Day 17

The plan for the day was to back track a bit to check out the western side of Fitzgerald River National Park, but firstly we thought we'd fill up in Bremer Bay and check out this small seaside community.  For no certain reason we drove down some local streets and found a little boat ramp area that had a pretty outlook over the inlet, but then I noticed some parrots in the trees with a strange "clacka-clack" sort of call.

I called Morgs out of the car and we found the two birds responsible for the noise turned out to be a couple of Red-Capped Parrots - one male and one juvenille.  This is exactly the kind of exciting moment that we hope to achieve while we're on holidays; just randomly stumbling across some relatively uncommon parrots that we can only find in this part of the world out in the wild, yet we weren't actively seeking them out.

We moved on to find our way to the national park, navigating a few good dirt roads.  We got to a sign that stated "You're entering a Dieback FREE area" and words to the effect of "Go wash your vehicle at the wash down area 600m that-a-way or you will be removed from the site".  We went to the wash down area where there was large grate, high pressure pump, a heap of dirty muddy water, and no one to be seen around or any instructions on what to do.  Not satisfied in the lack of supplied information describing what we were supposed to or whether we had to do anything at all, and generally miffed at the whole process I decided it wasn't worth it so we changed our bearing for Albany.

The road to Albany, National Highway 1, felt like it was in good need up an upgrade.  The edge of the bitumen was right next to the white line with a drop-off edge or pot holes in the dirt if you drove over the white line.  The road surface was rather lumpy and sometimes kicked the vehicle left or right.  But worse than that, the surface camber was too aggressive for the transitions going into curves, which meant that as you were entering the curve you had to keep the steering wheel straight, sometimes even turn the opposite direction to the curve, then flick the steering wheel back the other way so you can continue going around the curve rather than steer out of it.  Very disconcerting at 110km/h.  I even had to check that the wheel nuts were all tight (all good).  On top of the bad road we were also pushing through increasingly frequent and intense rain showers, which made me slow down a little at times.

We arrived in Albany about 1:30, which has been our lunch time for much of our trip in WA... probably a hangover from the slow acclimatisation to the change in time zones.  Pies for lunch... we've done well to last this long without any pies.

Driving around Albany we found this town to be much larger than we expected, and actually very interesting.  It reminds me a little of Ballarat with a number of older buildings and undulating terrain.  The main street of town is between two high hills, which were developed with medium residential housing up to a certain elevation a long time ago and offers great views across the town. There are some interesting newer houses in the area, and some nice old houses too, closer to the CBD.

Another feature we discovered of Albany, particularly in the Mt Clarence suburb, was that there are these huge granite boulders everywhere.  The boulders may have been removed if it was a recent subdivision, but thankfully they have been retained as garden features.  The boulders are in public open space as well as private gardens.  Earlier when we had lunch we questioned why the shopping mall was called "Dog Rock"... that was answered when we drove behind the mall and saw a great big boulder that looked like a dog's head with it's nose in the air.  Unfortunately we didn't go back to grab a photo; just search google images for "dog rock albany".

We spent the afternoon exploring the Torndirrup National Park, on a peninsula south of Albany, where there are a few spectacular coastal cliff lookouts and rock formations.  Unfortunately the rain persisted and made the views either uninspiring or invisible, not to mention the fact that we were getting increasingly wet getting out of the vehicle.  We waiting 5 or 10 minutes for the rain to clear for us to see the Blowhole (a real inspiring name for, wait for it, a blowhole), but gave up and moved on to The Gap and The Natural Bridge - two rock formations about 50m apart.

After another few minutes of waiting for the rain to clear we gave up and decided to put up with the rain, knowing that this was the last activity for the day so we could afford to get a bit wet.  The Natural Bridge, again another real inspiring name, is an arch formed in the rock.  The Gap is a big gap in about a rock cliff face, as you probably could have guessed, about 25m high.  The Gap was probably my favourite because the waves were crashing into the rocks at the base of the gap and the spray was going at least half way up the height of the cliffs.

We most certainly did not want to have to pitch the tent and cook dinner in the rain so we booked a serviced apartment for a ridiculously cheap price for what it was.  Sure enough, as soon as we had arrived and set ourselves up the rain dissipated... oh well.  We're expecting a lot more rain in the coming days, so we'll probably be finding caravan park cabins the next few nights as well.

We'll have to come back to Albany to explore it's surrounds in more detail... one day.