After seeing and tasting Margaret River, we wanted to start our journey towards Albany. We were really looking forward to seeing the ways, because they should lead us through a huge forest area, the Shannon Forest. The ways were indeed really nice, until at some point, we saw thick smoke clouds above the forest. Probably it had been a small bush fire. We still don’t know the exact size of the fire, but as the natives in the small village 5km away from the fire didn’t move and as we didn’t hear any news, it wasn’t a big deal. But anyway, the next adventure in the category: “danger in Australia”. We stayed for the night on a parking spot in Shannon Forest (far away from the bush fire).
The next day we continued to Walpole, the starting point for the Tingledale Nornalp national park or also called the Valley of the Giants. The park is famous for its gum trees, the only place in the world where you can find 4 different sorts of gum trees growing next to each other. Additionally, there is an unbelievable phenomenon: due to smaller bush fires, a couple of trees close to the ground are more or less burned. But the trees survived the fire and continued growing around the burned part of the tree. It looks a like a tree walking on stilts. There is one of these trees, which is so big that once a VW bus drove under this tree.
Having done this impressive walk, we visited the Tree Top Walk, a shaky way through the top of the trees in the Valley of the Giants, in around 40m above the ground.
As it was Monday we were able to talk to the rental company and complain about the camper. The engine still turned off (mostly while switching gears) what almost became dangerous at one time when it happened while driving of the highway and the electronic break and stearing didn’t work anymore (this time we were really lucky that there is not so much traffic on the roads in Western Australia). In addition the car needed more than 20l/km what would have been really expensive thinking about the distance we still had to go. We were told to drive to a mechanics in Albany, who should have a look on the car, why we tried to arrive there as early as possible since the mechanics closed at 5 pm.
On the way we visited two additional highlights, which weren’t too spectacular since the weather was quit badly. Green Pool and Elephant Rocks are located in a bay with impressive rock formations. With some imagination one can see a group of elephants in them.