Monday 6th November – The Valley of the Giant Tingle Trees

Another solid night’s sleep and even though we were up early for us, most of our neighbours had already left!  It got a little warm on the camper so I sat outside with my morning cuppa and went for a wander to remind myself how stunning, if windy, the beach was:

First port of call was to try and reach the Southernmost point in WA.  We may have bent the camper van hire rules slightly by taking a red sandy road down to this amazing beach.  Okay so you may be able to walk further south in WA but this is as far as you can DRIVE south in WA! 

The tip of the land in the centre is the most southerly point

We then made our way to the Valley of the Giants, which refers to the giant Red Tingle Trees (or Eucalyptus Jacksonii to give their scientific name).  We paid to go on the Tree Top walk having heard that it was a worthwhile thing to do. And they were right! What a feat of engineering! To enable people to see these magnificent trees as closely as possible whilst avoiding the risk of damage to their sensitive and shallow root systems, a metal maze of walkways was designed and built elsewhere before being carefully built around the forest.  The structure appears strong but sways around to a degree along with the trees themselves and you find yourself 40m up in the air within the canopy. Hopefully these photos will give you a taste of the heights we were at.

We took our time to enjoy the experience.  What amazing trees.  Okay, so they’re not quite the size of the Giant Sequoias in California, but they are still an extremely rare species that live to over 400 years old and are only found in this corner of Western Australia.  Tingle Trees, we salute you!  Additionally, there was a walk around some more aged forest and tingle trees which had been altered by fire, but survived.

We completed our visit in the usual place…. The gift shop… where we added to our Oz Experience by purchasing the obligatory bird identification guide for the van so that I would start having a clue as to what we were seeing out there.  The lady at the till gave us an additional map to help us locate the Giant Tingle Tree (they’re all giant but this one on the left is apparently the biggest) a little further on down the road. 

Simon helpfully adding some scale to the giant Tingle Tree

All of this was fantastic but we needed to make ground west towards the coast to squeeze in some more amazing experiences before our return to Perth on Wednesday.

We hot-footed it down the highway…. into swarms of some kind of lacewing bug.  It sounded like it as raining at times but it was just the incredibly high body count as bugs bounced off the windscreen and front bumper of Ozzie! We had to stop a couple of times to clear the screen enough to continue the journey.  Eventually, we found Alexandra Bridge Campground.  The plan had been to find somewhere with some decent facilities for tonight so that we could have a shower and maybe even power.  Well, this one has one outside cold shower…. And water… but no electricity.  We are surprised at how few and far between campsites are here.  We had to keep driving until past 6pm to reach this one and this has more facilities than most of the others.  For only $10 each for the night you can’t expect too much I suppose.  We’re parked near a block with flushing toilets and lights, which is more than we had last night.  Whether I feel desperate enough to brave a cold and public shower in the morning waits to be seen.  We are heading to the beach tomorrow for a swim so I may wait until after then instead!