Day 5

From Albany we headed northwest, aiming to spend a couple of days at Margaret River. Gradually the farmland gave way to taller and taller trees until we were driving through a vertical landscape of karri forest. At the valley of the giants tree top walk:

Steve tears a tree open with his bare hands. Oooooooooo, trouble. I think they're protected.

We didn't go on the tree top walk because Steve's strength is sapped in direct proportion to how far he is from the ground. More evidence that he's not from our planet.

Now there was the island with the hole in it to deal with. Broke Inlet is hard to get to. We sniffed around a couple of overgrown tracks that looked iffy even from the clinical overhead view in Google Maps. Eventually we bumped miles down a dirt track to what looked like a zombie paradise. Thick, quiet forest. Beach huts with rags flapping in the open windows. A completely deserted stretch of black water. Enough to give you the screaming meemies. Then I paddle out to the horizon leaving Steve sitting on the beach. I expected to come back to a gibbering wreck.

Paddling across Broke Inlet is difficult. There are currents, persistent wind, and sometimes it is too shallow to paddle and you have to walk. Other times there's a deep channel with a fast running current. On top of that, I had no map or compass, so I was aiming where I wanted to go by dead reckoning. Which is another way of saying that I had no idea. So I choose the most obvious looking island and eventually fetch up on it. A small black wombat stares at me like the last visitor here was well before his time. There's no sign of humans anywhere on this island - my footprints are the only ones. I tried to navigate through the thick underbrush and grass trees to where the 'hole' in th island ought to be but find only an open area of thick native grass. I started to paddle back and only just in time - paddling back against the rising wind was exhausting. By the time I got back to the beach I was just about done. Steve had also survived - I guess the zombies only come out at night. On the way back I did glimpse a very cool looking house buried in the forest, as isolated as a swine flu victim.

Steve was getting into territory that he remembered from his youth and found the Gloucester Tree for me, which is a particularly large Karri tree near Pemberton which someone has painstakingly impaled with about a zillion lengths of re-bar to make a kind of deadly staircase. You climb up this spiral of re-bar around the trunk to the very top of the tree, and through a couple of viewing platforms. A family of German tourists were very efficiently availing themselves of the experience, but the combination of car sickness and the fatigue from paddling for hours made me feel it was unwise to go up.

We had a long way to go to get to Prevelly beach, and the sun was getting low in the sky. Steve navigated and I pinned the Commodore on the speed limit (company car, you know) and dodged kangaroos in the gathering dark. The motel at Prevelly beach (we though we'd treat ourselves) was a laugh. It was staffed by a surfer dude who clearly needed several cones to operate, and the carpark was jam-packed with Mummy's BMW while the communal kitchen was jam-packed with rich faux surfer kids too dim to figure out that what they were doing to food could not be considered 'cooking' ('cooked' food is generally edible). We skipped out on the kitchen and went around the corner to an adult 'resort' (almost as bad - a bunch of sunburned fat people eating pub standard food for ten times the price). At least the food was edible. Pity the bill wasn't.

On the way back to our room in the dark we had to dodge a massive collection of wetsuits hung all over the place. They looked like the trophies from a hunting party, quixotically trying to rid the world of spoiled kids.