Saturday, October 31, 2015

(Geoff) It cleared after breakfast Saturday, and we headed off to the major attraction of the area – a treetop walk through the forest canopy at Valley of the Giants. (I think this was the very first item on Catherine’s Australian to-do list, having read about it in Bill Bryson’s entertaining book on Australia.) The forest here is red tingle (another variety of gum), and the trees grow to 70 metres in height and 20 metres in girth. The oldest are 400 to 500 years old, and some of the veterans are badly scarred by fire but continue to put out new growth. The treetop walk has suspended spans between a series of platforms sitting on pillars, with the highest platform sitting 40 metres above the forest floor – but the whole structure is built on a hillside and requires no climbing. In fact, the whole walk is wheelchair accessible. It was designed to sway a little, to give you a true canopy experience, and even with a light breeze Saturday we were moving with the adjacent treetops. It was a great experience – that lacked only a zipline back to ground level!

We also did a ground level walk with a park guide who was passionate and informative about the tingle forest, and we learned a lot.

A short way down the road we detoured down to the water for a van lunch and a quick look at Elephant Rocks on the rugged south coast.

Denmark was then an hour’s drive east, and we stopped, as we always do, to ask at the visitor center about local sights and events. The local brewery, we were told, had a live band playing that evening, and since the Boston Brewery was already on my radar we headed off to hear the Shaky Reed trio (plus percussion). They were great, doing some blues and some potboilers from the 70’s (they, and most of their audience, were our age) and we spent the evening over a charcuterie and cheese platter with good beer and wine (so, blues and reds together).

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