Perth to Albany - Day 2

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We spent the night in the town of Augusta, below you can see our accomodation from the outside.

Our first stop was at the bicentennial tree. As the guide was saying the name of the place and explaining that it was a tree 70 metres tall that used to be used by the firemen because it was the tallest in the region, he was staring at me...I think he still remembers my disapointment from yesterday when we didn't go to see the 600 years old tree and he probably believes I am one of those tree loving people that chain themselves to the trees to prevent them from getting chopped...I should have learnt my lesson by now...keep a low profile on the first day...

You could climb to the top of the tree but this wasn't for everyone. If  you have any kind of minor problem with heights you would certainly avoid this. The way you climb it is by using iron bars stuck to the tree and you just go one by one...70 metres... Only 4 people climbed to the top, another two went half way and decided it was enough and climbed down. You can't really appreciate on the pictures how tall it is and how unsafe the iron bars look...not that that minor detail would stop two intrepid climbers as Aída and myself though. :-)

By the way, those dots at the bottom ARE PEOPLE.

The next stop was the valley of the giants. It is called like that because of the gigantic trees in that forest. So first we did a tree walk.

And then we went to see the tingles. This is a curious tree, when there is a bush fire, the centre of the trunk gets burnt out and it becomes hollow but over time, the tree regenerates on the sides and keeps growing.

From there we went to the hightlight of the day, elephant rocks and greens pool.

This is another picture for all the animal lovers, I've noticed there are lots of signs as below

Elephant rocks. Not sure what is all about, but I took a photo just in case.

And just 50 metres away it was greens pool. This is a fantastic beach. There are rocks all around it forming some kind of pool so from the beach shore you have like 70 metres or so of clean quiet waters. The guide took us to the rocks (it was a good swim to get there) and then we jumped from rock to rock all around the "pool". Really nice.

Rachel and I were taking photos around the beach, a woman saw us and asked whether we wanted her to take our picture, she seemed so keen we didn't dare to say no.

And then we kept taking photos.

PHOTOS greens pool

Paradise!!

We probably spent a couple of hours there, after the beach we got back  to the bus and put some miles behind us. We did another technical stop...and I couldn't resist the temptation of taking the below photo.

You don't get to see a picture like this every day. Woman carrying a leg around.

And from there we went to our last destination for the day. Gap and bridge.

Gap

Bridge

Then it was sunset time. I am quickly becoming an expert in sunset photos...I've probably taken hundreds during the past 2 months. :-)

We had to make a run right before the sunset. A storm broke out and the lightening turned out to be far more impressive than the sunset...the problem was when it started raining...we made a run for the bus...and off we went to our accomodation for the night...and that's the way the second day ended.


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