Margaret River - Day 1

Just got back a few hours ago from our Margaret River trip, probably my favorite thing I've done thus far in Australia (not to discount anything else, because it's all been awesome, but this weekend was especially great). Our trip started Saturday morning a little after 5 when seven of us - Noam, Matt, Alyssa, Leslie, Sindre, Cindy, and myself - all piled into the super-cool minivan we rented for the weekend and headed down south. Margaret River is a town about 300km south of Perth, which translates into about a 3 1/2 hour drive. The town itself is cool, but the region around it is really the reason to come. It's roughly situated between two points, Cape Naturaliste and Cape Leeuwin, and includes the aptly named Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park, as well as caves, forests, roughly 10 million wineries, and a myriad of other attractions.

We decided to spend our first day doing mostly outdoor stuff. The weather was iffy - mostly cloudy/rainy with a few sunbreaks - but we managed to persevere and have a wonderful time despite the hardships. We started out by hiking a portion of the Cape-to-Cape track, which is a trail that runs between the two capes of the region and takes about five days if you do the whole thing.



The scenery from the trail, which ran along the cliffs overlooking the Indian Ocean, was totally spectacular, as you can see above, but what got me the most exited was that we saw wild kangaroos for the first time ever! (Matt just sort of laughed at us for how excited we got; kangaroos are actually pretty commonplace in most areas to the point of being a pest, sort of like deer in the US). Two kangaroos, which looked like a mother and a maybe year-old baby, hopped in front of us as we were hiking; we proably disturbed them resting somewhere. Kangaroos can move pretty fast, so I was only able to get one good picture, but here it is:


We actually saw quite a few more kangaroos this weekend, including one that bounded in front of our car (and one dead on the side of the road, which unfortunately is not an uncommon occurence).

After the hike we headed down to the beach, where there were some really cool rock formations that we could scamper around on. It was also getting pretty stormy, so after not too long we headed to the car and had lunch.




At 1:30 we took a tour of Lake Cave, which is the most famous of a whole group of caves that dot the area. It wasn't especially big, but some of the formations were really spectacular and our guide was very good. The cave was located down in a pit (I forget the actual geological term) so it was quite a hike to get there and even harder to climb back up, but we managed all right.

In the afternoon, we took a scenic drive through some karri (giant eucalyptus) forest, then we went to Cape Leeuwin, the southernmost point of the cape-to-cape region. There were some very cool rock formations there and we all got some incredible pictures with the stormy sea and sunbreak-thorugh-the-clouds lighting. Cape Leeuwin is especially notable because it's the point where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean, so I can now say I've been at the mixing point of two of the world's great seas. There is a lighthouse of the tip of the cape, but it cost $15 admission to go to it and you couldn't actually go up the lighthouse we didn't make it out to the extreme edge of the cape, but it was pretty fun anyways.

After seeing Cape Leeuwin it was starting to get dark so we called it a day and drove to check into our hostel. We decided to actually go out to eat as all of us were hankering for a good meal after a constant supply of Currie food, and we found a reasonably priced tavern called Settler's that had really good food. I had house specialty "burger royale," which was the first burger I'd had since coming here, and I have to say it didn't disappoint in the slightest. We then spent the evening playing poker at the hostel with bottle caps we found in a big box in the lounge.

Day 2 of our Margaret River adventure was just as fun, filled with sensory pleasures and gorgeous scenery, but I'll have more about that later. Unfortunately I can only upload 4 pictures at a time to a post, so I'll put some more Day 1 pictures up then I need to get to bed and I'll write more tomorrow.