Albany is neat, surrounded by bare granite domes and hills on the edge of the Southern Ocean. We spent the day morning doing some hikes in Torndirrup National Park to the south of town, then went to some wineries in town. The weather cleared up too, becoming a sunny early spring day and bringing out all the colors in yet more strange wildflowers along the trails and streets and even road ditches. It was a great day.
Just south of Albany is a strange peninsula, with quite a few little psuedopods of land that wrap around Albany's inner and outer harbors. This strange peninsula is Torndirrup National Park, and it's part of the rock that once glued Australia to Antarctica: old, gray granite and gneiss, eroded into domes, and covered now with heath and a meter of sand. The rounded granite hills, quite steep and tall in places, ends at the ocean, sometimes in gentle shelves where you can watch waves unroll themselves along the continent's edge, and sometimes in clefts where the waves make huge, noisy blowholes that blast your hair back. This is where we went hiking this morning.
It's all of a 30 minute drive to the end of the peninsula; we drove all the way down to the end, though we skipped the big Whaleworld museum, joking of course about Free Willy. Turning south, we went to Salmon Holes, just because it was the last thing on the road, and walked the short 50 meters to the lookout. It was a vista unlike any we've seen. The granite sloped into the water at a shallow angle, leaving a huge, smooth shelf that the waves sloshed across before crashing on the beach below us. Offshore, there were a few more odd shaped granite islands, covered in moss and low heath. On the slope below us, a banksia was starting to bloom, sending up foot long candles, colored like deep red wine. And the strange Albany woolybush, which looks like a collection of silver ropes, was blooming. It was spectacular.
Coming back on the road, we looked out back to the city, with its main central street and a few blocks in between huge granite mountains. Off in the distance, the Porongurup mountains made a line on the horizon, and beyond them, the Stirling Range was broken and jagged, 100 kilometers away.
Next stop was Natural Bridge and the Gap. Again, more granite. Natural Bridge is granite and was formed by wave undercutting, and the Gap was just a collapsed natural bridge. Pretty nice, and the sun started coming out which made it all the more cheery.
Then we followed this up with a 4 kilometer hike to Possession Point, where Captain George Vancouver claimed southwest Australia for the Brits. That was another great hike, a really good short hike. Part of the heathlands had burned the previous year, so all the fire wildflowers were out, and running rampant. Down on the beach, we spotted an orange sponge and a black soft coral, and on the trail, yet another bobtail skink that stuck its tongue out at us.
After the hiking, we visited a couple close-in wineries. Wignalls had a good pinot noir that we purchased, and Alkoomi had a curious dry rose that we needed to try, but otherwise the wines weren't done in styles we liked. We're finding that out here at least, Australian winemakers really pump up the sugar in all their wines, making them taste like a cheap alchopop than something interesting. Oh well.
And then, well, we went back to the room, where Chris cooked up some food we bought in town, and we read and relaxed.
Weird Wildlife Sighting
Three! Orange sponge. Black soft coral. And yet another bobtail skink!
You make me want to visit Albany. It's a place in my own country that I won't pretend to know anything about.
Will talk with you when you're back in Sydney.