After some deliberation we decided that we would hire a car for a couple of weeks and have a look around the south west corner of Australia before heading up the coast towards Darwin. So, after a few more days in Fremantle, we set off on Wednesday to a place called Bunbury which is a couple of hours sout of Perth.
No major dramas on the way - except for my near miss with a lorry and our constant confusing of the windscreen wipers and indicators (on the car, the stalks are on the "wrong" side of the steering wheels). We soon lost count of the number of times that we pulled up to junctions and sat there with the windscreen wipers going whilst giving no indication of which way we were going to turn!
We had a good, unintentional look around Bunbury when we arrived, as the hostel address given in the Lonely Planet was out of date! We managed to track down somewhere to stay eventually though. The next day we had a very fun morning feeding lots of kangaroos and birds at the "Big Swamp Wildlife Park", before headig further south to Dunsborough, on the edge of the Capes Region of SW Australia.
On Friday, we visited the first of a couple of lighthouses in the area, at Cape Naturaliste. Whilst wandering around the coast there we also saw some dolphins just off the coast. We then stopped in at a very pretty beach at Yallingup, before heading down to Margaret River which was to become our base for the next few days.
The Margaret River region is well known here for its wine, so on Friday we went off on a wine tasting tour, which basically involved getting driven around lots of winerys and drinking a lot. All good fun - we had a fit of hysterics at lunch when we realised that one of the other people at our lunch table was a spitting image of Wallace from the Wallace&Gromit program!
On Sunday, once hangovers had cleared from the previous days wine, we went on a canoeing trip up the Margaret River where we also got to try our various items of "bushtucker" - plants, widgety grubs (Melanie ate these, I didn't!), kangaroo, wild turkey etc. At the end of the trip there was a race back to the river mouth - we decided that we didn't really have much chance of winning, so instead we sabotaged the chances of the clear favourites by ramming them right at the start. An hilarious tactic which backfired a little bit as it eventually resulted in us capsizing our canoe. Good job I'd put my camera in its waterproof housing!!!
For photos, click HERE.
