Day 99: Pemberton

 The cool mornings are here to stay and we don't rush out into the cold first thing in the morning, so our morning plan started at around 9 am when the sun had appeared and the rain had not. We drove into Pemberton to visit the Visitor Information Centre to help map out our day.

It seems they don't start too early either and when we arrived at 9.30am, we were greeted with a sign that said they opened at 10 am. Coffee is always a good standby so we found a cafe across the road, to bide our time. That combined with a quick lap of the main street filled in the time.

Main street of Pemberton

The lady at the visitors centre, as usual, was very helpful and gave us enough ideas to keep us busy. She also gave us some good information on further destinations we plan to visit. Following her advice, our first priority was to rush to the Pemberton Tramway Co., who run a tram tour through the Karri forests to the Pemberton Cascades on Lefroy Brook. Karri Forests are unique to this part of South West WA.

Utilising the Pemberton - Northcliffe railway line that was built in the early 1930's the tram travels as far as the cascades, through the Gloucester National Park. The tram was almost full when we arrived at 10.25am, departure is at 10.30 am.

The tram cars were specifically built for this tourist attraction based on the design of Fremantle Trams.

A few other latecomers joined us and we left on time at 10.30am, expecting to return at 11.45am.

Our official ticket

After a slow start leaving the station, and a temporary halt to activate the boom gates at a level crossing, we were quickly entering the forest. The tram driver was also the tour guide and had a wealth of knowledge. 

Pemberton was founded as a timber town originally established in 1913, first known as Big Brook, to supply railway sleepers for the trans Australia railway. Today tourism is the significant industry as the sawmill finally closed in 2016, having reached the status of Australia's biggest sawmill in 1939.

The remains of the sawmill

The forests the tram goes through are regrowth forests, the massive Karri trees are impressive, with an estimated age of 100 years in the regrowth areas. Part of the Eucalyptus Family, they are among the World's tallest trees reaching 90 m in height.

We gingerly cross three rail bridges before reaching the cascades.

After arriving at the cascades we have 25 minutes to explore the area on well defined trails, but cannot stray too far from the tram.

The cascades

There is great infrastructure to navigate this area and get the best views

There was another railway bridge we didn't cross just past where we stopped and returned back to Pemberton.

We arrived back at Pemberton safely after a very informative tram ride.

Next we went to see the Gloucester Tree, a bit of a tourist feature in Pemberton. The massive Karri trees line the carpark.

The Gloucester tree was chosen as one of eight fire lookout trees in 1946. After being manually climbed to check its suitability, the arduous task of building a ladder out of spikes into the tree trunk and an observation tower at the top followed. If you are adventurous enough, you can climb up to the top.

Ladder spikes

Also in the same area is an aerial adventure course compiled of zip lines and aerial walks between trees. We saw one participant having a go.

There were two short bush walks here that we also did going through the forest not straying too far from the carpark.

It was now lunch time so we went back into town to the Crossings Bakery for a pie before moving on to explore a bit more. This area is also a wine growing area, so we decided to seek out a local winery for a sample of the local produce. Finding an open cellar door was challenging, but we did find one, Mountford Wines, about 17 km out of town. Our drive took us through canola fields and lots of orchards of relatively large trees which we later found out are avocados. Apparently they are very thirsty and Pemberton gets around 1.2 m of rain a year making this area ideal. 

Mountford wines looked impressive and the cellar door was well set up. Sadly the wines were disappointing and we left just paying for the tasting and buying no wine.

We found our way back to the caravan park mid afternoon and there is a walk from the resort that goes to the Beedelup Falls and we wanted to do part of. It starts at the lake just near the resort restaurant.

There were a few kayakers out on the lake, including the one below who were fishing. 

Unfortunately, as we progressed on our walk, the track became more and more soggy, until eventually it was so bad we turned back. There was a warning sign at the track head advising that recent weather had damaged the track.

So we drove back to our van. There are a number of new arrivals in the park compared to yesterday, and the kangaroos were arriving in numbers for their afternoon graze.

These 4 were very close to our van, but overall there would be around 100 roos in the caravan park area and one or two emus. The emus seem to prefer the resort near the lake.

Tomorrow we head off to Albany.