Did we mention the Salmon Gums ? More gorgeous examples of these encountered on this drive. Farewelled our fellow Sportliner traveller, Ros and left Norseman around 9.30 for drive of just over 2 hours to Esperance. Checked into caravan park and explored the shopping area, foreshore for lunch with home made sandwiches, ham, cheese and tomato, then a coffee at McCafe. Dinner in the caravan, shower and early night.
We started at the Tourist Information Centre to get some ideas of where to go. It was located on a village green with old houses relocated from all over the district, now set up as art and craft shops and of course a French café called Café Louis ! Of course we had a coffee !
We then proceeded out of town along the 'Great Ocean Drive', a 40km loop around the coastline showcasing very picturesque coves and beaches.
Inland it passed Pink Lake, which naturally is no longer pink !!
Back in town went for a walk out on the long jetty and then back to Maxi for soup and bread, shower and bed.
Camp site in Esperance
Wet humid conditions also meant lots of condensation in Maxi, to the extent where it started dripping on Tania during the night. So now a new focus was to find a way to reduce it and came up with an idea to get a small fan inside the van to assist with the air circulation.
This turned out to be a scenic and enjoyable day drive. First stop was at the Diamond Tree, an old Fire Lookup platform tree, that also has had public access (as in scaling the tree) stopped. Manjimup was the biggest town in the area and was the cheery capital of Western Australia. A number of shops here and amongst other things we went looking for a USB fan for the caravan. Bridgewater is billed as the Winter Town of WA, with lots of galleries, craft shops, a main street with reasonable well maintained old buildings. Nannup had a nice coffee shop and we scheduled a call with our accountant while here. The drive was very picturesque and made the day quite enjoyable.
Jewel Cave lived up to our expectations, and Digby our guide contributed to the experience. So many examples of different types of formations and structures.
Lake Cave is a wet cave with the most amount of water present for the last few years, the guides were saying we were privileged to see it in this state. While not as pretty as Jewel Cave it was impressive in different ways.
Drove to Ngilgi Caves as we have booked in the 11.00 am tour. This tour was partly self-guided with rangers inside to help out with explanations. There were steps down into this cave .... which of course meant 365 steps up to exit !! This is mostly a dry cave, but still interesting and had different formations then those we have seen in the caves yesterday.
From here we drove on a bit further to Dunsborough, checked out the Mitre 10 for a fan, then the town centre generally - very upmarket boutique shops and cafes - similar to Margaret River but on a smaller scale.
Back to Busselton to continue our search for a fan ... Bunnings, BCF, Repco, and yes finally found one that we think will do the job ! Fingers crossed.
Back to Busselton to explore the longest jetty in the southern hemisphere ! 1.8 km in length and yes we walked the entire length and back ! Lots of tourists taking the train out -- lazy !!
