23 - To Bunbury and Busselton - 19-25th Sept 2012

19th-25th September 2012

A beautiful trip down the road from Perth on a fantastic highway, will bring you to Bunbury. We turned immediately on to the highway from our caravan park. The highway has two lanes each way, a divided road, with a very wide gap between, which is occupied by the train line. To accesss the trains you have to walk across a footbridge and on to the train station. Everything seems brand new - road, trains and lines. There were heavy duty electricity poles going everywhere. Multiples of them. Lots happening in the West.

Bunbury

Bunbury

Perth to Bunbury Railway down middle of divided road

We drove through many beautiful towns with waterways everywhere and even though it was a very cold day, the beauty of the areas was obvious. Many of them are towns for retirees who want to fish and take their boats out on the water. When we left the towns behind, we came to the most beautiful countryside imaginable. There were living green paddocks, lightly treed with wild flowers all over them. Later the flowers changed to exotic flowers as well as natives. There were flowering trees everywhere as well. It looked all the world like an English meadow.

Bunbury has grown to such a size it has absorbed the surrounding towns into its populace. It is a large and colourful centre indeed. Dolphins are their special interest for tourists, plus orchids growing wild all around, for everyone to find.

A couple of hours drive further on, brought us to Busselton. The weather has been freezing, windy, menacing grey-black cloud and nearly black ocean, which can look quite frightening and rain of course. So its been a case of "batten down the hatches" for most of the time here. We have bravely hit the road each day and have visited all the Margaret River region (all picturesque) like we haven't seen for many years. There is the greenest grass and the fattest, happiest dairy cows and livestock. 

There are wildflowers and orchids scattered through the properties and bushland. After so many months of desert it is a real treat to see. The beaches are extensive and the surfers 'breaks' are in layers going out in the ocean, and yes, they are all in there having a ball. Other beaches are full of the most picturesque boulders.

On the day we arrived in Busselton a Wildflower and orchid Exhibition opened in the Uniting Church hall, it was amazing with wildflowers collected by nature lovers from a wide area and put on display for two days.  Here are just a few we photographed.

Yesterday was the day for visiting the caves. There are hundreds of them. Some were found in the early 1800's, but it was a privilege to be taken on escorted excurtions through the caves. The limestone caves are standing up just in the bush. They seem to stand about about a couple of hundred feet above the ground and when you are inside them they are also way down below you. 

Augusta Mammoth Cave near Margaret River

Augusta Jewel Cave

Mammoth Cave

To see an ABC DVD on Jewel Cave:

http://www.abc.net.au/local/videos/2011/03/11/3162030.htm. When we stopped to take photos of the tall Jarrah trees, which look so statuesque and magnificent, standing like giants, it was interesting to notice one of these large ridges of caves was the backdrop to the wonderful forest.