After a wonderful night’s sleep in our sauna, the heater kept us very warm all night, we had a bit of a sleep in until 6.30am. After brekkie, we were on the road by 9am. Our first stop was at the Tree Top Walk at the Valley of the Giants, which was about 10 minutes before Walpole. We all went on the tree top walk, which was an engineering marvel as they weren’t allowed to use concrete, cranes or helicopter to construct it. It was all made off site, disabled, cut into 10m lengths, put on the back of 4WDs and reassembled and rewelded on site and lifted up by old fashioned rigging. The highest point of the walk was 40m off the ground and the trees still soared above us. There were some absolutely beautiful old trees, the Tingle trees, which are only found in this area. They have a very large base, which buttress with age. Some of these trees were over 400 years old and had suffered bushfires, but were still alive and thriving. We also took a guided tour of the forest and learnt even more about these trees, such as the root systems were very shallow and the Red Tingle didn’t have a tap root, whereas the Yellow Tingle did. We walked through the base of a tree and until 1990 there was a tree there you could park your car in, as it was so big. It ended up dying and collapsing due to the high volume of tourists coming to look at it. It was once this happened they built the Tree Top Walk.
We the drove to Walpole and had lunch in a café/bakery. We got fuel and a recharge for the internet as we had run out yesterday (this is why the blogs are late being posted). However they gave us an Optus charge instead of Telstra so we still have no internet until tomorrow.
We drove to the next town of Manjimup and pulled into the first caravan park. It didn’t look like much from the front, but once we drove down to the sites, it is one of the best Caravan Parks we have stayed in. Everything is new and the toilets are nice and close.
We are about 300kms from Perth now, so will make it there tomorrow. Today was a wonderful way of celebrating our 3rd wedding anniversary.