Tues 29 Oct 2013 - Valley of the Giants

Our first stop today was a town called Walpole, on the South coast. It has a huge inlet, like a salt water lake that makes an excellent harbour for small boats. Just on our short walk to see this, we saw 7 different wild flowers, they're everywhere.

Not far from Walpole is the tingle tree forest. First we went to see what is thought to be the biggest eucalypt in the world. This tingle tree is 75m high, 24m around and 400 years old. It's completely hollow at the bottom and yet it can still live. The space inside is as big as the downstairs bedrooms in our house! 

After this we went to the Valley of the Giants, which has been created in order to allow people to enjoy looking at the trees without inadvertently killing them.

These tingle trees only grow in one small area and they have roots that spread out sideways more than down, so when lots of people walk around them, over the roots, the tree can't survive. In the 90s they had a competition to design a walkway and the result is fantastic. There's a boardwalk on the ground to walk around the trees at ground level and then a walkway up at canopy level, 40m above the ground. It's very unobtrusive and yet strong enough that you feel very safe up there and it only takes up 4 sq m of ground.

Giant Slingshot?

It was so interesting to go on a guided tour and hear about these special trees, rare flowers, and then to be up among the branches, with the birds was a great experience too.

This was a great start to the day and a hard act to follow. We're now travelling East, and, as we were driving, I saw a toffee factory. We stopped to look and hit the jackpot as it was an ice creamery and a cidery too! Inside we tasted lots of goodies, as they sold chutneys, jams and sauces as well.

We continued on our way, along the South coast and came to Denmark, which also has a big lake inlet. We decided we had time to get to Albany today and kept going. Albany is a big town and spread out around a harbour with 2 more harbours going off it, just perfect for the whaling fleet that used to work out of here.

As we drove in, we saw a ship which is a reconstruction of the "Amity", the first convict ship to arrive here. It was so small, it must have been terrifying to be aboard out on the open sea. 

We also saw the earliest house built here and looked around the museum. We went up to the lookout and were able to see out over the sea and harbours. A quick visit to the Visitor's Centre found us a caravan park for a reasonable price and it has email and phone contact too. On the way here we saw a sign that amused us very much - it looks as though the turtles are so fast that they have to slow them down to 60 when crossing the road!

Our camping area near this point