With Jenny at the wheel of her and Doug’s hired Hyundai Tucson – a little more butch than our Nissan Tiida – we headed off from Parihoa Farm in Murawai to the nearby wine country of Matakana. On an apparent whim (so unlike my own, strictly destination-focused husband), Doug spotted a sign for the historic village of Puhoi – and then actually turned off and stopped the car!
With the sheep in New Zealand famously outnumbering people by about six to one, staying on a working sheep farm was a superbly appropriate way to kick off our travels. Our friend Matt Chapman has over 400 of these lovely, woolly beasts at his farm (parihoa.co.nz) at Murawai Beach in North Island – about 66 times his fair share.
This is Roy’s and my first visit to the North Island of New Zealand. With only a week to go before we fly to Queenstown, South Island, there’s no way we can see everything – so we’re taking it easy. No point in rushing around, we reckon: we can always come back.
We had two good reasons for booking a full-day tour: Roy was sick up and fed of driving, and I was sorrowful about having been driven past so many vineyards without stopping at a single cellar door.
Glenn, our guide for the day and also the driver of the 13-seater bus, arrived bright and early at our motel on a cloudy, cool morning that blossomed into the most perfect blue-sky day. And, with a total of nine stops between the 10am hotel pickup and 5.30pm drop-off times, our $115 each (including lunch) was good value.
Having travelled west from Albany along the southern coast of West Australia for about three-and-a-half hours, we decided (or, to be more specific, I requested fervently and Roy capitulated) to turn left and south to Augusta*, rather than right to Margaret River. Our destination? Cape Leeuwin, a spectacular spot with a lofty and photogenic lighthouse that dates from 1895.
* You can stop in Augusta for a coffee at the Deckchair (or Café Deckchair Gourmet), as we did, but be warned that if you order only one it might cost you $6 instead of the listed $5 price. That’s what happened to Roy. I needed to check my email, you see, but I was already jittery-full of coffee, and the minimum order for Wi-Fi access was $6. I suppose they’re sick of tapwater-sipping backpackers occupying prime chair-space…
Both Albany and neighbouring Denmark (50-odd kilometres to the west) feature picturesque bay after halcyonic headland after idyllic, white-sand beach, with one magnificent vista after another. We’d hardly driven into town before I’d resolved to come back here one day for a longer stay.
How completely different this coast was from the countryside we’d travelled through for four hours to get here, following the route through country towns Kulin, Lake Grace, Dumbleyung (watch out for the Dumbleyung Dunny!) and Katanning to the Chester Pass Road.
I have no experience of mad dogs, but I do of Englishmen (being married to one) – and it’s simply not true that they go out in the midday sun. Not often, anyway, and certainly not by choice.
It was too early to check into the Wave Rock Motel in the town of Hyden (population 400), so, in 36-degree noonday heat, Roy drove straight through to the site of the famous rock itself, 4km further on.
Despite my being equipped with the latest, updated and fully revised Western Australia map book, Roy utterly disrespects my map-reading skills. He sneers when I turn maps sideways or upside–down, and rudely calls me Henrietta The Navigator.
After three weeks with the family in Perth, I was itching to shake off suburbia and make a beeline for the bush.
In order to make this happen, I started speaking, in deeply wistful terms, about the simple joys of camping – how pleasurable it would be to travel self-sufficiently, to be able to stop on a whim, to cook over open fires as our forefathers did, to be at one with the glorious outdoors!
Nowadays, my regular morning run finds me on a stunningly beautiful trail along the southernmost part of Western Australia’s Coral Coast. So distinctively itself, it has an unforgettable sense of place and reminds me of absolutely nowhere else I’ve been or seen.
It’s been many years since I last spent the better part of a day at the beach, swimming and picnicking. Sand-fringed Lake Leschenaultia is located in Chidlow, in the Perth Hills, in the Shire of Mundaring (sounds distinctly hobbity, doesn’t it?), only a 45-minute drive from the city of Perth.
In case you were wondering what the excuse was to drag Roy out of his comfort zone, it was granddaughter Holly’s third birthday today.
