Castle Rock in Porongurup National park
Sarahs vertical climb, the last ladder to the lookout, ramp on the top
After morning tea in Albany, which has a lot of nice, old buildings and interesting shops (unfortunately closed on Sunday morning), we drove north to climb Castle Rock. It turned out to be a 4.4 km return hike, only the last 200 m being actual rock climbing. A fair length for Sarah but we told her about the climbing part and she really walked the whole way! So proud! the walk was really beautiful, just a narrow path through the forest on a steady incline of about 350m . Sarah was so enthusiastic once we reach the rock, she started climbing straight away - vertically up the wall :-) What an awesome lookout and what a great climb!
Driving further towards Wave Rock, we crossed the gigantic West-Australian wheat-belt. It stretches for hundreds of kilometers, no matter which direction you drive. Scattered between those massive fields are beautiful, little towns. Usually there is a grain facility near the town with huge sheds and silos for grain storage. It's all connected by railway to send the grain to the port of Freemantle.
One of those little towns is Lake Grace. It's located right in the middle of the wheat-belt on the shore of a huge salt lake. We were lucky enough, that it rained a couple of days before and therefore the lake was filled with some water. We went to a nearby lookout to see the lake and tasted some crystallised salt on the shore. Very salty.
Waverock
Next stop was Hyden. Famous for the 'Wave-Rock'. I was surprised how high the wave is (about 15m) and also surprised that it is only about 100m long with the actual wave even shorter. You are allowed to hike to the top of the rock, which is actually a very big granite rock. About 35 ha are fenced in by a little stone wall, about 60cm high. It looks very similar to the Berlin Wall. It's function is however, very different. It's designed to capture the rain on top of the rock so it flows towards the drinking water reservoir of Hyden. Very clever, but not the nicest of executions.
Another feature, about a kilometre away is called Hippo's Yawn for obvious reasons. There is a little walking track along the bottom of the rock and you can see where the water wall is stopping the run-off, resulting in a very dry forest. In contrast where there is no wall the forest is much greener with different vegetation.