26 February, 2012

Before leaving the Margaret River area, we headed to Cape Leeuwin, the south west tip of Australia, where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean, and where many, many a ship has foundered on its way to Australia.

It's a lovely exposed granite area, covered in windblown shrubs, and with big seas in all directions. And the granite knobs continue out to sea, it looks utterly treachorous for miles out to sea, and with the wind howling it's not hard to imagine it being hellish back in the wind powered days. Great to drive out in comfort, and just watch the sea go by though :)

I wondered off the concrete track here to have a quite bit of granite and sea for myself, and got yelled at quite promptly. Though not for being off the track. :) It was because there was a large resident Dugite, one of WA's venomous snakes, known to be living in that area!

Then, for something different, we went to Jewel Cave. As we'd seen at Gracetown beach, this area is dotted with both limestone and granite, and there's quite a few caves in the area. Jewel Cave is one of the bigger and better known tourist ones, so we went for a tour.

I quite enjoyed it, it's extremely well decorated. The group was too large for my style, but this was a tourist cave. The longest straws I've ever seen, over 5m long, and allegedly the second longest in the world, after "some place in Mexico" (The guide didn't know what cave)

What I found interesting was how much the cave had changed since it was discovered. It originally had a lake in the bottom, and was explored by rubber boat, but the water level has now sunk beneath the floor of the cave completely, and it's all starting to dry out.

From here, it was back to camp for another lovely dinner and our last night at Gracetown