Although we’d asked the takeaway shop owner about the local tourist attractions last night when we were ordering dinner, we decided to pass on her suggestion of visiting her street with four drug dealers and two prostitutes. After a bit of reading in the official (though duller) Bunbury Tourist Bureau, we decided to drive east toward Collie and get a free tour of a coal mine, that being the main industry of the town. However, it turned out to be further away than we thought, and we would have missed the tour if we’d gone, so we decided to return to our original plan of going southward.
It was shortly after this that we had a bit of a navigational problem. Di had the map and directed me along the right road, but then told me to take the wrong turn-off. Trav decided quickly that they were heading in the wrong direction, and attempted to get them back onto the correct road. Only one small detail – Trav had become disoriented during the drive to Collie, and was heading north, not south. Just before a large sign loomed up to point out this error, Trav had made the comment to simply “Trust Trav, we just go down this road and we’ll be fine”. Note to audience : swallowing one’s pride is never a satisfactory meal. On the plus side, we can now tell you the best way to the Bunbury bicycle shop, seeing as we passed it three or four times in our misguided travels.
Trav was put into contention as “Stupid Person Of The Day”, setting the pace early, and seeing as nobody had risen to the challenge by the end of the day, Trav won the right to the award.
Courtesy of the detour (“No, I meant to go there”, says Trav), we found the Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre, and a place called Mangrove Cove. The dolphin discovery centre was the alternative we’d been suggested by the locals instead of driving all the way to Monkey Mia, but seeing as we’d seen dolphins recently, and it cost money to go in, we chose Mangrove Cove. Not sure whether it was mid-week, or just how bad the place was, but we were the only car in the carpark.
In short, Mangrove Cove is the place where you can find the southern-most living mangroves in WA, and it looks like a big swamp. We wandered around the boardwalk for a while, reading the patronising tourist signs written by “Jolly Jack”, apparently the ghost of a sailor that had died a century before. Pretty smart fellow to know what was going to happen in 1978 (ie: local whaling activities stopped) when he died in the 1800′s.
Then again, that character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic” was pretty clever to spawn the idea of “king of the world” – a craze that has even reached Bunbury.
At the beginning of the Mangrove Cove walk, there was a large sign instructing us to return to it at the end, and follow another path to a “deserted island”. We did return to the sign at the end of the walk, and walked along the second path for about 200m to read a sign telling us to look out for birdlife. We did. There was none. The sign also said to look out for pigs. We did. They were as abundant as the birds. After another 200m, we came to a sign telling us a pig farmer herded his pigs onto the island last century but they all tried to swim back and drowned, hence the pig reference.
It was only then that Diana realised that we could not get onto the island, and vented her thoughts in words too strong to publish to a mixed audience. She was under the impression that there would be a bridge or something to the island, and that it was deserted other than the people walking onto it to have a look. This was not the case, as we only got to look at it across a hundred yards of water, hence the outburst.
Arriving in Busselton, we went to the tourist bureau to get the information about the town we had just arrived in. The woman behind the counter serving us had a limp, which although we noticed at the time, was not a significant thing until we thought about it later. After the tourist bureau, we went down the main street to buy some lunch and noted a person coming toward us with a limp also. Glancing across the street, Trav noticed a person on crutches. As we got back in the car and drove to a nearby park, we saw a person in an electric wheelchair, and another in an elderly person’s motor scooter. All of this lameness was within 50m with the exception of the tourist guide, so we decided to get out of the area in a hurry before we ran into Mulder and Scully. Walking along the beach promenade, we noted a sign saying there was a beach-going wheelchair available for hire from a nearby kiosk. We figure it would be in high demand…*grin*
Busselton has a long jetty (2kms/1.3mi) that extends out to sea, and there is a train that runs along it from the shore to the end. We decided that we had to definitely go 2 kms out to sea on a TRAIN, because it is rare these chances come along. The jetty was originally built in 1865, when the first 175m was constructed, and over the years it has increased in length despite fires and cyclones during that time. When we got to the end of the jetty, we saw a young girl who was reeling in fish left, right and centre. Catching three in the ten minutes we were there, she was handing them to the man next to her, who stuck hooks through them, and threw them back in as live bait to catch bigger fish. The advantage of the jetty to the common fisherman is that they can catch fish that live 2km out to sea, without having to own a boat.
Just out of Busselton, and not in any of the tourist brochures, we found an archery course. It did not take long for us to decide that what we needed were weapons. After all, one of is a loony, and the other has dodgy vision. What better game than playing around with bows and arrows? For the record, out of a possible 270, we got a half-worthy 142 and 106, which was pretty good seeing as neither of us has fired an arrow since high school, and those were hardly of high training quality.
Arriving in Margaret River, we decided to change our plans to stay there the night. The whole town was filled with Bed ‘n’ Breakfast houses, yuppies, and brand new “ye olde country arte and crafte shoppes”. It looked so tacky we didn’t even stop the car – just kept driving south to Augusta to stay there for the night. Checked out the three caravan parks in town:
1. Turner’s Caravan Park was nice and shady, and was filled to the brim with ducks. Ducks were everywhere, walking over the roads, sitting near tents, wandering around, and generally putting Di into fits of excitement by just being there and saying “quack”.
2. Flinder’s Bay Caravan Park was a dump. No question about it. It was a dump. Open for only part of the year, they had a construction site office for a reception, and to cook a meal, we would have had to hire an old drum as a BBQ. Firewood was extra. Stayed there for about a minute – didn’t even bother to ask the prices – we could guess what the amenities would be like.
3. Doonbank’s Caravan Park was nice and shady like the first one, but had more grass, so we decided to stay there instead. Di was a little disappointed there were no ducks, but cheered up when I pointed out two ducks standing down the hill about 100m away. I went back up the top of the park to get the car and bring it around, and when I returned, Diana was standing at the tent site, with two ducks quacking merrily away at her feet, while she grinned like a Cheshire cat. With the car now there, we were able to feed them some bread, and they were very friendly with us then, even returning in the morning to see if we had any more bread for them.
Went out for tea at the Augusta hotel, which overlooked the river flowing into the sea – very picturesque. We decided to get a porterhouse steak each, which seemed a little expensive at $14.50, but then, we were in a relatively isolated coastal town, so they could afford to charge a bit more than usual. When we saw the meat though, we got a surprise – the steaks were roughly 10 inches long by 6 inches wide, and about an inch thick. We figured that we should also sample the local wine, seeing as were in the middle of the Western Australian wine producing region, but the bottle we chose was actually South Australian in origin.
After dinner, we went back to the campsite where it looked like it was trying to rain, but couldn’t quite muster enough energy to get the rain to form in the clouds. We decided to risk it for a while longer, lit a campfire, and toasted marshmallows before going to bed.
Onward to Walpole tomorrow…
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