Bunbury

Wednesday 5^th October

As we left Perth we got onto the Kwinana Freeway which is a fairly new road, and that took us all the way to Bunbury.

Just like driving along the southern motorway out of Auckland. The country side was flat and green, much like New Zealand. Our motor camp is on the eastern fringes of Bunbury City.  After we set up camp Cameron went off to explore the camp ground.

We decided to go into the city to the visitors centre and have a look around. Cameron was still out exploring somewhere, so Christel went looking for him and found him sitting on the ground holding his foot.  Turns out he was running across a wooden footbridge in his bare feet and somehow managed to get a huge splinter in his foot.  He hobbled back to the caravan with Christel’s help where we had a look at it and fairly quickly decided there was no way we were going to be able to get it out.  It was well and truly buried in his foot and there was nothing sticking out to get hold of to pull it out, so it was off to the Accident and Emergency at the hospital, which was luckily just around the corner form the motorcamp.

After a heap of laughing gas and a couple of injections the doctor decided the only way to get the splinter out was to cut it out. Thanks to the laughing gas Cameron thoroughly enjoyed the whole operation, and was able to give the doctor a couple of his Jim Carrie impersonations while she was busy chopping into his foot.

He was sent home with instructions to keep his foot up for 48 hours, so now we are all a bit handicapped as to what we can do.

Thursday 6^th October

After the usual morning’s school work we drove into town for a look around, then seeing as one of us couldn’t do much walking we decided to have a drive through the surrounding countryside.  Cameron was quite comfortable with his foot up on the back seat. 

From Bunbury we drove east towards the town of Collie.  On the way we took a detour to have a look at the Wellington Dam and Lake in the Wellington National Park.

We then continued on to Collie, and as we were having a drive around the town came across a tank parked in front of the local RSL. 

From Collie we headed south to Mumballup, and then west to Donnybrook where we called into the local for a beer.  Donnybrook is the official home of the Granny Smith Apple. We then carried on east to Boyanup and then back up to Bunbury.

All the way we drove through beautiful green countryside with lush green pastures and rolling green hills.  Very much like the Waikato countryside at the height of spring. We’ve obviously left the outback well and truly behind.  We passed through towns and localities all with rather odd names like Bibbulmum, and Munda Biddi.  It seems the early settlers had a fixation with the word up when it came to naming towns in this area. As a result we have lots of towns ending in up.  Like Burekup, Binningup, Dardenup, Myalup, Balingup, Nannup, Dinninup , in fact just about every sort of up you could think of. But we didn’t see whatsup, holdup, stuffup or ballsup.  We’ll keep looking.

Friday 7^th October

The invalid was getting around quite well on his injured foot, so we decided to have a look around Bunbury, and in particular the Dolphin Encounter Centre which appears to be Bunbury’s main claim to town.  We called at the Visitors Centre and found out that apart from the Dolphin Encounter Centre there was bugger all else to see or do.  We had a look around the shops and then went to McDonalds for lunch.

From there we headed out to the Dolphin Centre which is located on the beach front.  It has been set up there because apparently dolphins have been frequenting the area for ages.  They didn’t frequent while we were there but the centre held quite a few good attractions.  Overall another lot of noise about nothing much which the Aussies seem so good at. 

From there we drove along the waterfront to a lookout over the town and bay.  Some of the houses along the waterfront were absolute mansions. Bunbury is a lovely seaside town and has a nice feeling about it. 

Then it was another drive around town before heading back to camp.  Tomorrow we will head further south to Busselton which is only about 60 km away, and is renowned for its jetty, which is apparently the longest wooden jetty in the southern hemisphere.