Surfari Highway - episode eighteen
- Distance travelled:
- 13,116 KM
- Location:
- Far South Coast, WA
- Travel dates:
- June 8, 2011
- Status:
- Third stop of our WA leg
- Surf:
- Three to five foot beachbreaks
- Swell direction:
- South-west
- Wind:
- Light northerly.
- Weather:
- Fine, sunny.
- Tides:
- High tide 1.53 pm, low tide 11.51 pm.
The far south coast of WA is spectacular country, full of massive old trees and quaint country towns huddled around beautiful estuaries and inlets. We're heading west, on to a little town that brings to mind a smaller, cold climate version of Byron Bay 30 years ago, where the alternative lifestyle community has taken root. There are lots of massage therapists, health food stores, a busy environment centre, an award-winning bakery, plenty of dreadlocks and baby slings in evidence. We all quickly warm to it.
We pitch camp at the local van park, bounded on two sides by the river and the inlet. The weather forecast has been bleak for a couple of days but we seem to be dodging the worst of it, intermittent showers giving way to brilliant sunshine in the afternoon. We're a bike ride from town, with plenty to keep the family entertained, and I've run into a local surfer who reckons we met in Bali 25 years ago. Paul's a born and bred local and he's offered to pick me up in the morning for a surf. After months of blundering around unfamiliar coasts by myself it feels like an enormous treat.
Paul often refers to surfing here as the South Coast Fitness Camp, because of all the walking and paddling and duck diving it requires of a surfer. It's a phrase that falls from his lips often, when I'm caught inside by a set, or trudging up a steep set of steps from the beach. I comment on the number of four-wheel drives we see combing the coast. "If you don't have a four wheel drive you're not surfing this coast," he says.
He takes me to a local, reliable beachbreak option that involves a long four-wheel drive up the beach on high tide, with very little beach to speak of, the waves lapping at the tyres. Several other four-wheel drives are parked along the water's edge, their owner's paddling about a smorgasbord of peaks that appear to be breaking for endless miles to the east. It's a simple matter to just keep driving up the beach until you get a peak to yourself. We surf here a couple of days in a row, in fun four to five foot beachbreaks, never with more than six or eight surfers within eyesight, spread across adjacent peaks. I'm assured it gets crowded here, but I'm from the Gold Coast. These surfers don't know what crowded looks like.
On our second day here, I'm ready to get back to the family after a couple of hours because we're planning on moving on. Paul's keen to keep surfing so he insists I take his old LandCruiser. He'll get a ride back with a mate in the water. It's exemplary country hospitality.
Paul's asked me to just park the car at the van park and leave the keys with the office. We're pretty quick and efficient with the pack up these days and pretty soon the van's hitched up and we're on the road again. Like Mae West, I'm relying on the kindness of strangers along this foreign coast and luckily, despite the lingering reputation for crusty localism, I'm finding it in abundance.
Local tip: The Tree Tops Walk in the Valley of the Giants, near Walpole, is a must for the kids and great value. Stroll through the canopy of the giant Tingle trees via a suspended steel walkway.