The Pinnacles

A day trip with friends to the Pinnacles last week – somewhere I’ve never been even though I’ve lived most of my life only a two and a half hour drive away. Weather was gorgeous, saw some lovely wildflowers although the best of them were a few weeks earlier.

The Pinnacles are limestone formations not far from the coastal fishing town of Cervantes. Interestingly, it’s not known exactly how they came to be formed, but there are three theories. Regardless of how they came to be, they are stunning – as was the countryside and the coast.

We’d planned to have a simple lunch in Cervantes, and we did. Mind you, the main ingredient was crayfish (lobster) as we stumbled across The Lobster Shack. Half a grilled crayfish with salad and chips. Can’t do much better than that ...........

Pink and Grey Galahs - nesting in holes in the limestone Pinnacles

Bob-tail goanna

Cervantes

Not the one we ate ..... definitely out of our price range ....

Pink and Grey Galahs

Smoke bush

Grass trees with flowering spikes and smoke bush

Stromatolite, Lake Thetis near Cervantes

Stromatolites

Gnomesville

Yes, really. Down in the forests of the Ferguson Valley..... I’d not heard of either the Ferguson Valley or Gnomesville. I spent a few days with my cousins in Bunbury and they took me out for a drive to the Valley, which is pretty well on their doorstep. Wineries, restaurants, cottage industries, orchards, dairy and beef industry and beautiful scenery all around.

There are several stories as to how gnomesville started, but nobody really knows. It’s just in a piece of bush near a roundabout on a country road. There are now thousands of them from all over Australia and across the world - scattered on pathways, on logs, in groups and separate.

Besides a beautiful day out, it was a lovely stay for a couple of days in Bunbury with the last night Colin cooking up some Confit de Canard  - one of three tins I’d squeezed into my luggage coming from France. Delicious.

Vietnamese humour

“She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me ....................”

Rice Harvest

As it turned out, we were visiting at the time of the rice harvest. Depending on the region and altitude and rainfall, there can be one, two or three harvests each year. Especially beautiful were the terraced rice paddies in the mountains around Sapa. We saw no mechanical harvesting – all done by hand, and the ploughing done mostly by water buffalo.