at 130 years old, the trees have made it to a good size); so we decided to head out to find some real old-growth forest. 

Here in Augusta, we are on the edge of the Margaret River Wine growing area, and we see vineyards whenever we travel around the region. 

I’m not big on doing the winery crawl, but I don’t mind doing the occasional tasting, as I did when house-sitting in the Barossa Valley eighteen months ago.  And it's always entertaining to watch and listen to the verbal convolutions as dozens of irrelevant adjectives get manipulated into the service of describing wine.  For example: I tried a ‘muscular’ wine the other day!

Augusta, where I’m currently house-sitting, is on the estuary of the Blackwood River; it’s a huge and very beautiful body of water, and I haven’t had an opportunity to get out on it until today.

The Royal Freshwater Bay Yacht Club (from the Swan River, between Perth and Fremantle) brought two St Ayles skiffs, ‘Ripple’ and ‘Dotsie’ down here today to promote these boats, and to see if they could kick-start a local interest in them.

Here in south-west Western Australia the coastline is always beautiful – it seems that wherever you find your way to the coast it's stunning and unspoiled. 

This area is the Margaret River Region; it’s well known for a few things and one of them is excellent surfing.  (Some of the other things are great wine and great white sharks.) 

 We dropped into Cowaramup bay for a look, and found it to be yet another beautiful place, and a surfing hot-spot with nice waves pumping. 

I'm house-sitting in Augusta, in the Margaret River Region, in the south-west of Western Australia.  

The region is defined by Cape Leeuwin in the south, and Cape Naturaliste in the north.  There’s lots of limestone here, with a huge limestone ridge running virtually from one cape the other.  As I’ve noted in a previous post, limestone creates interesting landscape features.  The limestone dissolves into the water that permeates through it, leaving cavities under the ground.  With enough time those cavities enlarge to become caves, and this whole area is riddled with them – more than one hundred are known. 

Our house-sit in Augusta is only a few kilometres from Cape Leeuwin, which is the south-west-most point of Australia.  It's a wild place at the junction of the Indian and Southern Oceans. 

As an east-coast Australian, I grew up with the dominating presence of the Pacific Ocean;  I haven’t seen much of the Indian Ocean, so it’s exciting to be visiting its shoreline!

I'm house-sitting in Augusta in south-west Western Australia.  This time we are looking after couple of dogs, a cat, and a couple of galahs (large Australian parrots). 

We were in this area twenty years ago, so we're following up on some of the attractions that we saw back then.  One of those attractions is Boranup Gallery, which exhibits handmade timber furniture mostly made from local Western Australian timbers jarrah, karri, and marri.