South West Coast & Bremer Bay

South West Coast

As I said in our last update, we would possibly stay an additional day in Esperance if the rain continued. Well it certainly did so we had a quiet day "at home" in the caravan - I spent the morning baking so it was just like home. When the rain eased later in the day we went for a long walk along the promenade and shopping area.

We left Esperance on Tuesday morning after Peter had spent over an hour on the telephone to Dell as he had knocked the laptop over on Monday night and now it is not working. It is still not repaired so entries to the blog will need to be done via email with only one photo attached until the repairs are complete.

Our first stop after leaving Esperance was at Munglinup beach. This was quite an exposed beach with a very nice camping ground within the sand dunes. There was only one other caravan there and as it was particularly windy we decided not to set up camp and continued on towards the west. There were not a couple of very small townships and a couple of roadhouses along the way. We decided to head for Bremer Bay which is a very popular salmon fishing beach and stayed overnight enroute free camping at a roadside bay. It was really interesting to sit up in bed in the morning and watch a kangaroo go hopping past the caravan - an experience that can only be had in Australia I am sure.

Bremer bay
The advertising for Bremer Bay is "where the river meets the sea". The Fitzgerald River National Park runs along the coastline to Bremer Bay and is one of the world's biodiversity parks and is extremely popular for the many species of wildflowers in the spring. There are also viewing stations to watch the whales as they migrate the southern ocean. Unfortunately our timing was not right for either the wildflowers or the whales. As you will see from the photo the sand was really white and soft. Peter spent most of his time on the telephone to Dell trying to sort out the computer repairs and I walked along the beach in both directions. Down one end of the beach there were huge rocks and in the distance wooden steps up the rocks but as the tide was very high it wasn't possible to get to the stairs. Obviously it wasn't the right time for salmon fishing either as no one was fishing. The two caravan parks had quite a few campers but surprisingly there was no township. There was just the customary roadhouse servicing quite a large number of permanent and holiday homes and the caravan parks.

Bremer Bay is about 200 kms east of Albany. We continued on to Albany and there were no towns on our way. Albany is much bigger than we anticipated and we now know that the population is 36,000. We decided it was worth staying a couple of days so have booked into a caravan park. Surprisingly we had to try three caravan parks before we could get a booking for two nights - Albany is apparently a very popular holiday area for people from Perth and it seems that every senior who enjoys caravanning is here.

The computer repairs have not yet been commenced - Peter has now spent over four hours on the telephone to the call centre in Manila. They want to send a "box" to our address in Melbourne to pack the computer in and have no concept that we are thousands of kilometres from Melbourne and that is not going to help us get the computer repaired. We keep trying.