At Windy Harbour we drove down to the boat ramp. There was an interesting composting system for fish offal using maggots and worms to decompose the offal. We walked a little way along the beach. The beach cabins were close together with no fences - it looked as if people had just built beach shacks wherever there was a spare bit of land.
We visited a few lookouts in D'Entrecasteaux National Park, with stunning beach views and rock formations at Salmon Beach (complete with fishermen), Tookalup, and Point D'Entrecasteaux. The cliffs are limestone and have been eroded into interesting formations, including at Point D'Entrecsteaux an arch with a view to the ocean below that was quite spectacular.
On the way home we climbed Mt Chudalup. Inland from the coast there are big sand dunes with low vegetation, and then further inland the vegetation changes quite suddenly to taller trees. Mt Chudalup is a single rock formation (monolith) that stands out from the surrounding low plains and wetland. It reminded me of Kakadu. There's a track to the top, but Pete couldn't do the last bit of the climb because it was too steep so Sue and I left him to wait for us while we climbed to the top and admired the 360 degree views of the coast and inland. When we came down he wasn't there, so we assumed he'd gone back to the car. We heard him cooee-ing as we went down the track. When we got back to the car he wasn't there either, and we got quite worried that he'd got lost or had an accident, so we started walking back up the track, cooee-ing and speculating on what might have happened to him. Well, we eventually found him coming back down - he'd taken a different track to see whether it was an alternative route to the top, and we were supposed to have understood this from his cooees.
(Pete says this is biased and his version is different.)
We had lunch - excellent home baked pies - at the Hollowbutt Cafe at Northcliffe and went for a loop walk in the bush near Northcliffe where there are twin karri trees. Then we drove through a marri forest.
On the way back to Pemberton we drove through Warren National Park and saw the Bicentennial Tree, the Marianne North tree (painted by a lady called Marianne North at the turn of the century) and followed 12 km of the heartbreak trail along the Warren River. We stopped at Drafty's Camp, the Warren Campsite, and the Warren Lookout. It's a pretty river with lots of good camping sites and swimming spots and must be very popular in summer.
Back at Pemberton we drove to see the Gloucester Tree. The Park Ranger wanted to charge us $11 to drive in and Pete thought this was too much so we drove out again, parked outside and walked in! The Gloucester Tree is also climbable but we decided we'd done enough tree climbing and went back to our Picture Theatre for rose and beer. Then we staggered up the hill to the Gloucester Motel for dinner at Sadies.
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