Walpole, Coalmine Beach, Tree Top Walk

Now at caravan park at Coalmine Beach, pay for 3, stay for 4 nights deal, we are in a beautiful little cabin with sheets, towels, fridge, and watching a DVD Kubo. We don't know ourselves how luxurious this is... So the arvo, now it's 4, we're relaxing watching the show, with a capital R, and a glass of chilled white wine from Margaret River. Oh boy...

Lazy pancake breakfast, thanks Marie, off to the tree top walk. Firstly, the ancient walk - the guide tells us the granny tree is over 300 years old. There are Quokkas around which come out at dusk. They get around amoung the cane grass via Quokka tunnels called runnels, tunnels in the grass. 

The trees are about 70m tall, but their roots only go a metre down, and go about 3m from the tree, a narrow base for trees so high! Because of the dense canopy, wind does not get too strong, the rain would be well absorbed by the greenery as well.

This area is a remnant from when we were connected to Antarctica. Imagine that place full of trees, grass, etc.

The structure for the tree top walk was fabbed up in Freo, then trucked in. There were no cranes or other heavy equipment on site. It was all hoisted into place by hand, block and tackle. It looks quite strong but swings around a fair bit when you walk on it, making it a bit hard to get a  photo. Pretty amazing to be up around the tree tops. Looking down gives me the shivers though. We must be at least 60m up.

17th Nov, started with a jog along the peninsula here at the caravan park. The diversity of plant life is amazing - like someone has planted a random, yet very well coordinated, garden. We get rolling around 11am, and decide to walk into town, about 2k's direct pathway away. The path winds through swamplands.

All the shrubs and the few trees are quite short. Tonnes of different flowering plants. Too beautiful. Lunch restores everyone's spirits, and an ice cream fuels the walk back again. This afternoon is another serious chillax session, with a too rare DVD. My feet are sore enough now.

18th Nov lazy start to the day, more school work, then a low stress wander around the peninsula. If you do the full length its 5km, but we short cut it through some bush, still a couple of hours walking, the limit of the boys.

The shrubs are diverse yet repeating, very beautiful. It's interesting how the trees next to the water are very tall, while the adjacent swampland features only short shrubs, and short twisty trees.

So much diversity of plants in this little area!

And the locals were friendly: they didn't seem to like the carrot we offered. The magpies liked crackers amazingly enough.