130 miles in 8 days from Kalamunda to Dwelling Up
Day 1 - Kalamunda to Ball Creek - 14 miles
Day 2 - Ball Creek to Beraking - 17.5 miles
Day 3 - Beraking to Brookton - 13.4 miles
Day 4 - Brookton to Monadnocks - 17.1 miles
Day 5 - Monadnocks to Nerang - 16.7 miles
Day 6 - Nerang to White Horse - 20.5 miles
Day 7 - White Horse to Chadoora - 18.9 miles
Day 8 - Chadoora to Dwelling Up - 13.3 miles
We set out from the northern terminus at Kalamunda and very quickly found ourselves amongst the Australian bush. Everything feels novel - all the trees, plants and wildlife look and sound completely different. You don't realise how much you're used to the sounds of native birdsong until it's replaced by the manic cackling of a kookaburra.
We walked for a few hours through lovely but unusual wildflowers (with Katie stopping every free metres to photograph a new flower) before getting to Hewitts Hill shelter - the first of many impressive wooden shelters, with two sleeping platforms, rain water tanks and a fireplace. A friendly couple who were already most of the way through a bottle of wine wished us well as we decided to continue to the next shelter (forewarned by the Bibbulmun website that a large group of 17 people were due to invade the shelter that night). We arrived at Ball Creek about 5pm to find around eight or so people already cooking dinner and enjoying themselves - a mixture of day walkers & new end-to-enders like us. Inadvertantly 6 of us ‘end to enders’ had started on the same day - Myself & Callan, an Aussie bloke, a Kiwi guy, an Italian chap and an American woman. These would become our hiking partners for the next week as we all seem to travel at a similar pace.
The first few days were full of wildflowers, endless bush and the occasional wildlife spotting - some kangaroos, black cockatoos (apparently a protected species but they’re pretty common in the bush), green parrots, emu poo and a glipse of an actual emu. It really made us appreciate how big Australia is - in the UK you’d have walked through a variety of scenery in this time and passed through several towns. This thought was made especially clear when we walked up our first hill on about day 4, when you could see the vastness of the bush. One thing we hadn’t expected was flies - they seem to gather through the day and we end up with hundreds hitchhking on our packs at the end of the day. Our headnets usually reserved for midges have served very well against them, protecting us from their endless attempts to land on our faces. With regards to other unpleasant wildlife we’ve seen one snake that disappeared quickly when we approached and a few not too harmful looking spiders. A discovery of a tick need to much frantic self-examination and a subsequent tick competition - we’ve both had a tick or two but the American is way out in the lead with over 8 ticks.
Its been amazingly, wonderfully and fantastically brilliant to notice our pack gtting lighter and lighter each day as we eat more food, even though this means our diet is less varied and our only fruit & veg left is dried raisins. Food highlights include pizza sauce on everything (pizza sauce in a squeezy bottle = winning) and tim tams. Lows would be super dry spicy lime rice & pop tarts (just too sweet for breakfast).
Day 5 was great walking up Mount Cuthbert and a few other hills with views all around, big granite slabs and we saw an eagle to top it off. On day 6 we made the bold decision not to go to the pub at North Banister. Ths may be one of the only times in Callan's life that he has declined this offer - but it came with a sting in the tail - an extra 1.5km walk to the pub and back didn’t seem worth it for a burger on a day that was already over 20 miles. Instead we listened jealously to 3 of the others talk of their food as they came back.
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| Aerial view of a shelter from a fire lookout |
Currently we’ve just arrived into our first town - Dwellingup. After a long week we're yet again experiencing some of the finer things in life - a shower, washing clothes, meals that can’t be cooked in one pot on a camping stove and that include fresh vegetables. The town itself is pretty small, with an overpriced general store but an extensive visitor centre that focuses on the town's short history. The town only seemed to be built in around 1900, with a large display dedicated to the fire of 1961 with 'ancient' artefacts from this time. We’re glad to have made it through the first and longest section between towns relatively unscathed and from the pub table with a steak on the way everything seems pretty rosy.
