#89: Tree Top Walk!

Day 2 of Western Australia started out with a trip to Denmark!!!  Ooooo yes!!!  We went to Copenhagen and Tivoli Gardens and Legoland and we drank all the Carlsberg and Tuborg we could guzzle down!!!

Ok, no we didn’t.  We just bought some meat pies.

The small town of Denmark, Western Australia, was our breakfast stop on the way to do some outdoorsy stuff.  Denmark is a cute little town with less than 5,000 and one of the tour books I read said that gays and hippies were moving there and that the town was very gay-friendly.  And where there are gays, there is bound to be good brunch.  I had to check this out.

Survey said:  the town was adorable but I didn’t see any gays.  It was raining a bit, so maybe they were staying inside so their hair didn’t get messed up.  Also, it was 8am and most gays don’t get up until noon on weekends, so maybe they were sleeping.  Brunch did turn out to be absolutely delicious, which leads me to believe that the tour books weren’t lying.  After brunch, we stumbled on a bakery that apparently has the best meat pies in Australia.  We took some to go and ate them later for lunch.  They weren’t all that and a bag of potato chips, but in their defense, we did eat them cold.

See we were in Denmark!  There was a sign in the bakery that said no photos allowed, but I took one anyway.  I’m such a rebel.

Then we were off to a destination picked by Cade and/or Karen from one of the pamphlets they snagged from somewhere:  the Elephant Rocks!  I was skeptical at first, but they actually did look a bit like elephants…

Now, can you imagine my reaction had I been squeezed between two actual elephants instead of two elephant rocks?  And look at Karen way down there in the back.  She’d be right near their butts.  Ewww!

And then it was the moment I had been waiting for.  The big thing for Day 2 and one of the biggest things I had on my itinerary for the trip.  #89 on my list of 103 things to do:  the Tree Top Walk!

Suspended 40 meters above the ground, we got to walk around the canopy of the “Valley of the Giants”, named for the tall tree old-growth forests that are found there.

Then, after that’s done, you can walk around the base of the trees on a boardwalk they installed down below.  The trunks of the tingle trees (seriously, they are called tingle trees) naturally hollow out over decades and centuries due to viruses and bacteria and stuff.  Some are so big that you can park a car inside.

“Hey, what’s that smell?”

“I don’t know, but it sorta smells like a koala just farted...”

After wandering through the giant trees, we checked ourselves into the Best Western hotel in the small town of Pemberton.  It was much nicer than the budget motel we were in the night before.  We then headed for Gloucester National Park to check out the Gloucester Tree.  The tree stands 61 meters tall and has metal pegs sticking out of it so you can climb to the tree house at the top.

Karen and Cade went all the way up.  I… I made it about 4 meters or so and said fuck it.  The last thing I needed was to fall off a damn tree.  I was happy on the bench.