Sunday 16th May - Fremantle to Dwellingup

We’ve finally hit the road, although it did take all morning to finish our packing.  At least this allowed us to take advantage of having an oven at our disposal and we cooked a pizza for lunch.  As we’ll be back in a couple of weeks it was more au revoir than goodbye to Annie and family as we set off south to Margaret River.

We gradually settled into the “hum” of the Land Rover as we took the inland South West Highway through pasture land and horse country.   Anne got excited when she spotted her first kangaroos, although from their size I thought they may have been wallabies, shortly followed by our first kangaroo road kill (although she was less enthusiastic about the latter).  We also spotted some emus, but we’re not sure if this counts as they were on an emu farm and not racing alongside the Land Rover in the wild.

Rather than drive the five or so hours all the way to Margaret River we detoured to the small forest town of Dwellingup to the east of Pinjara in order to find our first bush camp.  Although SPOT will make it look like we camped next door to a golf course, I can assure you that we could neither see nor hear the fairways, and we followed a dirt road about a mile into the forest before we came to a clearing in the trees.  As it was late Sunday afternoon a group were packing up camp as we arrived, but we shared the site with a second group of people who looked like they were camping for a good while - toilet tent, tarpaulin, trailer and a couple of ground tents.  Our first taste of an Australian bush camp had us pleasantly surprised, with composting toilet, picnic tables and fire pits all provided for no charge.  We could get used to this type of “wild camping”. SPOT