The Virtual Reinhard
Created | Updated Jun 19, 2008
A Letter from Margaret River
Darling Range
We flew into Perth airport, intending to spend some time touring around the south-western corner of Western Australia. We had arranged to hire a motorcycle from 'Bike Round Oz', whose owner, Mark, picked us up and took us to his house in the Darling Range, where he installed us in a beautiful little converted railway carriage.
Fitted out in dark wood, with a plush red bed at one end, views across the range and a serene farm dam, it was a great place to relax after our flight. Add into the equation a friendly bunch of alpacas, black cockatoos wheeling overhead, and a bottle of gratis champagne, and we felt right at home.
The next morning, after a basket breakfast, we had a look at our ride, a yellow BMW GS1200, a little elderly but with impeccable credentials - it had already been around the world once: 'She lost those cooling fins in Argentina...'
After packing a handful of stuff into the very small panniers, we set off southward down the Darling Range. The GS felt like a bit of a pig at first, but was very stable at speed, apart from an inclination to pull hard to the right, and fierce wind noise from the windshield.
Mining equipment dominated the scenery. Coming into Waroona, a parking lot for mining machinery was quite a shock; absolutely immense vehicles standing shoulder to shoulder in the red dirt, surrounded by cast-off caterpillar tracks. Lining the road near Capel were scrapyards containing enormous pieces of old machinery.
Every signpost along the way indicated a mine or a quarry and the road was chock full of ore trucks (which politely shuffled over to let us past). OK, we get the picture, this is mining country.
As we headed south, the machinery gave way to dairies and then the cows gave way to trees. Regular trees gave way to big trees and finally to the enormous timber that characterises the logging town of Pemberton.
The Gloucester Karri
Back in the early days of Pemberton's history, the timber of choice was the Karri tree, a truly enormous species scattered around the local forests. Some of the tallest were spared to serve as lookouts for the ever-present danger of fire, and these remain.
The famous Gloucester Karri is sixty-one metres high. Embedded in the trunk are hundreds of steel spikes, and if you are particularly keen, you can use them to climb to the top.
There's nothing to stop you slipping between the spikes if they are wet or you are careless, so the climb is quite exciting, but the views from the watch platform at the top are worth it, and it was easy to see how useful these trees were in spotting incoming bush fires.
The Bicentennial Tree
A pleasant night at a vineyard B&B, and an equally pleasant morning chatting with the owner, a retired butcher, who cooked us some excellent sausages and answered all my presumably dumb questions about the rammed earth from which buildings hereabouts are constructed.
Much of the soil consists of marble-sized clay balls and these are mixed with a little cement and poured into a form to build just about anything. The thickness and air-gaps make for a good insulating layer as well as a striking red colour that blends into the equally ruddy landscape.
On the road again, it was time to check out another one of those Karri trees, this one even taller and much, much scarier to climb. The spikes were farther apart, and the trunk was devoid of branches to give even the illusion of safety.
There was a midway-platform with a sign that pointed out 'That was the easy bit. Reassess your situation now'.
Luckily, we had the place to ourselves; I wouldn't have liked to meet anybody halfway up.
Heartbreak Trail
Looking around for another challenge after descending the Bicentennial Tree, I saw a roadsign that said something like 'Heartbreak Trail blah blah prohibited blah blah dangerous'. This was obviously the direction that we needed to go. It looked pretty steep and I was interested to know how those little red marbles felt under the wheels, so off we rode into the bush.
The GS performed admirably and the riding position, which had been pretty uncomfortable on the road, started to make sense on the dirt. The marbles weren't anywhere near as awkward as, say, dry sand, and we had a very pretty tour of some deep forest with pristine waterfalls. It was here that we discovered that the wind that blows off the Southern Ocean is so laden with salt that the rivers in this region are slightly saline. Possibly this is the reason that this is the area for catching 'marrons', billed as the third largest crayfish in the world.
Eventually the dirt petered out into tarmac and we trundled along at a steady 140 through endless forests until, with some shock, we came out amongst crowds of tourists in the town of Margaret River.
